I approach fear the same way I approach almost everything else in life: with an antidote. Here’s what I mean: anger and gratitude, for example, cannot coexist in the same thought; it is cognitively impossible. The moment you are angry with your spouse, for example, is the moment you stop being grateful for having them in your life in the first place; yet the moment you go back to gratitude, the anger goes away. It’s like magic: gratitude is the antidote to anger.
Here’s the trick: instead of focusing all of your energy on “letting go of anger,” focus on increasing your gratitude . . . and the anger will naturally subside. Fear also has an antidote, and I hope you can follow my train of thought here.
I spent years envious of people who had faith because I was too logical to understand it, which was frustrating because I’d heard it said that if you feed your faith, then all your fears will starve to death, and now I know it’s powerfully true. “Faith” is trusting the process. You see, SOMETHING is making your heart beat right now, your lungs function, the grass grow and the planets spin. So whether we admit it or not, what we have is FAITH. We have faith that our heart will keep beating, and that we’ll wake up tomorrow morning. We don’t KNOW this; we TRUST it.
So trust the process and honor it by not overlooking this tremendous faith that you have. It’s okay. It doesn’t mean your faith has to be wrapped up in religion. I, Timber Hawkeye, for example, am Faithfully Religionless. Why is acknowledging our faith so important? Because faith is the antidote to fear. We now know that energy flows where attention goes. So if you feed your fears they get bigger, but if you feed your faith, your fears have nothing to eat and eventually die. The problem is that fear has been drilled into us from a very young age, with its level of severity greatly varying depending on our upbringing, culture, family, etc. So in your “battle against fear,” I say change direction: don’t focus on letting go of fear; focus on increasing your faith . . . and the fear will disappear on its own. It’s like kundalini yoga, if you’ve ever done it. It involves a lot of very rapid breathing and can get very frustrating if you’re trying to breathe in and out really fast.
As my yoga instructor says, however, just focus on the exhale; the inhale will happen automatically. Trust the process, my friends. Let it happen (it’s going to happen anyway). When you trust the process, you trust that it’s okay for people to be different from one another, that as much as we don’t like it, there’s a reason for what’s happening in the world, and the opposite of what we know is also true. Trust. The. Process. There is balance and harmony in the world (the north and the south poles), and we need it so that we don’t spin out of control, right? So just focus on feeding your faith and the fears will naturally go away. Try the breathing stuff . . . I’m serious. Close your mouth and breathe in and out through the nose really fast. It can get tricky UNLESS you just focus on the exhale and trust that the inhale will happen effortlessly.
Being nice to those you don’t particularly like is not being two-faced; it’s called growing up. —Anonymous”
By Timber Hawkeye
