How to find the fear?

[Eva]

Thank you all for everything you write about fear on the forum. Special thanks to Max and Pierre for your discussion about fear and terror.
I wanted to write about my issues with fear. In the family where I grew up, fear was banned. You didn't feel fear at all, at any cost. Nobody did, my mom and dad didn't, my sister and brother didn't - as far as I remember. Happy and smiling was ok, anger was also somewhat ok, although not when directed towards the parents.
There was (and still is) a lot of fear under the surface in the family. As I have already mentioned elsewhere in the forum, there was quite a lot of beating and rage going on, weekly and for several years. This must have created huge amounts of fear within me that I yet haven't felt. We were also a sailing family, and my dad loved to experience critical situations when we were at sea, but never showed any fearful emotions about it. Neither did mom.
There is much more to say about this, but the sum total is that I have a lot of fear and terror within me that I have a really difficult time to feel.
So I was thinking about my false beliefs about emotionally experiencing fear.
The first false belief is: if I feel my fear someting horrible will happen. This is not at all true, it's quite the opposite that is true, according to Jesus and Mary and Divine Truth!
My second belief (which probably is false, but it doesn't feel that false to me) is: Something horrible must happen to me for me to be able to feel my fear and terror. And I definitely don't want something horrible to happen. So I keep shutting myself off from fear, which actually may lead to something horrble happening according to the truth about my first belief.
The most fearful activity I could engage in is taking a walk alone in the huge forest that surround my house. I am afraid of being attacked by a bear to make it simple. I do take these walks now and then, although it's a long time ago now. There are in fact bears in the forest, and people come across them now and then. But when I walk into the forest I get so afraid that I just shut it all off, and at times feel only happy and peaceful about it. It is not true happiness and peace though, I can feel that there is a tension in it.
This is has become a difficult area for me, and I think that my stagnation in my progression towards God largely depends on it.
I would be grateful if anyone of you who reads this could shed some light upon this issue!
With love
Eva

[Anita]

Hi Eva, I hade Jesus telling me 3,5 years ago that I needed to feel my fear and terror and I'm still not there yet.

But I have come a bit closer, but only a very small bit. I have been increasing my desire fo feel my fear. And like you I have these beliefs:

The first false belief is: if I feel my fear someting horrible will happen. This is not at all true, it's quite the opposite that is true, according to Jesus and Mary and Divine Truth!
My second belief (which probably is false, but it doesn't feel that false to me) is: Something horrible must happen to me for me to be able to feel my fear and terror. And I definitely don't want something horrible to happen. So I keep shutting myself off from fear, which actually may lead to something horrble happening according to the truth about my first belief.

I can suggest to pray for having more desire to experience your fear. I use to pray to God and to ask my Guide to scare me during the night. To put me in situations where I will be scared. I don't know if my Guide is doing this, but I feel a bit closer to my fears.

A while back I took on a job for a friend, to paint her barn. It included standing high up on a ladder, I thought well, I can do that. Big hmmmm, I tried to worm and sneak my way out of standing on the very top of the ladder and paint the top of the barn. I felt it was unloving and my friend did not get me to have my way, for which I'm grateful. I stood on the very top and felt my fear and cried and prayed to God. At one point I went away behind the barn and cried and had a bit of shake. All sorts of emotions came up because I did this due to lack of money, I'd never do it otherwise. This experience made me feel that it is not so insurmountable to feel fear.

Why I feel that I'm a bit closer to my fear is that I don't get annoyed with my son anymore when he wants to do his various types of “bro-fists” with me. I feel it like a demand coming from him when I refuse, and I'm scared to refuse and sometimes I start crying. That is an improvement compared to when I used to get annoyed with him.

[Elvira]

Hi Eva,

I am also a very fearful person it has/is controlled my whole life. I don’t have answers for you because while I feel I have processed some fear, each time I do I realize how fearful I really am and I often get very resistive in that place. I could relate though to some of things you said and I thought I might share one of my experiences, which might help.

I feel like you are trying to push through the blocks to feeling your fear (your false beliefs about feeling your fear), which are also fear based; from my own experience this never works. One example from my own life is when I watched the movie ‘The Stoning of Soraya M’, which was a few years ago now. This movie terrified me on many levels right from the beginning, but I hardened myself to ‘feel my fear’. I hardly breathed watching the movie and at the end I started to scream and wail, which is something that I just would not normally do in my living room with other people home. It was such uncharacteristic behavior, I asked God, this doesn’t feel like me, what is going on? The emotion turned off like a tap. I had been so terrified I went right out of body and was completely disconnected from myself because I did not want to feel my fear. I was pushing myself to feel it without feeling the blocks to why I did not want to feel it. For me it is a long list, I don’t feel like God will protect me in that place, I may never be able to come out of it or I won’t be able to continue to function in my life if I fully feel how afraid I am. Disconnecting from myself also allowed spirits to take over. I watched the film a second time thinking I had learned the lesson from the first time, ‘all I had to do is stay connected with my body, make sure I’m breathing.’ That time I stomped around angry, kept taking breaks, distracted myself…. all the usual addictions. Again I hadn’t tackled the blocks (another being my addiction to being hard on myself and pushing myself because I wasn’t progressing well enough).

