Psychiatry recognizes over 500 fears and phobias (A few are listed in the Appendix below), but we can categorize them into just three kinds – physical, mental and emotional. Physical fear is that your parachute won’t open and you’ll hit the ground going sixty miles per second. Mental fear is “thinking” your parachute won’t open, and emotional fear is “believing” that thought.
Military training reveals the key to overcoming physical fear, and from there you can extrapolate to overcoming mental and emotional fear – the most common and debilitating forms of fear. Military training is about functioning at peak performance via constant repetition of a particular procedure. It’s about operating on automatic pilot. When you’re on automatic pilot, you’re not on mental or emotional pilot – where all fear is founded. So fear is removed by bypassing mental and emotional considerations during the activity at hand. You’re simply too busy with the mechanical details to think of and fear all the real or imagined consequences.
Physical fear is of bodily injury or death. If you can overcome that fear via practice and repetition, then you can certainly overcome any mental and emotional fear in the same way.
So, what are you going to “practice?” You’re going to practice doing or facing the thing you fear over and over again until the fear subsides. If you fear public speaking, for example, do it again and again and again. The fear subside when you discover that the thing you feared was only a fantasy. A shadow. That you had been shadow boxing with yourself all along. You may recall from your past that all the consequences you feared rarely came to pass, and the ones that did, you found were really blessings in disguise. So facing rather than escaping your fear is always a win-win situation.
Lao Tzu said, “A man with outward courage dares to die; a man with inner courage dares to live.” If you stand up to the bully at work, the bully must eventually back down because a bully is essentially an inside-out coward. He’s a charlatan. And you may consider every person, place, thing or situation you fear – as charlatans, because they are either not real or your thoughts about them are not real. Shakespeare said, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
Another common fear, for example, is that you can’t stop an unwanted habit – such as smoking, drinking, overeating, etc. If that’s how you “feel,” then that’s how you’ll stay because the fear will always block the correction. Fear, being false, cannot spawn a satisfactory outcome because it’s not real, not in harmony with the “like-energy attracts like-energy” Law of Attraction. As long as you’re living in mentality instead of reality, the universe can’t help you. The only thing fear or falsity can generate is disappointment or failure. Again, when you persevere in facing the thing you fear, the fear mustdisappear. That’s how the mind works. That’s the law of the Subconscious – how it’s hard-wired.
Practice stopping your fear of anything by moving into it not away from it. Confront it again and again with calm, conscious, present-moment detachment, and soon you’ll you see with total clarity the falsity of its power and the truth of your own power. The thing you fear will give you up because you’ve stopped feeding it, stopped empowering it. That’s what courage and confidence is, and that’s what makes you healthy, happy, and free.
APPENDIX: Here a few interesting and unusual fears – All have a scientific Greek- or Latin-based name which space prevents me from listing: Fear of: Work, Teenagers, Crossing the Street, Church, France, Blushing, Noise, Dust, Garlic, Walking, Chickens, Opinions, Music, Looking Up, Dinner Conversations, Paper, The Wind, Persons with Amputations, Hearing Good News, Flutes, Gold, Ventriloquist’s Dummies, Being Dirty, Gravity, Bolsheviks, Pins and Needles, Books, Slime, Sitting, Hair, Snow, Dancing, Clocks, Throwing Stuff Out (Hoarding), Constipation, Chopsticks, Justice, The Dutch, Mirrors, Chins, Knees, Being Infested with Worms, Sermons, Ideas, Sitting Down, String, Poetry, Clouds, Numbers, Belly Buttons, Wet Dreams, Heaven, the Pope, Bald People, Mother-in-Law, Daylight or Sunshine, Rectums, Beards, Being Tickled by Feathers, Long Words, etc
William F McLaughlin
