Cure for Fear?

Fear. What a tiny word for such a HUGE emotion. Fear is capable of so many things. It can drive a person or it can freeze them. Fear can aid a person in their quest for success or it can be the very thing that leads to their failure. A single four letter word. Wow!

Recently I experienced the stifling kind of fear. The fear that stops you dead in your tracks. I am a part of a group called "The Artist Way". We're just a group of ladies from all walks of life that have gotten together and are discovering things about ourselves or resurrecting life enhancing things that have been long buried. Our manual is a book by Julia Cameron called "The Artist's Way; A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity". Awesome writing and instruction. I give it a huge thumbs up. Anyway, during one of our weekly meetings I sort of blurted out my desire to write. I received lots of affirmation from the group. No negativity sent my way at all. What happens though? You guessed it. I all of a sudden could not write. I would pick up my pen and nothing. I would sit down to type and nothing. It was so heart breaking for me because writing has always been my "outlet". You know those little voices we all have, well, they were talking non stop. "Look what you did. You said you wanted to write and you can't. You told them and now people are going to expect you to write." It was a lot more brutal than that but I am toning it down in case someone does actually read this. LOL! It was so bad that I swore off writing. I quit writing morning pages. I quit journaling and I didn't' work on any of my stuff. I found myself soon depressed. Just the other day I picked up my "Artist Way" book and thumbed through it. Julia speaks of synchronicity in her book and well, I think I may have experienced a bit of it that day. My thumbs landed on Week 9 "Recovering a Sense of Compassion". What's the first section labeled? "Fear". Julia says this, "Fear is what blocks an artist. The fear of not being good enough. The fear of not finishing. The fear of failure and of success. The fear of beginning at all. There is only one cure for fear. The cure is love...Stop yelling at yourself. Be nice..." She says a lot more than that about it but you'll have to get the book and check it out. Anyway, so, I'm afraid. That's why I'm not writing. I'm not stupid, incompetent, or dreaming. I'm just scared.

So, the cure is Love. Seems I've heard that message before. "Perfect Love Casts out Fear" I've wrote here before about my "theory" concerning "perfect love". What if to make love perfect you have to allow yourself to love yourself. You know, do what is good for you. Take care of yourself. Be nice to YOU. How many of us are nice to ourselves? I don't know about you but I often take a mental verbal beating on an almost daily basis. If I were to say to another person the things I say to myself I wouldn't have many friends and I'd probably lose my family. What gives us the right to berate ourselves like that? The Bible does mention loving your neighbor as yourself doesn't it? Well, I feel sorry for my neighbor if he's getting the kind of love I throw my way.

I want different. I'm not sure what the answer is. I don't know how you change your thinking where yourself is concerned. How do you take a lifetime of relating and reacting to yourself and change that? I'm going to try to find out though. And I'll probably write more about it on another day. Wish me luck.

God Bless!

Living and Learning,
Marcey