Don’t Let Fear Rule Your Life
Fear can keep you alive, but it can also falsely limit you.
Long ago, when the human race was hunter-gatherer packs roaming the land, fear kept them alive. Back then, fear was almost entirely related to threats to life and limb. Fear of lions and other large animals, falling off cliffs, fast-running waters, storms, and other matters that could lead to death. In this form, fear kept the human race alive.
Over time, as humans formed communities, started farming the land, and domesticated animals, such fears lessened. Communities built walls to keep out predators, learned how to shelter better against storms, and choosing one place to live limited their encounters with chasms and fast-running waters. Dangers to life and limb became far more manageable.
Then, communities developed stratifications. Haves and have-nots, ownership, possessions, and all sorts of other artifices came into being. Now you noticed if your neighbor had a sturdier home, better tools to manage their fields, and things that you didn’t have. With this came a new form of fear. Fear of intangibles, like being good enough, how you appeared to others, if you were worthy of your community or not, and so on.
In this form, fear ceased to be about protecting life and limb. Rather than being an instinctive tool to keep you alive, fear became an abstract. Most couldn’t put a name on this before modern psychology, and everything related to it that came into being.
Because our society treats mental and emotional health as being utterly secondary to physical health, fear has become something else entirely.
The weaponization of fear
Because most fear is utterly intangible now, it’s easy to miss. There are all sorts of disguises for fear, many of which are cutesy and easily taken for granted.
FOMO is one of the most obvious examples of this. Fear of missing out gets played off as kind of cute, kind of silly, and not a big deal. Except it then gets used to convince you to buy things you don’t need, utilize services that offer quick fixes but no real solutions, and choose to follow people who do not have your best interests at heart.
This is an example of the weaponization of fear. Advertising, politics, and news media use this to make money, get viewers, and elect awful people by convincing you that not doing so means terrible suffering.
I believe that the thing most feared now is not death, but suffering. If you don’t do “X,” you will suffer. When you vote for “Y,” you will suffer. Fail to buy “Z,” and you’ll suffer. This is the ultimate weaponization of fear. Someone, often far removed, gets artificial power, makes money, gains a fake form of control, or all the above.
That’s not to say that fear of death is gone. When someone points a gun at you or threatens to deport you because you’re not white, fear can keep you safe and alive. However, the way news media and some elements of social media depict these plays on the fear of suffering.
Weaponized fear, attacking your mental, emotional, and spiritual health, is why the world is as crazy today as it is. But what can you do about that?
Apply active conscious awareness – i.e., mindfulness
You, and only you, are in your head, heart, and soul. Looking with your eyes, smelling with your nose, hearing with your ears, tasting with your tongue, touching with your fingers, and feeling empathy and the like are experienced by you alone. Nobody other than you is in your mind, body, or psyche.
Yet nobody teaches you how to look inside and address anything you experience, unless you get therapy. If you desire to know yourself, understand how you experience the world around you, only you can choose to apply active conscious awareness to do that.
What does that mean? It means that you pause and put yourself here, now, in the present. From there, look inside your mindset/headspace/psyche self and ask,
- What am I thinking?
- What am I feeling?
- How am I feeling?
- What am I intending?
- Is my approach positive or negative?
- What am I doing?
From there, you can see into your subconscious. This is important because it’s in your subconscious that your memories, values, beliefs, and habits live. Unchecked, all sorts of things align in the subconscious that might not be who, what, where, how, or why you desire to be.
Once you engage active mindfulness in this way, you can see what suffering you are fearing. Because, unless you’ve actively done this before, there is a fear of suffering holding you back, keeping you limited, and possibly driving you to do, be, and have things that are not authentic to you.
Active conscious awareness – i.e., mindfulness – is how, in the here and now, you can engage with your subconscious and address the mental, emotional, and spiritual fear.
Choose not to let fear rule your life
Nobody wants to suffer. That’s why so many people accept lesser lives rather than doing what lights them up, empowers them, and makes them thrive. It’s fear of suffering that puts people in falsely labeled comfort zones, which are all about stability (that in and of itself is usually bogus or only for a limited time).
Paulo Coelho, in The Alchemist, addresses how to recognize, acknowledge, and approach this:
“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams…”
Most of the suffering people fear they’ll experience is worse as a fear than what they might actually experience. Yes, heartache sucks. Losing people and things feels bad. But if you think about it, as much as you might have suffered after shit happened, was it as bad as you feared it would be?
To be fair, yes, sometimes the suffering is gruesome. However, more often than not, it’s the fear of suffering that’s worse than any suffering you’ll experience. Worse than that, the suffering you’re experiencing by not pursuing your goal, your idea, your whatever, is nasty.
Everyone knows someone who’s a perpetual downer because fear has ruled their life. They take no chances, seldom if ever act on ideas they have, stay small and unhappy because the fear of suffering limits them. Fear rules their life experience.
You can’t do anything for anyone else about this. But you can choose to help yourself.
Be here now
The past has come and gone. It can’t be undone, redone, or done over. Often, memories of the past are colored by nostalgia, bias, prejudice, and other things that create false beliefs. This is the whole reason for the existence of MAGA.
On the other side of this coin, the future is unknown. As Yoda said,
“Always in motion is the future.”
Numerous factors make the future utterly unpredictable. Things can and will happen outside of your control that will impact and influence how the future plays out. All suffering you fear lives here. In the unknown. Most, if not all of it, is tied to mental, emotional, and spiritual health.
Because the past and future are unreliable narrators, the present is where it’s at. Right here, right now, in this moment, you can recognize and acknowledge who, what, where, how, and why you are. If your thoughts, feelings, intentions, approach, or actions aren’t to your liking, here and now, in the present, you can address them and alter or change them.
Chances are, as you read this, you’re in no danger. At this moment, you have nothing to fear. Being present, here and now, you can choose to be empowered.
Nobody else can empower you. I can hold open the door to show you a way (not the way, but a way), yet you alone can choose to walk through it. Or not. I can’t empower you. No political, business, religious, or other person, place, or thing can empower you. You empower yourself.
Lots of things in the world today use weaponized fear to disempower you. Why? So that they can guide, direct, influence, and persuade you to cede your power. You, however, can recognize and acknowledge this, then choose not to let fear rule your life.
Tell fear to suck it
Pause, reflect, be still for a moment. Be here, now. Allow yourself to be present, in this moment, and not consider the past or the future. In this way, you empower yourself. Thusly empowered, you can take control of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, approach, and actions.
That control allows you to make choices and decisions for who, what, where, how, and why you are. Yes, there are still going to be environmental and societal factors you might need to overcome. But being in the now, present in this moment, you gain what control you can to direct your life experience.
You can choose to tell fear to suck it. The power is yours, and all the things in the world telling you to be afraid fall short when you empower yourself.
This is not a quick fix. It takes time, energy, and work. But when you empower yourself, the world of fear shrinks, and the world of potential and possibility expands. I don’t know about you, but that’s the world I desire to have more of.
Lastly, you are worthy and deserving of your empowerment. Period, end of story. Kick ass, take names, be the you that doesn’t let fear rule your life.
Can you see how fear only rules your life if you let it?
This is the seventh-hundred-thirty-fifth (735) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to repost and share this.
The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here.
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