PATHWAY TO JOY AND HEALING

The biggest impediment to our contentment is fear.  Fear prevents us from living fully.  Awareness of this fear is crucial in living a secure, peaceful and joyful life.  When others trigger fear within us, it is important to realize our reactions are a response to this fear.  We experience a rise in adrenaline causing our body to initiate the fight-or-flight response that is critical to any animal’s survival.

Fear is a chain reaction in the brain that starts with a stressful stimulus and ends with the release of chemicals that cause a racing heart, fast breathing and energized muscles, among other things, also known as the fight-or-flight response. The stimulus could be a spider, a knife at your throat, an auditorium full of people waiting for you to speak or a perceived fear.

The brain is a profoundly complex organ. More than 100 billion nerve cells comprise an intricate network of communications that is the starting point of everything we sense, think and do. Some of these communications lead to conscious thought and action, while others produce autonomic responses. The fear response is almost entirely autonomic: We don’t consciously trigger it or even know what’s going on until it has run its course.

However, when fear response is triggered even if perceived, it causes us to react by running away, getting upset, or behaving impulsively without our control. This can be a constant state of existence for those who have been traumatized or abused.  When living consciously, we can be aware of our responses to fear by observing this fear within us. We observe this fear as it rises, sit with this feeling without judging it, and allow it to pass. The use of meditation techniques also can help with fear responses, as well as nostril breathing and belly breathing techniques.