Mid Life Fitness

To achieve your goals; your purpose, there are many paths which you could take. But of those paths, those which are optimal are much fewer and indeed there may only be one path which is a short cut, the best path.

Do you have the courage to walk that one path? Or is it closed to you because there is something barring you from it?

Fear is the mirror of freedom. Fear exists in the child part of our mind, a part which is not fully rational, not adult enough to take a dispassionate viewpoint. Fear should be a guide post, a warning sign, it should not be a barrier across the path saying, “this far and no further”. It warns us to be careful, but never should it be enough on its own to stop us. We might decide that the risk is too great for the proposed reward and choose a different path, but that is a very different thing from being afraid to walk the path.

Fear though, is not just of physical threats; it can be of emotional and social threats. The fear of looking foolish can be stronger than a fear of physical danger.

Are you afraid of what your friends might think if they learned of something which you are considering doing? Would they laugh if you took a dance class? Would their laughter be amusement or ridicule? Would your action be a threat to them? Friends are there to support you, and if they are instead dragging you down, then perhaps its time to cut them loose and find some new friends, ones who have your interest at heart, not their own.

Most fear reactions are repetitions of something you have already experienced. Once you have experienced fear then the child part remembers and blocks the action without any rational reasoning as to whether the fear is still valid. To remove the fear is not easy, but it has to be faced. This is not as bad as it might seem for you have already done this once. What we need to do this time is to look at it from a dispassionate view and change the outcome. If you can, go back in your memory and find that first time. Meet the memory and accept it, just allow it to be remembered and then accept it for what it was, take away its power. Reassure the child part of your mind that you now have faced the fear and it is no longer something to be afraid of.

This process works best with irrational fears, but it works too with rational fears where we have allowed the fear to grow out of proportion to the threat it represents. You control your response to fear, not the other way round.