Build Courage To Face the Enemies Within

Facing the Enemies Within

We are not born with courage, but neither are we born with fear. Maybe some of your fears are brought on by your own experiences, by what someone has told you, by what you've read in the papers.

Some fears are valid, like walking alone in a bad part of town at two o'clock in the morning. But once you learn to avoid that situation, you won't need to live in fear of it. Fears, even the most basic ones, can totally destroy our ambitions. Fear can destroy fortunes. Fear can destroy relationships. Fear, if left unchecked, can destroy our lives. Fear is one of the many enemies lurking inside us. Let me tell you about five of the other enemies we face from within.

FIRST ENEMY - Indifference

The first enemy that you've got to destroy before it destroys you is indifference. What a tragic disease this is. "Ho-hum, let it slide. I'll just drift along." Here's one problem with drifting: you can't drift your way to the top of the mountain.

SECOND ENEMY - Indecision

The second enemy we face is indecision. Indecision is the thief of opportunity and enterprise. It will steal your chances for a better future. Take a sword to this enemy.

THIRD ENEMY - Doubt

The third enemy inside is doubt. Sure, there's room for healthy skepticism. You can't believe everything. But you also can't let doubt take over. Many people doubt the past, doubt the future, doubt each other, doubt the government, doubt the possibilities and doubt the opportunities. Worst of all, they doubt themselves. I'm telling you, doubt will destroy your life and your chances of success. It will empty both your bank account and your heart. Doubt is an enemy. Go after it. Get rid of it.

FOURTH ENEMY - Worry

The fourth enemy within is worry. We've all got to worry some. Just don't let it conquer you. Instead, let it alarm you. Worry can be useful. If you step off the curb in New York City and a taxi is coming, you've got to worry. But you can't let worry loose like a mad dog that drives you into a small corner. Here's what you've got to do with your worries: drive them into a small corner. Whatever is out to get you, you've got to get it. Whatever is pushing on you, you've got to push back.

FIFTH ENEMY - Timidness

The fifth interior enemy is over-caution. It is the timid approach to life. Timidness is not a virtue (unlike humility--they are different); in fact, it can be an illness. If you let it go, it'll conquer you. Timid people don't get promoted. They don't advance and grow and become powerful in the marketplace. You've got to avoid over-caution.

Do battle with the enemy. Do battle with your fears. Build your courage to fight what's holding you back, what's keeping you from your goals and dreams. Be courageous in your life and in your pursuit of the things you want and the person you want to become.

Fear of Heights

Fear of heights seems to have a simple physiological explanation, and there is a solution to it: Learn to rely more on your ears for balancing.

In this article I try to analyze my fear of height through self-inspection and document my experiments in trying to overcome this irrational feeling also known as acrophobia.

First of all, make sure to take this text for what it is, namely the naive, non-expert, non-scientific ramblings of someone with no medical training whatsoever, so please don't hold me responsible if you get some false or harmful information here. You might or might not have a similar condition like me, I have no idea, and even if I had, I wouldn't be qualified to give any advice.

So what is acrophobia? It's one of those things like orgasm or autostereograms where if you are wondering if you experience it or not, then it's almost certain you don't. I'm pretty sure I have at least a mild form of it as I am afraid when I look down from heights, but it's not so serious that I couldn't look out from my window. I have climbed some decent mountains and my feelings have ranged from general discomfort to complete panic. The alarming thing was to discover that it's been getting worse recently and I have real difficulty climbing to places where I had no trouble years ago, so I decided I had to do something about it. Just to make sure, acrophobia is when you look out from the balcony on the second floor and feel safer to stay close to the wall or hold on maniacally to anything secure or when you feel dizzy on a mountain trail and you have to crawl on all fours, grabbing every blade of grass for the illusion of safety but you are pretty sure you could fall any moment. If you look down, the world seems to spin and sway, your stomach contracts, you forget to breathe regularly, mouth dries out, you start sweating like a pig and generally panic in every possible way and swear that if you ever get down alive, you'll never set foot on a hill again. Meanwhile your friends are carelessly passing by, jumping from one rock to the other, wondering what the hell is happening to you...

