Make Fear Your Friend!

Make Fear Your Friend!
by Neale Donald Walsch
March 26, 2011
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Hello, Everyone...

We are exploring here the Five Natural Emotions: Grief, Anger, Envy, Fear, and Love. These emotions are tools, gifts given to us by God with which to build a letter life. In the last three weeks we looked at Grief, Anger, and Envy. Today, an exploration of Fear.

Fear is a natural emotion. It is built into us at the cellular level. All babies are born with only two fears: the fear of falling, and the fear of loud noises. These two fears are given to us as protections. They are tools, or devices, designed to keep us safe. The purpose of natural fear is to build in a bit of caution. Caution is a tool that helps keep the body alive.

Most fears are learned responses, brought to the child by its environment, taught to the child by its parents. The job of the growing human being is to learn how to translate fear into caution. Children who are made to feel that fear is not okay that it is wrong to express it, and, in fact, that they shouldn t even experience it will have a difficult time making this translation. Likewise, children who are taught to fear everything, that they should experience it at every turn, will also have a challenging time effectively dealing with their fear as adults.

Fear that is continually repressed becomes panic, a very unnatural emotion. Fear that is over-impressed on a child will transform itself into the very same thing. Thus, as an adult that person may fly into panic mode at the slightest sign of anything untoward.

Fear is the second most powerful of all the emotions, ranked only behind love. In truth, fear and love are the same thing. All fear is an expression of love love of life, love of the self and love of others. If we didn't love life, the self, or others (in other words, if we didn't care about anyone or anything), we would be afraid of nothing. We would not even be concerned with our own survival.

Likewise, a person can be induced to love something greater than life or others. People can be taught to not fear death, or be concerned with their own survival, by simply teaching them that something greater than anything that physical life has to offer awaits them after death.

This happens, in fact, to seem true to many people much of the time. To them it seems that life in the physical can offer very little that comes close to what life after death offers. Yet this is not because life in the physical is inherently inferior, but rather, because our understanding of life in the physical is often insufficient to allow it to provide us with the joys and rewards of life in the non-physical, or spiritual, realm.

Persons who deeply understand the nature and the purpose and the process of life in the physical can and do experience every bit as much joy, bliss, and reward when they are in their bodies as they do when they depart their bodies. Therefore, do not depart your body simply in order to experience what you believe will be more joy without it. Conversations with God teaches us that you will simply return to physicality in any event, to re-experience what you came here, joyfully, to experience. The opportunity that your life now offers is to experience it in a different way, complete with deeper understanding and all the rewards and joys of the Hereafter. Or, if you please, on Earth as it is in Heaven.

And one of the things you will more deeply understand, should you step fully into this opportunity, is fear. You will be clear that the late U.S. President Franklyn Roosevelt had it exactly right when he famously said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." You will see that the now well-known acronym for fear False Evidence Appearing Real is also true. And then, you will adopt a second acronym, knowing at last that fear is simply a word for: Feeling Excited And Ready.

Teach children, therefore, not to fear their fear, and not to be afraid of being afraid. Rather, teach them that fear is their friend, inviting them to take just a moment to see what caution advises. And then, to step into the fear and, if caution allows, to explore what lies on the other side of their fear. In other words, what would happen if they did it anyway? Or, as I like to put it in my spiritual renewal workshops, What would happen if what you fear happens? What would happen then?

Ultimately, all fear is the fear of death. And once you are no longer afraid of dying, you are no longer afraid of living. You lose your fear of death not because you don t love anyone or anything, but for exactly the opposite reason. This is the complex nature of life...and death...and I will explain more of this as the weeks go by.

For now, know that fear is a natural emotion. Translated with emotional maturity and intelligence, it becomes the caution that tells us to look both ways before crossing the street. Yet fear that does not translate into simple caution can cause us to be paralyzed on the corner, even when no cars are coming. A car, after all, might come. Something, after all, could happen. And so, we will be afraid of our own shadow, scared to venture out into life.

Teach your children, therefore, to invite fear in and then to investigate what is on the other side of it. Teach yourself the same thing. You will both discover that 95% of what you fear never happens and that 95% of the time when it does happen, nothing bad comes of it.

In fact, the master is one who knows that, actually, 100% of the time nothing bad comes of what happens. Life is always conspiring in our favor, and if we wait long enough for the result, we will see the ultimate benefit of everything.

More next week, as our exploration here continues.

Love and Hugs,
Neale

Neale Donald Walsch is a modern day spiritual messenger whose words continue to touch the world in profound ways. With an early interest in religion and a deeply felt connection to spirituality, Neale spent the majority of his life thriving professionally, yet searching for spiritual meaning before beginning his now famous conversation with God. His With God series of books has been translated into 34 languages, touching millions of lives and inspiring important changes in their day-to-day lives. * (http://www.cwg.org) * Blog: * www.TheAlternativeVoice.org *

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