In order to get a handle of fear, one must be aware of how it arises within oneself.
Fear can be understood as a psychological process that we experience as an uncomfortable and out of control feeling that we label as anger, anxiety, stress, paranoia, shyness, suspicion, feeling trapped, guilt, and depression. The effects of fear can range anywhere from mild irritation to a paralyzing panic attack.
There are as many faces of fear as there are countless thoughts. There is the fear of living, of dying, of wanting to live and wanting to die, of failure, and success. There is the fear of rejection, retaliation, denial, and of being alone. We fear suffering and also our freedom. We fear ridicule, criticism, boredom, change, and responsibility. We fear our thoughts and feelings. We are even fearful of fear itself. Truly, there is nothing we do not fear. We enthrone fear without realizing it and it rules us from within.
Fear is this unconscious movement. It is rooted in the belief in lack, the ego-sense of being separate, and the placing of the power of causation outside of oneself. And the only way to be free of fear is to become conscious of the mechanics of fear itself; how it arises in experience; the nature of our thoughts and feelings, and the mental defenses that keep fear in place and running in the background of our lives.
You’ve mastered survival mode, now it’s time to live.
Anonymous
All fear is related to survival. This instinct of self-preservation is part of the evolutionary memory that we carry. Our minds are meant to be creative but through socialization, has become a survival tool not only for our bodies but also to protect our limited psychological selves.
When it comes to the preservation of the body, fear is helpful. Fear helps us dodge oncoming traffic, catch a falling baby, and run when we are being chased by a lion. It is a flash in the pan, fight-or-flight adrenalized response that gets us out of physical danger and enables us to lift a car off of someone.
But when it comes to preserving our egos, fear has far more dire implications.
Fear is the survival mechanism by which we attack those who think, look, and act differently from us. It is the weapon we wield to defend ourselves endlessly from what we perceive to be threats to our separate identities. It is the reason why we get defensive and angry when our egos are proven wrong. It is what keeps us grasping at straws and irrationally protecting a limited fragile identity, that is easily broken by criticism.
This "you versus me" is the cause of all violence in the world. It is the reason why we get jealous, envious, and compete mercilessly for external validation. It is the motivation behind every desperate attempt to climb the social ladder at all costs. It manifests as a "holier than thou" attitude and also as someone who plays the victim and martyr card.
Irrational fear of differences is the reason for racism, tribalism, social injustice, and corporate greed. Fear exaggerates differences and prejudices and elevates them to the status of life and death. “I have to kill you because you are an existential threat to my beliefs”
Fear of suffering is what motivates us to build cocoons of safety that stop us from growing, evolving, and creating.
Fear of the future is how we con ourselves out of happiness and out of the present moment. Fear of the past is the screenshot of what was traumatic, unpleasant, and played on the screen of our minds over and over again and reliving our pain from events that happened 10 years ago.
Fear is the reason why people misbehave, act out, or take advantage of situations. “I am afraid I am not going to hold on to my position, my power, my status, my money, and my control.”
“Attack, defense; defense, attack, become the circles of the hours and the days that bind the mind in heavy bands of steel with iron overlaid, returning but to start again. There seems to be no break nor ending in the ever-tightening grip of the imprisonment upon the mind.”
A Course in Miracles
When our minds are preoccupied with self-preservation, we also cannot help but feel like we need to continually look over our shoulders, compulsively scanning our environment for anything that is out of order. Obsessive-compulsive behavior becomes the main diet of a divided mind. Suspicion, cynicism, and stressful reactions become the constant wear and tear on our nervous system.
Fear not only compromises our body's natural immune response to heal but it also distorts our perception of life. It creates an enemy and a problem where there are none, adding to the already present distress and struggle in the mind. Fear is a self-reinforcing mechanical feedback loop of thinking fearful thoughts, feeling fear feelings, and attracting more fearful experiences. Fear is self-sabotage; the kind of thinking that bets against oneself.
The habits you created to survive will no longer serve you when it is time to thrive. Get out of the survival mode. New habits. New Life.
Ebonee Davis
Survival mode is supposed to be a phase that helps save your life. It is not meant to be how you live.
Michele Rosenthal
Letting go is the basis of undoing a problem or more accurately the belief in one.
Ever get into a big fight with someone and then suddenly find yourself burst out laughing? We let go when we see that the whole reason why we were upset in the first place is wholly ridiculous and makes no sense; that our beliefs, interpretations, and perception of what happened cannot stand up to close scrutiny.
