True Fear or Manufactured in your Mind?

In order to understand fear, you must first understand the difference between true fear and manufactured fear.  Let me give you a personal example.  I experienced true fear last year.  It hit out of the blue.  I had just come from an event at the local Indigenous Friendship Centre and it was a cool spring day.  I had my route home laid out in my head.  Stop at the art store in the mall, catch the bus to the University, walk to the grocery store and head home.  Then it hit.  Bam! The realization that I was being run over by a car that was backing up from a stop sign in a mall parking lot.

Hit from behind, I went down to the ground and ended up underneath the car.  Everything seems to move really slow when the adrenalin rushes through your body.  It’s like your mind starts recording in clips.  I remember seeing the muffler and the undercarriage of the car and thinking ‘this isn’t right’.  Then there was the realization that there were wheels coming toward my head.  In the next instance the car stopped, went forward and once I saw the sky I bolted straight up.

It must have looked like I had risen from the dead as witnesses told me later that I was extremely lucky I wasn’t hurt.  I was extremely lucky because it was these people that came to my aid otherwise, I would have been a speed-bump in thing called life.

The adrenalin doesn’t stop rushing through your body when the event ends.  You are basically in shock and your body/mind/emotions goes into process mode.  Even though someone offered me a ride, I was determined to continue my path home.   I needed to process what had happened.  While under that car I was consumed with the fear of my survival.  The whole experience may have been a minute but it felt like an eternity.  Dying and dying like this was not part of my story.  I had a mission to fulfill and I wasn’t finished fulfilling it.  But, this experience did enter my reality and it taught me something.  In one moment, I am fighting for my life and the next moment, I am realizing I am safe.  I am in one piece and I am alive.

Forgiveness and Your Imagination

Everyone and every experience comes into your life comes through your invitation.  You are not at the mercy of outside forces and circumstances.  We live in a universe of vibration and through your thoughts and emotions you draw to yourself events, people and circumstances.  It is all an inside job which is why forgiveness is not about the other person; it is about you.

Most people do not want to accept that they create their own reality.  Instead they would prefer to believe that lousy experiences and people are random happenings. It has nothing to do with your thinking.  Yet somewhere at some time, you offered the thought and as the old saying says, “careful what you ask for because it has a way of coming back to you.”

The Art of Revision

Regardless of your circumstances, you have dominion over every thought or idea in your mind, and do not need to keep yourself stuck in a state of being that is not serving you.  You have the option through the use of your imagination to revise your perception of the events of your day or life.

The problem is most of us are not in the habit of exercising this option.  Instead, we spend our time rehashing the less than stellar events of our life.  We gossip, complain and lay blame on people and conditions outside of ourselves.  Somehow we have come to believe that continually talking about a problem or situation will make things better.  It doesn’t.  It keeps us tethered to the state of mind that reflects to us the events and circumstances we don’t want in our life or world.

Let me give you a simplistic example of what I mean.  I was coaching an individual who began telling me about an injury she had sustained while exercising.  She told me she was seeing a physiotherapist for it and after three months it wasn’t getting any better.  As we talked, she began telling me how she thought the injury happened.  Over and over again, she provided me with different scenarios.