How can we conquer all our fears?
Answer Podcast
Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So if we feel fearful of some things, how can we conquer all our fears? See, we can never conquer all our fears. Fear is not the problem.
Fearfulness is the problem. Fear is a natural and healthy response to danger. If I look out of a 10-story building and I peer down, we feel some fear.
That fear is good because it protects us from danger. So fear itself is not the problem. So if there is danger and I feel fear, that is healthy.
It protects me. The problem can come in two situations. One is that instead of, okay, there was a danger, I was peering down over there, I had a fear.
But even after I move away from there, still I keep having fear. So when the danger is not there, at that time also fear remains. Then that is not fear, that is fearfulness.
So fearfulness is the problem. So to some extent, none of us know what tomorrow is going to bring. So some anxiety about the future is natural.
At the same time, the mind often takes one stimulus. This went wrong. Maybe I didn’t do so well in one exam.
Or maybe one teacher is upset with me, doesn’t give me a good grade or whatever. It takes one stimulus and immediately starts a horror movie. Starts a horror movie inside us.
This will go wrong, that will go wrong, that will go wrong, that will go wrong. And in this inner horror movie, we are not the spectators, we are the victims. So that’s how from fear we move to fearfulness.
So now what we need to do is separate the two. Whenever I feel fear, look at what is the source of the fear. Get out of the head.
Get out of the head means that instead of letting just the thoughts go out in the head, we can verbalize or we can write down. What exactly am I feeling afraid of? We write down, just we verbalize it, we give a form to our fears. Give a verbal form to our fears, you know, their spectral like nature, their phantom like nature disappears.
It becomes concrete. OK, this is the problem. And then we will recognize, OK, if this happens, I can do one, two, three, I can do this, this, this.
But then I can also think, you know, how likely is this to happen? And we can evaluate. Many of our fears, many of the things we worry about, they really, most of them don’t materialize. So we, if we just give a verbal form, then we can evaluate whether it is a possibility or it is a probability.
If we see possibility right now, this roof can cave in and we can die. But that is extremely unlikely. We can’t let our lives be dominated by all kinds of dystopian possibilities.
But if something is a probability, say, if my shoe heel has come off and is slippery, my falling down, slipping and falling is a probability. Then I have to take a walk more cautiously or I have to get the heel repaired, whatever. So once we get them out in a verbal form and evaluate, then we can actually note down, we can take tangible steps either to deal with it or to neglect it.
So that is with respect to our specific fears. And if we find a similar kind of fear is troubling us again and again, then what we could do is if we do this exercise, we write it down. OK, if you have a fear that, you know, my friends will reject me and I’ll be alone, then we can write down, how will I deal with it? You know, OK, it’s not that everybody is going to reject me, whatever.
One friend may leave me, other friends are there. Whatever it is, we write it down and keep that readily accessible to us. Whenever the fear starts attacking us, we look at that.
We read it, that will calm us down. So this is with respect to specifically addressing the fear. Generically, again, what we are doing here is same thing.
We are focusing on the conscious intention and separating it from the circumstantial emotion. Generically, spiritual practice, understanding spiritual knowledge and practicing meditation, this by itself shifts our focus and that will be like strengthening our inner muscles. And when our inner muscles, you know, physical muscles, we can lift weights.
With our inner muscles, we can lift our intention above our emotions. So this is my intention and these emotions, this fear is there. I’ll not let it consume me.
So by meditation, by such practice, actually, by spiritual practice, we will be able to…substantially our fears will automatically go down. And specific fears remain, we can address them using our intelligence. Is the answer your question? Yeah, thank you.
I’ve been meditating for the past seven years and it’s helped me a lot. Like every day for at least an hour. But there’s still like dealing with some residual anxiety, but that kind of helps.
So thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you.