I suggest that it might be useful for you to stay at the edge of the forest and tell God that you are really scared and don’t want to feel the fear. In the letter on Mary’s blog ‘Responding to Spirit Attack” Mary gave this very good advice

‘No fear is just general. For example the feeling is not just “I am really afraid of spirits” or “I am really afraid of the dark”

Our fears are specific and individual to us. While we might have many fears of many different things, each one is definite and often intricate in detail.’

You might need to allow yourself to really feel and discover exactly why you do not want to feel your fear. Of course all our addictions (and in my case anger) help us to cover over the fear so that is always a good place to go back to, looking at those things.

All my best
Elvira

[Max]

Hi Eva

I thought I might add something that you may find helpful. One of the great things about this forum is that even if what I say is totally wrong, someone will correct me and set us both straight. So that's one of my fears alleviated right there.

As Elvira said above its good to be specific with your blocks and fears. So with your fist block, what horrible thing exactly do you fear will happen if you feel your fear. If it's that the actual fear will come true, that is by fully experiencing your fear you will make it real, then you would address that specific fear. If you feared that you would not survive the experience, that is you would die, then you would need to address that specific fear, etc.

I see your two blocks as two sides of the same fear. In the first you fear that something horrible will happen if you feel it, so you don't want to feel it. Then by not wanting to feel it you are fearful that something horrible will happen to make you feel it. This is like a catch 22 where you are damned if you do and damned if you don't. There is no escape!

The first false belief is: if I feel my fear someting horrible will happen. This is not at all true, it's quite the opposite that is true, according to Jesus and Mary and Divine Truth!

I feel this comment shows that although you understand the truth that feeling your emotion will make it less likely that something horrible will happen to you, it's still an intellectual understanding at this stage and you're taking Jesus and Mary's word for it. It's not yet written in your heart. This may be a large factor in why you're finding it so hard to feel your fear because you don't quite know if the truth that you understand intellectually, is real yet. Gods designed us so that the only way we can know that a truth is real is by personally experiencing it and thereby writing it in our heart. There are no shortcuts and we can't take any other persons word for it, not even if it is Jesus and Mary. You have to engage in every step of this experiment yourself if you want to walk The Way to God. I thinks that's the coolest design ever, it couldn't be any other way really, not without compromising personal responsibility.

But don't be discouraged because there is something that I believe can help make processing the blocks to feeling your fear easier and it's called faith. Now I've never really understood faith, I've got most other things, but faith was always something I didn't really get. I understood intellectually what it was but I never understood it in my heart, I couldn't see any value in it. I understood the importance of love, truth and humility but what role did faith have in all this? Well I have recently started to understand what faith is and how valuable it is in this process and I have read in your intro Eva that you also understand faith and see its value. By growing in your faith in God you grow in your trust in God and all Gods laws because you understand that God loves you and wants you to grow closer to Her in love and has designed everything in this universe to aid you in that growth. It's all designed to help you walk this straight and narrow way. So as this faith in God grows it becomes easier to place your trust in God that if you follow this path that she has designed for you, that you will be alright. That trusting the fear in you is the unreal and that trusting in God is the real. And each time you act in your faith, where you haven't experienced something but because you know that God loves you and wants you to grow towards Her and that this action is in harmony with truth and love, that when you do take this step you will be ok. You will be one step closer to God and your faith will have grown as well. Your conviction in the goodness of God will be greater with each step in faith you take. I'm very excited about faith at the moment.

I just wanted to say that if you keep taking steps in growing your faith, there will come a time when your faith will be strong enough to give you the strength and courage to feel your blocks and your fear.

I hope that was helpful in some way

With love

Max

[Eva]

Thank you Anita, Elvira and Max for your kindness and engagement in my issue of fear!

Anita and Elvira, you both talk about pushing oneself, and that it is actually not loving to push oneself. As it isn't loving to push anyone else either. I certainly do push myself a lot, and I am often impatient with myself and with others - just as I was brought up in a family with a lot of impatience going on. One part of my fear must be about this, - what would happen to me if I am not good enough, not fast enough?
I have found quite recently, that when I wish to feel my fear this opens me up for my memories and they carry fear with them. So there won't be any need for anyone to scare me. My openness to my memories will be enough as long as I can be emotionally connected. So there is no need for pushing or scaring, just a soft and sweet longing for being myself, feeling myself and beginning to remember.

Elvira - it is a good idea to walk to the edge of the forest and pray to God about my fear right there. I can feel some fear rising when writing this, so thank you for your thoughts! And the quote from Mary is also spot on. I have found that when I experience loneliness - it is not only about "loneliness" as such, but much more specific and that the emptiness has a different flavour to it. The loneliness in itself seems to be an addictive feeling, an emotion of self deception, somewhere I go to be able to blame outwardly instead of going deeper and taking responsibility of my emotional layers.

Max - thank you for writing about faith and about God. And thanks for mentioning the forum and the feedback we get here which scares me a lot, so there is already some fear going on.

Gods designed us so that the only way we can know that a truth is real is by personally experiencing it and thereby writing it in our heart.

A reminder to not live in the fear, but feel the fear and do whatever we desire anyway - this will add to our experience, the experience whether something is the truth or not.

Thanks again guys, - I'm sorry it took me such a long time to read and answer your comments, but I have been away for a while and therefore not been active on the forum.

With love
Eva