Letting go is a release of that inner pressure. It happens when we recognize that what is being held on to no longer works, has no value, and is needlessly painful. With this release, we experience increased energy, a sense of lightness, and happiness. As we let go of the interference, we flow.
Letting go is the mechanism that deactivates our survival genes and activates Awareness. It is outgrowing the survival mode and stepping into self-empowerment. When our minds become rested, sorted, and balanced, we also naturally become focused, purposeful, and creative.
Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.
Eckhart Tolle
So consider how you would feel if you could let go of all your negative emotions as they arise and no longer be a hostage to them? Consider how you would be if you were no longer controlled by your compulsive stressful reactions and judgments of self and others?
Our minds have infinite storage capacity. As we forget to let go, we also unwittingly consume and become blindly defined by a huge diet of unresolved feelings, negative attitudes, and emotionalized limiting beliefs. This attachment to a broken identity of worry, distress, disquiet, and dread makes us miserable, ill, and colors our perception of life. We develop a negativity bias and argue for our limitations. "It's just my nature. I cannot change."
To escape and by-pass this accumulated neurosis, we get busy, binge, over-think, and consume drugs and alcohol. We find ways to numb our senses so that we can avoid feeling threatened by our very own thoughts and feelings.
As a result, our lives become an endless struggle of running away from "bad" feelings. With every half step, our world gets smaller and smaller. As we deny the part of us that is afraid, we also abdicate Self-responsibility and project blame onto our others. This makes for the perception of a hostile world, exacerbated by the victimization of our feelings and the pitiless judgment of self and others. We repress our feelings for fear that we will become out of control and damage ourselves if we were to face them. We continue to accumulate this pressure of negativity until we look forward to death.
Fear/Ego is a death wish.
Thoughts by themselves are not painful. It is the feelings behind the thoughts that arise that are painful.
A single feeling can generate a million thoughts, scenarios, and hypotheticals. So, if we want to get a handle on fear, we must first look at fear. By acknowledging our “fearful” feelings and seeing that they are only just energetic sensations, we realize that fear can actually be easily overcome by not resisting it. Our freedom lies in learning to be with our feelings in a way that does not judge, condemn, or moralize.
Without resistance, negative feelings have a half-life. Without rehashing the past or projecting into the future, fear is the stranger in the present moment. By surrendering a negative feeling, we also release hundreds, if not thousands of associated dis-eased and toxic thoughts and beliefs.
Surrendering the underlying energy behind our feelings is the key. And it's very practical. Simply notice, disengage and let go of giving them any importance and let them run their course. When we are free of judging our feelings, we are also no longer hostage to them.
We see that there is another alternative to be with our thoughts and feelings; one in which we are free, relaxed, and intensely alive even in the presence of what appears chaotic and unruly.
We can decide how long we wish to stay angry or upset.
We step into the higher vibrations of courage, acceptance, and peace.
Thoughts and feelings and our reactions to them, are not a solid or fixed part of who we are.
Nicole Beland
Feelings and thoughts are not permanent fixtures but energetic phenomena of consciousness that can be let go of at any time and any place, in any instant, continuously and effortlessly. This is the value of paying close attention to the nature of our experience because it facilitates the release of what are blocks and to our sense of well-being.
What is the surrendered state? It means to be free of negative feelings in a given area so that creativity and spontaneity can manifest without opposition or the interference of inner conflicts
David Hawkins
The consistent and persistent surrendering of our feelings tips the scale favoring freedom and everything that is pure, healthy, and loving. It allows us to manifest the greatest good in any given situation.
The state of freedom is already innate. We merely have to uncover our ignorance as to who we truly are, let go of our attachments and aversions to our thoughts and feelings, and withdraw our allegiance to the ego-sense of lack.
In this section, we will discuss how the mental survival mechanisms of the untrained mind keep fear running our lives.
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Suppression and repression
“Eat your emotions”
“Swallow your feelings”
“Place them in a box under lock and key and shove it all the way back in your mind where you cannot see them”
We repress our feelings unconsciously. This is an automatic and conditioned reaction to avoid pain instead of feeling it, addressing, and healing it. When we repress our thoughts, feelings, and urges, we are unconsciously pushing them out of awareness. This happens in a twinkling of an eye, often too fast to be noticed. Repression is the mechanism whereby we, in unawareness, deceive ourselves into thinking that our feelings no longer run our lives.
