"Fears and Phobias"

The lesson that kept showing up again and again this week was about fears and phobias. It seemed that every time I looked around I ran into some sort of fear with a phobia attached to it with myself and others. Even my son's golden Labrador who is a rescue displayed a sense of phobia when we took him for a check up at the vet. He seemed to think we were going to abandon him there and kept trying to climb into our laps to hide. He even started to shake as we held him and coxed him to finish his check up.

My daughter on the other hand had an incident with a spider in the bathtub and clearly had to have her father help her out with removing it to the outside. Even my cat who found a bug outside and finally ended up catching it with her paw had a conniption fit when she finally touched it. All we heard was this loud wail and complaining in cat language. Looking out the window we saw her shaking her paw profusely complaining that it had wiggled. She is an indoor cat. When checking in with myself, my fear of losing a friend who was diagnosed with breast cancer in stage 3 reared it's head, even
though I know she has a good chance of surviving the cancer.

When I thought about the feeling of being fearful I remembered being a small child and my father telling me that fear was really a tool to help us navigate through our lives in what may or may not be healthy for us. Our fears were not ever meant to rule us or make us miserable. If we allowed our fears to take over and develop into a phobia then we have the potential for them to shut us down, stopping us from experiencing and seeing the whole picture. What we can learn from this is to take the time to really analyze what makes us fearful, then we are able to decided if it is something we can move through to heal or even step around it.

 As I continued to analysis what fear is all about, I could see that if we continue to feed our fears then in the long run it can make us physically ill or even take over our lives. One of my friends who is a firewalker once told me that, "Fear is about stepping out of our comfort zone." Looking back on my week with my family I saw that even though some of our fears we can laugh at, some of them could become miserable if we let them take over. In the end all I know is that if we live our lives through our fears then we miss out on a big chuck of enjoying our lives and each other to the fullest.