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Fear A few years ago, while working on an important project. One of the emotion which I experienced predominantly within me was fear. I was trying every permutation combination, short cut, or patch work to avoid feelings around it. In the process, I happen to get caught up most of the time in anxiety and anger. I did oscillate between fear and anger for some time. In the end somehow, the project and lessons around it became one of those defining moments of my life. That drew my attention towards different areas of my life and also made look into how I was dealing with some of the challenges in my life at that point in time. Later on became opportunities, a realisation that was hard to imagine or understand at that time. My thought process seemed, like running on a winding and rewinding mode on its own, my mind was running ten thoughts at a time, that showed a huge pattern. On reflection what I was doing, playing the behavioural patterns, which were obviously not working for me. Frustrations had started creeping in. I was reacting strongly to immediate stimuli in most of the situations. I was definitely off balance. Something in me, started searching for real issue and I tried to set aside the apparent ones. Although I have worked with different issues with my clients and did help them to get through jolts of life. Experiencing my own condition felt interesting.........Understanding the human nature enables us to predict how and why we do what we do. In order to find myself, I had to go through some self-reflection. This seemed the only key to make peace within myself. · What is preventing me from moving forward ? · What controls and determines the quality of my life ? · Why do I do, what I do and what are the ultimate drivers behind my actions ? I asked myself, all these, soul searching, transformational questions. To find answers, it takes lots of U turns, tears and emotional honesty to find our own-self in this huge world and the relationships we live through. I also found out, of course through research on Essential Human Emotions, that according to Budism there are more than 8000 emotions human beings experience in one life time. We may, or they may not be aware of these emotions which keep residing and showing up time to time within us . I believe life is journey and learning is awesome, at any stage in life. So started acknowledging my own emotions around different areas of my life, and that gave me huge insight into human emotional body. As we all know emotions are the physical signals in our body and when we experience emotions, we tend to react to immediate stimuli. Stimulus may be in real time or memory retrieved. Emotions drive our thoughts, our moods, our motivation, even our behaviour. The biology of our emotions is what gives our life meaning.
What stops us from moving forward is emotion of fear. If we focus our fear directly on people and things, it is people and things we are afraid of. If we focus, our fear on a situation, it is usually the loss of our self-esteem that we are afraid of. Fear can destroy our psychology and it can immobilise us from taking action. We all experience fear in some way during our life time. Fear can be defined as a very strong unpleasant emotion and, is usually known as one of the most destructive emotions of human kind. It is caused by the anticipation or awareness of imminent danger. And is characterised by painful agitation. Fear is system of inner thoughts that can affect both our mental and physical process. It can steer us in a wrong direction. Fear is hard –wired into all of us on some level. The secret is to use the fear, to understand it, instead of letting it run us. We all develop fear conditioning through the neural pathways. These fears are universal, innate and learned. They dominate us emotionally because they are the flip-side of all our happy emotions – we fear losing those things as well as, those emotions which bring, pleasure, joy, contentment and satisfaction in life. Some people with lack all these emotional responses, complexities and cueing systems which enrich our lives and help us to explore who we are and who we could be (the potential in us). Since our emotions help us to survive and to bond in social groups, such people live a life in a cognitive bubble floating in a world which does not make sense to them. Their genius can be extraordinary. Their talents can be awesome in their power, but the ability to be productive, the ability to initiate and sustain intimate, appropriate relationships, the ability to cope with adversity and the ability to adapt to change, the four parameters of mental health, elude them. This is called Savant Syndrome. What determines our lives are the meanings we associate to the events and things in our lives. Two people can experience the same event, with one can being upset and yet the other exhilarated. Once meaning is determined, each one of us has a pattern of emotions that we all associate to that meaning as our way of dealing with the event. One thing which I learnt was choices with our emotional response are unlimited. We could perceive a situation, as being a personal sight and choose to become hurt. We could perceive situation as an opportunity to learn about our strategies, as well as other people’s strategies with which they operate, and feel elated and be curious to know more. We could perceive situation as threatening and loose no time in getting mad at people with rage, or feel anger as a reminder that people can’t be trusted and keep feeling vindicated and significant. And built huge ego around us and keep protecting that for the rest of our lives. I realised that in the middle of all these emotions I had choices, about how I could respond to the situation. When we choose to respond differently to fear and anxiety there is always an opportunity to gain insight into broader perspective of life, that leads to more satisfaction and clarity. We are mostly driven by unconscious mind. That is something like, as a child or as an adult we might have gone through some experiences, which did not make sense or were huge to deal with due to lack of maturity or the lack of skills. What we tell ourselves at that time can become a driving force for our actions. Emotions are driven by three forces that mould the meanings we make from these emotions. And these forces are Focus, Language Physiology. Person with most behavioural flexibility has control on different situations. Focus Whatever we focus on we get. This also means that we exclude everything else which we do not focus on. That means if we repeatedly visit disempowering emotions like fear and anger, we are going to experience our world through this filter. It is vital to create emotional well being by moving to new empowering and resourceful state. Language The language we use will determine the meaning we have of the situation and can change the meaning of a situation. Sometimes you must have experienced someone who seems to get angrier and angrier, as if they are building themselves up into rage. Notice their language, how they used the language. Strong words create strong emotional responses and meanings too. Soft words create softer responses and meanings. If we are angry, we will use the language to stay angry. If we feel compassion, or forgiveness, we use different language. And the outcome is life giving not life negating. Physiology Our posture, deep or shallow breathing, facial tightness or looseness, our gestures, our speed of movement, whether we are frowning our smiling, our standing upright or slumped determines our body posture. If we can manage our physiology, we can manage our emotions. It is important to be involved with some regular physical activity, that helps us release stress and shake the negative energy around us. We can manage our responses to the world and its events. It is about having conscious awareness of the choices we are making at physical, mental, emotional level. In the end I learnt, persistence and learning is the key to success for greater understanding and clarity in creating harmonious, peaceful existence for myself and those around me, and ultimately, the larger community. We can have acceptance and gain an understanding of what had happened in a particular situation. Although I understand the cause may not be my responsibility, how I respond to it, is. We are so much more than our expectations. Expanding our consciousness is vital to our well being. We all have the resources, to bring about change and success – all we need, is there within us right now. We just might not have noticed it yet ! ************************************ ****************************** *************** |
