By Charles Cresson Wood
To many people, all the changes in the world today seem chaotic, overwhelming and incomprehensible. Many people don’t know what to do, and they remain in a vicious circle of doing nothing, a cycle where they are emotionally and spiritually paralyzed by their fear. This brief note talks about one simple step that everyone can take to come out of that painful vicious circle. The intention of this note to reaffirm our great personal power to change the circumstances of our lives. The intention is also to point out how we often deny this great power, then disempowering ourselves, and also thereby putting constructive and appropriate action beyond our reach.
The one step I suggest is to seriously investigate your fears. Bring them up from the unconscious and bring them into the healing light of your conscious awareness. Ask for your inner guidance to help you along the way. Those fears are much more accessible than you might first think. What are you shying away from, what do you think you could never do, what do you think you are unable to undertake, and what do you believe you cannot possibly master? Yes, those hated things, the things you are afraid of, they are what I’m writing about here.
Bring a certain detachment to the process, asking what’s the truth of the matter. Is it true that you are unable to undertake that particular action? Is it true that you are really incompetent to master that topic? Is it necessarily true that you must always shy away from that feared area? The answers are right there, if you would only look at them. Ask the best of yourself to help with the process. Yes, you may have some fear of your fear -- that is natural. But if you can read this article, you are fully competent to do this process, and it in many cases performing this one step that I recommend will help a great deal.
Once you come to know your unconscious mind -- and how you have suffered from your unjustified and unrealistic fears -- you will start to take life as it comes. You will then be empowered to go on and do what is needed. Of course, that means there will be successes and there will be failures. I did not guarantee a fantasy where you go off with your true love into the sunset and live happily ever after. There are still things to learn, and there are still places for all of us to grow. But with the meeting of these successes and failures, there can be a healthy resistance. This healthy resistance includes a willingness to meet what life brings you, without running away from it, in a way that is committed to confronting the situation in an objective and fact-based truth. If we don’t confront the situations we face, with the sanitizing light of truth, there can be no subsequent appropriate responses.
So here I am distinguishing between healthy resistance and unhealthy resistance. A healthy resistance is the mental equivalent to your body’s resistance to an infectious disease. A healthy resistance in the terms used in this note is in the mental, emotional, and spiritual domain, and the disease specifically is fear. By examining and challenging your fears, along the lines of what this note suggests, you help create a healthy resistance. With a healthy resistance, you confront the previously-unexamined aspects of the situation, as that situation is now presented to you, and then you come to understand the all-encompassing broader-truth-of-the-matter (not just our subjective, emotional, and reactive truth). With a deeper understanding, you then can then undertake a constructive and appropriate response. In contrast, with an unhealthy resistance, you remain in denial, disempowerment, anxiety, paralysis, and without appropriate responses. An unhealthy resistance will keep you in that vicious circle mentioned at the beginning of this note.
You are of course at choice, to do as you please. You are the one in charge of your life and how you go through life. But why wouldn’t you want to be in the full truth of the matter? And why wouldn’t you want to be empowered to take constructive and appropriate action? Looking at your refusal to even consider this question is the beginning of this process. I urge you to start with an examination of your unhealthy resistance to looking at your unhealthy resistance. Why specifically would you do that? And is your offered reason genuinely the truth of the matter?