Embracing Fear

Written by Mathew Naismith

Embracing fear sounds ridiculous because it sounds like we are endorsing fear within ourselves instead of ridding ourselves of fear however that’s not actually the case. Evading or fearing to fear is actually more about endorsing fear than embracing fear, once we stop fearing to fear we are no longer influenced by fear itself. By evading fear, like fearing of being egotistically expressive for example, is still fearing because we are afraid of being seen as egotistical in any way especially if we are spiritually aware.  Spirituality brings forth a lot of fears and it’s how we handle these fears if these fears are going to continue to be unbecoming or not to us.

We are taught, through numerous spiritually oriented books and workshops, to expel our ego traits which of course fear is one of these traits, haven’t we just judged something being of the ego and isn’t judgment a part of these ego traits? You can see we are not getting anywhere by fearing these ego traits in any way in the first place, yes we are feeling better for expelling these traits but we still fear these traits consciously and/or subconsciously.  Any human trait we judge exemplifies the fear within us, judgement denotes fear however I should point out here that there is a difference between judgment & being aware.

I’m aware that judgement is brought on by us fearing, is this not judgement as well by judging judgment of being brought on by fearing? As soon as we categorise a human trait we have made judgment however by being just aware of these human traits without categorising these traits is only being aware without judgement.  It would seem that by linking judgement to fear is categorising judgment as being brought on by fearing!!  Because I don’t fear fearing or of expressing any part of the ego in any way I haven’t judged these ego traits of being bad or unbecoming in any way, I haven’t judged fear as being bad so it’s really not really categorising anything into something separate to something good for example.  Judgement comes about by separating and categorising fear as being just bad that can only give us bad feelings.  

Through some of these spiritually orientated books and workshops, we are trained to separate good from bad which is dictated by our feeling of good and bad, separating good feelings from bad feelings for starters is of judgement. The more we separate these ego traits and feelings the more of the ego we have become not less mainly because we are just as judgemental as ever.   Yes it’s hard not to separate human traits that give us good feeling from bad feelings, at this point we should ask ourselves why is this so hard not to do?  This is where fear comes into the equation again, we fear feeling bad that is why so many spiritually aware people are using spirituality to feel good.  Yes we are sick of feeling bad only because we haven’t faced our fears and yes we feel better when we feel good instead of bad however we are still fearing and separating one human trait form the other thus categorising them as being either bad or good which again brings us back to judgement brought on by fearing.  It’s a vicious circle that a lot of us have gotten ourselves in however there is a simple answer, embrace fear!!

Embracing any ego trait that we fear of expressing in any way will instantly diminish any bad feelings of these feared traits, we will also become a lot less judgemental only because we quite automatically stop categorising these traits as something opposite to other human traits.       

The following links are a good read on this topic.

  

http://bemorewithless.com/embrace/

Extract: If the bad news is that fear never goes away, the good news is that it gets easier to work through and walk through with practice. With that knowledge, you can stop trying to end fear and just get on with whatever you are scared to do or experience.

http://www.evolvingbeings.com/essay/embrace-fear-to-transform-your-life

Extract: Today I’m going to ask you to be open to the idea of embracing fear.  I say embrace fear…embrace it lovingly, gratefully, joyfully…for when you embrace fear, you are disavowing it of its Power…you are dissolving it, bit by bit, until one day that big, impenetrable barrier of Fear no longer exists. In its place is the change that your heart has been longing for.