Suppression, on the other hand, is a conscious defense mechanism where we attempt to force our feelings out of awareness. We suppress our feelings because we do not know what to do with them or feel ill-equipped to process them. We’d rather suffer through them, minimize them instead of letting them go.
These are major emotional and maturation blocks.
The psychological impact then of these suppressed and repressed feelings are irritability, dissatisfaction, discontent, mood swings, tension in the muscles of the neck and back, allergies, and other somatic conditions.
So why do suppress and repress?
This is an unfortunate consequence of the programming we received as children. Parents punish their children for being "bad" and reward them for being "good'. As the child is still yet emotionally unequipped to handle these conflicting influences constructively, he/she is often left feeling that there are parts of themselves that are wrong, unworthy, inadequate, and unlovable.
As a result of this collective unconscious programming, we often grow up thinking that there are parts of us that cannot be accepted and loved unconditionally. This engenders a lot of confusion in our innocent and defenseless minds, creating a massive amount of guilt which we then carry into adulthood. We repress because of the underlying guilt surrounding the feeling of unworthiness itself. We fear above all that our unworthiness is real.
We may be able to tolerate pain but it is not without limit. What is denied eventually gets projected onto others. “Others” are now the cause of the way I feel. We experience our upsets and grievances as if they were caused by “them”. “They” become the enemy as the confused mind continues to find justification to reinforce its projection.
The blame-game is symptomatic of this unresolved guilt and fear of love that we deny within ourselves. Blame gets placed on people, places, institutions, food, climate, God, fate, destiny, foreigners, ethnic groups, and external circumstances. Projection is the mechanism we use to maintain victimhood and the sense of helplessness. It accounts for all the violence and wars in the world. Hate is even justified in the name of an all-loving “God”. We voraciously seek external validation and maintain our false sense of security at the expense of others. This leads to social breakdown. “My success sits on your failure”
The mechanism of projection is what underlies all attacks. And because denial leads to projection, all attack is ultimately self-attack.
In denial, we also project dis-ease on the body. Headaches, illnesses, disorders become the preoccupations of a guilty and divisive mind looking to continually reinforce its projection and protect its sense of powerlessness in the mistaken conviction that it is strength.
We have been taught as children that some emotions are bad and that we should never entertain them, least of all have them. This puts added pressure of guilt on top of the already distressed feelings. As these unwanted and unresolved emotions get thrust deeper and deeper into our psyche, they also become harder and harder to dislodge. The mind as a survival tool then builds layers of defenses to keep the unwanted feelings and their corresponding beliefs from being exposed to the light where they can be healed, cleansed, and released.
What is unresolved, not released, and pushed out of awareness still operates and rules us from within. The mechanism of projection and denial then becomes the mainstay of the mind to relieve itself of the pressure by putting the power of causation outside of itself. "You are the cause of my pain" is its mantra. We fabricate the image of an enemy where there is actually none. This is why victimhood can be so painful and so destructive at the same time. Victims are a danger to themselves and to others. They distort reality and see something which is not really there.
What we call "normal" is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection, and other forms of destructive actions on experience...It is radically estranged from the structure of being.
R.D. Laing
Projection makes perception. We look inside first, decide the kind of world we want to see and then project that world outside, making it the truth as we see it.
A Course in Miracles
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Expression
Expressing our negative emotions can be a temporary measure to release our pent-up emotions quickly but it is still destructive because the cause and energy behind the feeling have not yet been seen, uprooted, healed, and released. Venting, verbalizing, yelling into a pillow, exercising, and protesting are all forms of processing fear without actually getting to the root of the problem.
Many people believe that by expressing their feelings, they are free from them. This is not true experientially. Expressing your feelings tends to propagate and energize them even more. It also allows the remaining pressure to be suppressed. The fear is kept in place albeit pushed out of awareness.
Expressing our feelings minimizes fear without actually letting it go.
Expression however can be helpful in releasing enough pressure so that we can have the presence of mind to regulate our emotions and nervous system consciously. Repressed impulses can be neutralized, sublimated, socialized, and transmuted into constructive drives of love, work, and creativity.
Where suppression and repression are the cause of endless mental debates, the expression of fear has a detrimental effect on our relationships. When we dump our negative feelings on others, they experience it as an attack, and they in turn are forced to suppress, express, or escape the feelings. This becomes a never-ending cycle of attack, retaliate, defense, and attack.
