Getting lost in fear

© Jenn Shallvey

Sometimes I feel and take on the unloving of others. I feel it in my being, it reverberates and takes over. I lose a sense of self, awash in the whirlpool spinning me around and around. I look up for air but seem to have no control.

Then because the whirlpool is not real it is gone. Gone as quickly as it came. Yet the memory remains like a sticky substance clinging to the fibres of my brain. You see the memory is stuck in my head. Not the experience.

It can be challenging at times to differentiate the two, the experience and the memory of the experience. This is how powerful our mind can be. When channelled positively in a constructive self caring direction my mind is my greatest ally. When it rides along with my fear and feels and feeds on this ferocity then I succumb.

Today I am pleased to say this pattern, this habit of succumbing to my fear is less and less. I admit though that I am not perfect nor never will be. So to put myself out there as perfect is a marketing trick to woo you along to a false sense of security.

Truthfully though I really can say that I do not let fear get to me like I used to.  I am more conscious of it, aware of it, heeding of it and respectful of it. My relationship with fear is a symbiotic one of survival. I honour and accept it’s presence as a legacy of my humanness. It is what connects me with others.

Yet to stay united in this shared fear only holds us all back from being all we can be. We self select to the lowest common denominator by commiserating. It seems all too easy to complain, whinge, gripe, call names, blame, accuse. In this state of fear we divide into ‘I am right, you are wrong’ camps. The division grows. Fear feeds the divide.

There is no iota of a chance of coming together, or is there?