It does sound empowering to know that you can overcome your fears and conquer every situation you come across. However, fears in our life are not always easy to work with and even more, we are not even aware of most of these fears.
Recently, I was working on one of my known fears of flying. This made me realize that I need to honestly find what my heart and brain are afraid of. I had seen a small cargo plane crash a few years back in Denali National Park, Alaska. This incident not only was sad and disturbing, but also started a fear and anxiety of flying for me. I took medicine for a few times and for last few flights was working hard on my aerophobia by just convincing my brain. For me, this was an act of making my brain believe that my body is just a group of organic particles. These particles have to become part of the matter they came from someday, so do not worry about dying in a plane crash.
I was still thinking about more unknown fears and after a little bit of soul searching, the one that came to mind was - fear of losing face in front of my friends and family or anybody I had a good opinion about. I get nervous and anxious around the people who are taller, slimmer, beautiful, smarter, wealthier than me or in simply anybody who has something that I wish I had. This did mean most of the people around me, as I was very good in finding something really good in each and every person.
My brain was very active around these thoughts and I asked my 6 year old what are his top three fears. I was really not expecting a very specific answer. An instant response came back from him. “My three fears are- something I really want to happen, not happening; fear of being alone in dark places; and my anger, because that prevents me from being happy and I like to be happy”.
I really did not know what to say to that. In his first few words he had summed up every single fear that I can think about my life. He just knew what he was talking about in that moment. His fear of the day was mommy and daddy not buying that foosball table he really wants them to buy:-)
Lesson learned for me was that to overcome my fears, I need to leave all my strong desires of things happening certain way I want them to.
I have a long ways to go before I can truly be empowered and not feel nervous around people because of my real fear of them not liking me. I think, my strongest desire in life is to be liked by everyone even when I do not have some of those qualities that I greatly admire.
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