The alternative to that is to take responsibility for our emotions and neutralize them together with their associated thought-forms. What remains after letting go of the interference are the positive feelings of peace, happiness, and joy.
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Escape
The survival mind is very skilled at denial, deflection, and denouncement. Those are the ways the ego-mind escapes when it feels threatened by its own feelings and programs. Escape also comes in the form of dimming down one's senses through substance and alcohol abuse. We do so when we don’t wish to face the pain of our own thoughts and feelings. We disown and disavow our feelings and reject parts of ourselves that already feel rejected and unworthy. In this way, the cycle of self-sabotage, mistrust, and addictions continue unabated as we grow endlessly dependent on things that we think can drown out the voice in our heads.
Escapism or avoidance of inner awareness is socially condoned and human beings have all been socialized to stay unconscious. Most people are terrified of facing themselves because they have already judged themselves to be inadequate and powerless and they will avoid at all costs to feel like that. They dread being alone and frantically pursue activities like texting, shopping, overeating, constant checking of email, pill-taking, and cocktail-partying, in order to distract themselves from exposing and letting go of the beliefs that would actually set them free.
Many of these mechanisms of escape are stressful and ineffective. Enormous amount of energy is invested to keep down the growing pressure of suppressed and repressed feelings. Avoidance halts spiritual growth, loss of interest in others, isolation, and results in physical illness, stunted emotionality, aging, and premature death. Depression ensues when we lose all hope. Grief occurs where there is regret about the past and fear is always about surviving an imagined future.
Desire, anger, and pride are higher vibrational states but they are equally motivated by the fear of not having. In these instances, selfishness and competition become the preoccupations of our minds which often leads to self-hatred, violence towards others, and other such destructive behaviors as acting out and pointing fingers.
So what is the value then of letting go?
When we drop all resistance to the energy behind the feeling and give ourselves permission to feel it fully, the net effect of that is decompression. The flood of accumulated pressure begins to decrease and our psychological, chemical, neurological hardware begins to feel lighter. Our skin color, breathing, blood pressure, intestinal function, and blood chemistry begin to improve. In the state of relaxation, peace, and freedom, all bodily functions move in the direction of normalcy and health.
When we release the interference, the result is an improvement in the overall sense of well being.
All feelings and emotions are energy in motion.
To know that our feelings are just a play of energy gives us the understanding that there is in truth, nothing to be afraid of. It is when we label it, judge it, moralize it, condemn it, and associate our own personal meaning and story to the feeling that we miscreate a fear of fear itself. It's not our life circumstances that we are frightened of. It is really our emotions and thoughts about it.
It's not the fact that I have no money in the bank that I am fearful. But that I am afraid of the feeling of being poor and that the feeling of incapability is true. In fear, we add to the feeling that I will be impoverished for the rest of my life and unable to do what it takes to take care of myself. Fear of fear itself propagates and energizes the feeling of helplessness and powerlessness. It actually stops me from taking the necessary action to become financially independent. This may include finding a job, pursuing my passion, and even monetizing my interests. We can only react from the data that we have collected but we can respond in a million different ways when we have mastery over our feelings. We step into courageousness, acceptance, and peace. The doors of opportunities open when we are ready and willing to release the feelings and view that "life sucks".
Can you handle a knot in your chest? Or a sensation of an energy stirring in your solar plexus without the mental narrative? By not resisting these sensations, we also let go of hundreds and thousands of thoughts, beliefs, and associated memories that prejudice the perception of our world and life experience as something that is problematic.
By gaining mastery, our fear of living dissipates. We embrace our uniqueness, have greater confidence, and are willing to take chances because we now know that we can handle any emotional consequence. This is freedom and not bondage. Fear breeds inaction, apathy, and self-attack. So by regulating and understanding our emotions in an intelligent and available way, life also opens up with new avenues of possibilities that were once avoided.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It is what creates life as we know it.
All emotions and thoughts are vibrations and they emit an energetic field that affects and determines the people who are in our lives. They affect our energy field, our worldview, our ability to communicate, heal and to be creative.
Muscle testing will show that those who vibrate at a higher frequency have more energy and have a healthier immune response. The opposite is also true. The lower frequencies of misery and fear create conflict and imbalance in our bodies and the perception of the world as an unfriendly place. A person with a lot of repressed grief and guilt will create sad, punishing situations in their life. The fearful man scans his environment compulsively for anything out of order and precipitates frightening experiences; the angry person constantly looks to pick a fight and tends to be surrounded by infuriating circumstances; and the prideful constantly defend themselves and are prone to insult.
