Today we ask you to face your fears.
Many of you walk through life in a state of constant anxiety and terror.
What are other people saying or thinking about you?
What if you’re a failure?
What if something horrible happens to you, or your loved ones?
What if you are developing some awful disease?
What if you lose all your money, and wind up homeless in the street?
You each have your own particular menagerie of demons and fears.
These demons are almost always far worse in your mind, than they are in reality.
Whatever it is that terrifies you, whatever you are running from — face it. Face it.
Face it, in your mind. Open up the windows, turn on the lights, and expose those primal fears to the air and sunshine.
You will find that they shrink, when exposed to light. They are revealed as rather shriveled, puny things — not the horrible demons they appear to be.
Really, they are nothing.
All fear is rooted in the fear of death, and the fear of pain.
Death is not a big deal. If you really knew how blissful and wonderful it is to leave the physical body, you would have no fear of death.
Pain is more difficult. But all pain is transitory. There is no pain you will ever experience that is not temporary. There is no pain that will last forever. All pain, no matter how severe, is on its way to disappearing. This is true for all pain and trauma. All pain and trauma is temporary.
It is the mind that makes pain and trauma last beyond its measure, by obsessively thinking about pain and trauma that isn’t actually happening in reality. That is what suffering is. Suffering is thinking about past or future pain and trauma that isn’t actually happening right now.
And that is where all your fears and bogeymen and monsters in the closet live.
Almost all pain and trauma is imaginary. It is not actually happening, outside of your mind.
The remainder of “real” pain is transitory. It always passes with time. And it is rarely as bad as one’s fears make it out to be.
So — it is good to make an inventory of your worst fears. It exposes them to the light of consciousness. That way, they will no longer run you subconsciously, and you will not live your life totally out of aversion to fear, as so many do.
Living in fear is a terrible way to live. It is like refusing to use one of your arms because you’re afraid something bad might happen to it. You have a perfectly good arm, but it dangles uselessly at your side — because of what is happening in your mind.
People who live in fear cut off so much of their power.
wordfromthewell 