Snow Melt

Facing my Fears – Grounded and Ungrounded

Istijlál (Majesty), 16 Sharaf (Honor), 165 BE – Thursday, January 15, 2009 about 8:02 AM Pacific Time

Again this month the spiritual newsletter covered an issue I am dealing with in my own life. This weeks edition concerned Facing Your Fears. This past week and probably the entire month of January, I have realized that my life for the past year or so (perhaps more) has been governed by fear.

Most of those fears are ungrounded, like black balloon floating in the air, but others are connected to the ground by strings, like those of a kite. All of these fears are holding me back and have dominated my life for the past couple of years, at least. I have began facing these fears and some of them seem silly and completely illogical, these are the ungrounded fears. Things I am afraid of which never occur. Others fears are grounded in reality but become larger when I focus on them; sort of like a balloon that you are putting air into. When an event occurs that is based on a grounded fear, it is never a bad or as big as I thought it was going to be.

The questions asked at the end of this weeks newsletter are: What fears bother you the most? What spiritual resources have you found to be most helpful when you are overcome by this emotion? What have you done to successfully overcome those fears and move out of their shadow?

The spiritual resources I use are prayer, which helps me overcome the fear and carries me forward. Another thing I have recently found is just to start writing. Writing allows me to "write through the fear" and focus on a solution to the problem confronting me.

I think I will take each one of those questions and deal with them separately.