Everything in the universe is a play of One Energy. The higher the vibration, the more power it has. Our individual energetic signatures color our perception and impact the kind of experiences we have and influence our destiny.
The mind has no dimension, or size or shape. It is not limited in space and transmits its state via vibrational energy over an unlimited distance. This means that we are always consuming each other’s vibrations and unwittingly affecting others by our emotional and mental state. This is how powerful we are.
The vibration of anger attracts anger. The frequency of love attracts harmony, inclusion, and beautiful relationships. Fear and victimhood go hand in hand. We do not attract what we want. We bring into our experience what we are through our mental and emotional states.
A person who has let go of their inner negativity finds himself surrounded by loving thoughts, loving events and loving people, and loving pets. The converse is also true. Those who carry the vibrations of apathy bring impoverished circumstances into their lives.
Knowing this will help us to make the conscious choice to let go of the energy of fear when it comes up. When we become conscious of the nature of our vibrational experience and the mechanics of how fear arises, we also start to disempower the hold that fear has in our lives. We discover we have always been free and that we always have the choice to choose between fear and love.
In this section, we will explore the technique of letting go is, what the surrendered state is and why it is a more conscious way of being than the survival state.
How to Let Go
Letting go arises out of the awareness that what one is holding on to no longer serves our well being. The moment we see no more value in pain and fear, healing is instant.
The technique of letting go involves first being aware that all feelings are juicier versions of our thoughts. Our beliefs and their corresponding feelings are actually learned programs that can be questioned, reversed, canceled, let go of, and revised.
When we allow our feelings to be exactly what they are, they naturally run their course without interference. Negative emotions have a half-life if we are not continually rehearsing them mentally or looking for reasons to sustain them. By staying with our feelings in this way, the energy behind the feeling is easily released together with hundreds of associated thought-forms and memories.
So many times, we suffer the feeling of fear itself because of our tendencies to dramatize, theorize, moralize, and condemn ourselves for the way we feel. We guilt ourselves for having these feelings and we unconsciously create an enemy out of the experience which only perpetuates the war with our feelings. This creates a wounded and divided personality that we mistakenly call ourselves.
What we resist, persists. What we judge, we sustain. The psychological defenses of resistance and judgment keep in place the very beliefs that we are not already free right here and right now. A feeling that is not fought or resisted dissolves as the charge behind it dissipates.
When letting go, ignore all thoughts. Bring your attention to the feeling itself and not the thoughts or story that you habitually telling yourself.
Become aware that all psychological drama is endless and self-reinforcing. Identification with thought only breeds more thought. Misidentification then becomes an endless circus of rationalizing and trying to explain the presence of a feeling. The truth behind all feelings is the accumulated pressure behind them that is forcing them up into the surface at the moment, much like the steam that is forced out of a kettle when the water reaches a boiling point. The thoughts or external events are merely excuses made up by the mind to place the cause of the feeling outside of itself. It thereby renders itself powerless to see clearly by projecting its power away from itself. A divided mind is an unhappy mind.
All negative feelings are driven by survival programs that the mind thinks are necessary to feel safe and to be in control. When we are attached to our limited and personal identities, we are also instructing the mind to protect them. The letting-go technique, therefore, undoes these programs and the ego progressively. We start to get an insight into the nature of our feelings and the motivations behind them.
The Surrendered State
The surrendered state is to have no attachment or aversion to anything. There is no strong emotion either way. “It’s ok if it happens and it’s ok if it doesn’t”. This is freedom. Our happiness is not contingent on reiterating our pleasures or escaping our pains. We are free from the desire to separate, divide and fragment our universe, and to make enemies where there are none. We start to find a deeper enjoyment in things because we see that we don’t need them for our happiness. We are neither broken by criticism nor inflated by praise. We become more and more spiritually independent and there is a dissolution of the need to depend on anything outside of ourselves. This is not isolation. Rather it is innate peace and joy that one experiences when the interference is gone.
Surrendered feelings can return and this is only because there is more to be surrendered. We have accumulated a huge reservoir of wounded feelings and stuffed them down all our lives. It takes a lot of energy to keep our feelings suppressed and that is why when we let go, we also feel lighter and happier.
