I was asked today by someone,
What do you do when the threat that you are facing is real?
Such as when you know you're going to face the loss of your job or the loss of someone you love and there's no talking yourself out of the fear you feel.
So it's not about talking yourself out of anything.
It's not about talking yourself out of fear or grief or whatever you're feeling.
It's actually about bringing what you're thinking and feeling more and more into conscious awareness.
Conscious awareness dissolves the self-defeating attitude that fear generates.
You know,
I worked with a number of people during the last economic crisis in America in which people lost jobs and homes.
And the people I coached who came to see that fear didn't work,
That fear didn't protect them,
But actually defeated their inner strength and inner resourcefulness.
Those were the people who learned to let go of fear and because of that they enabled in themselves an attitude of faith to meet the challenges they faced and to go past them.
But getting to that attitude of faith that empowered them toward moving forward with their lives was first sitting in their fear.
First,
Allowing into awareness what their emotional state was.
Allowing into awareness the thoughts they were thinking and how their thoughts and emotional state was narrowing their perspective and recognizing that the thoughts and the emotions were in them,
Not necessarily in reality.
Reality is rather neutral.
The world gives and takes away,
The world goes up,
The world goes down.
But as Viktor Frankl said,
The last of human freedom is to choose your own attitude,
To choose your own way in any situation.
And he was a survivor of Auschwitz.
I know it's very challenging to be told when you're afraid that you're operating from a set of false beliefs.
It is a belief that you cannot be happy without the things that you are attached to.
You cannot be happy unless the world gives you whatever it is you want it to give you or whatever you're afraid it will take away.
But this is false.
There's not a single moment in your life when you do not have everything that you need to be happy.
Think about that for a moment.
The reason you are unhappy is that you're focusing on what you do not have rather than what you have.
Another false belief is happiness is in the future.
It's not true.
Right here,
Right now,
You are happy and you don't know it because you are caught up in fears and anxieties and attachments and conflict and guilt and a host of games that were all programmed to play.
Happiness is your natural state.
I'm talking about unconditional happiness that's independent of anything going on outside but simply depends on what's going on inside.
Awareness is the way we get past those false beliefs,
Get past the way we cause our own suffering.
Simply bringing your unconscious fears and emotions into awareness literally dissolves them.
The steps are simple.
Bring your emotional state into awareness.
Bring the thoughts that are generating your emotional state into awareness.
Allow them to be as they are.
Tell yourself,
These feelings,
These thoughts are in me,
Not necessarily in reality.
Don't judge them.
Don't judge yourself for having them.
Just let them be as they are and they will pass.
Everything passes,
Especially emotions.
And now your intelligence and creativity and intuition and wisdom are all freed and at your disposal to take on the challenge of moving your life forward.
The great mystic Anthony de Mello said,
I have not known a single person who gave time to being aware,
Who didn't see an important and positive difference in a matter of weeks.
The quality of their life changes.
They're different.
They don't react so much anymore.
They respond.
They're much more energetic,
Much more alive.
They see things they've never seen before.
They've discovered what people everywhere are searching for,
Namely that fountainhead of serenity and joy and happiness that hides in everyone's heart.