To continuously release in this way is to liberate our minds consciously. When you start to see that all feelings and their corresponding thoughts are fleeting by nature, you also realize that you do not have to be spellbound by them. The real “you” is witnessing them. There is an alternative to being lost in thought and feeling. This is the power of awareness and the ability to pay close attention to the nature of feelings and thoughts.
The “you” that is observing and aware of what is happening never comes and goes. It is boundless. And as you begin to meditate on the changeless witness within, you also begin to identify with that level of consciousness and function at that level of freedom. You are no longer taking the bait. You are no longer the victim of your feelings and thoughts. You see that all survival programs were merely the accumulation of a limited identity called the ego. You start to have an insight that you are not your ego.
The results of letting go are immediate and its effects powerful and far-reaching. A peaceful mind creates health. A chaotic mind creates dis-ease.
When we learn to release continuously and persistently, that which used to bother us, no longer will. This change is often noticed by friends and family. You find yourself having more energy to do good and you are also more present with those around you. You start to awaken your natural desire to grow, evolve, and be curious. Your intuition, once covered by clouds of complex and twisted thinking, starts to awaken.
It is important to acknowledge these gains, and keep a chart of them, for the survival mind is apt to forget and crawl back into familiar walls of suppression and repression. Resistance to the technique itself comes in the form of “this is not working” or “it only works for others but not for me“.
It is therefore important to stay on task. Whenever you forget, ask yourself what is the purpose of letting go and remind yourself of the benefits when you have let go. In this way, you stay vigilant and continue to make huge strides towards liberating your mind.
Resistance is actually the fear of fear itself. This is a program that is deeply embedded into our consciousness through a millennium of programming. When we think we are separate egos, the mind will attempt to protect us by resisting anything that threatens our ego (our need to be right rather than happy). The mind cannot accept anything that is inconsistent with its programming. So to change and train our minds is to transform everything in our experience.
Resistance can also come in the form of cynicism. We become cynical about everything including the technique itself. Resistance is also expressed in the undisciplined mind's inability to sustain concentration for long periods of time. This results in escapism, acting out, dissatisfaction, and boredom.
The solution then is to release your feelings about the process of letting go. When we resist the resistance, it only energizes the cycle of self-defeat. In resistance, the mind is a victim of its own fantasies. In release, we allow the light in to dispel the darkness of misunderstanding.
All resistance stems from the belief in lack. "I lack control"; "I lack safety"; "I lack approval". No matter the form of the resistance, it is always rooted in a scarcity-survival mindset.
So the method and training is to keep letting go of every fear as it arises. Let the feelings come up and run their course without interference.
What we are letting go of are the accumulated programs that have enslaved us. These programs blind us to the fact that we are already free. The ego is a trickster and it has developed many tricks to keep you spinning in circles. One of the ego’s strategies is to keep you distracted so that you will go unconscious about releasing. A suggestion will come into your awareness and you may suddenly find yourself deciding that letting go doesn’t work. This is a sign that the method is actually working. When we start to release, we are in many ways stirring up a hornet's nest of difficult repressed emotions. We are starting to cut the cords to ego control and be free of the desire to separate, attack, and project.
Letting go is a natural ability. As kids, we can be angry one moment and in the next, happy and playing with our friends again. Letting go is not based on some theory, intellectual feat or esoteric philosophy. Letting go is not a belief system and is not based on sectarian beliefs. It is the opposite of that. It is to release the mentalization and the limiting beliefs that we have enthroned unconsciously.
I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven
Bible
Until our minds becomes like a child and free of all limitations, we will never truly and experientially taste the innocence, value, perfection, and the wholeness which we already are. To liberate our minds is a monumental task that is worthy of our sacred attention and striving. Our happiness depends on it.
Conclusion
The letting-go method works if employed. Why?
Because it puts you in the driver's seat, and responsible for your feelings, thoughts and experiences without projecting the cause of the fear outside of yourself. It places the axis of power squarely in your hands to choose between fear and love. Feelings and thoughts are programs and as such, they can be looked at, changed, revised, and gotten rid of. Being aware of the nature of our thoughts and feelings as temporary fixtures in our experience helps us to let go of what is already their fleeting impermanent presence. This facilitates the present memory of who you are as the changeless and boundless witness of your experience.
On a practical level, letting go can be part of your repertoire to problem solve.
Our minds seek relief from all pain and suffering. Let's liberate it.
There is definately a lot to find out about this subject. I like all the points you have made. Emmi Shem Serafine