Fear of heights is a misnomer. It is not height per se that I am afraid of. I have no trouble flying in airplanes, I have flown glider planes, I think I could manage parachutes, paragliders or even space flight without acrophobia kicking in. It's not being on high altitudes that I find scary but being in places where I feel I can fall on sharp rocks or buildings and places where I can't easily tell which is the horizontal direction, where I am already not sure if I am standing straight or I am tilting. I'm talking about mountaintops, towers, bridges, balconies. At first I thought that I feel safe in airplanes because my mind tells me there is no way I could fall out, as it is well sealed. On a cliff, if I really wanted to, I could jump voluntarily if I went crazy for a second. This explanation occurs in a bizarre short story of Edgar Allen Poe where he argues that fear of height is really fear of oneself, our "dark side" that would urge us to jump and commit suicide. This "pull of the deep" explanation or the notion of a "latent death wish" seems like a fascinatingly romantic idea to a teenager, but lately I started to become suspicious. Why would I have this sort of split personality or psychological issue that none of my friends seem to suffer from. Surely there must be some more down-to-earth explanation...

The kind of "solutions" people generally suggest are usually of the typical new-age self-help type: healing by exposure, go to the mountains, "believe in yourself", "tell yourself there's nothing to be afraid of", "positive thinking", etc. Those kind of treatments that are supposed to work for everything from insomnia to arachnophobia and shyness to talk to girls. I was pretty skeptical. The more I went to the mountains the less confident and more acrophobic I became. Other popular treatments suggested on the internet include group therapy, meditation, aromatherapy, drugs, anxiety relief. Well, not my kind of stuff. Besides, I might have other phobias in mild forms, but I felt pretty strongly that this is different and a cure-it-all solution won't work.

In a way, fear of heights may seem natural. It is supposed to protect one from falling, by forcing them to avoid dangerous situations altogether. In this way it can even be seen as a healthy dose of caution or survival instinct. For me fear of height is not avoiding any danger, it is the cause of the danger, by not allowing me to stay cool and rational and continue walking on a perfectly safe, not-too-steep hiking trail. What's going on here? Others have said that acrophobia is a conditioned fear, where some past negative experience triggers the panic attack. It is often considered some protective action of the unconscious mind. Even though I've heard of people who have died in climbing accidents, I know this is not the explanation for me. Whenever I felt fear of heights, later it seemed ridiculous, thinking rationally I was certain it was totally unfounded, and I often felt like going back to prove there was nothing to be afraid of, except when I went back acrophobia appeared again. In this sense I don't think it is even correct to classify fear of heights as a phobia. It seems irrational for sure, but it's not the kind of thing that gives you nightmares. I'm not afraid at all of imagining climbing rocks, or looking at pictures or videos taken from high altitudes. So at this point I became pretty certain that if there is an explanation, it has to be some low-level physiological response, related to vision, balance or the motoric system, not a psychological one.

It's time that I tell about another peculiar trait I have, which is not a phobia but something rather pleasant. I never feel sick in a moving vehicle. Not in cars, not on a plane, not on a ship, not in a boat. It can shake and rock and roll and spin as much as it wants, it can be the worst driver and the curviest roads, even if I'm sitting opposite driving direction, I never feel dizzy, never have to vomit. This was something I noticed since my childhood, when I was on a sea cruise and the ship got into a rather serious storm, and I found myself to be one of a few people out of hundreds who didn't feel physically ill even the slightest. Why do I tell all this? Because my hypothesis is that this is pretty intimately related to fear of heights.
The clues came from researching computer vision and reading popular science books about how the brain works. An autonomous agent, be it a robot or a human, has to have some estimate of its own position and orientation in the world as well as its movement and acceleration relative to other objects. Both robots and humans can get this information through several channels. The highest bandwidth channel is of course vision. If I see that everything I know to be horizontal appears to be tilted by ten degrees, I'm quite sure it is me tilting and I quickly balance myself. Of course this is done unconsciously. The vestibular system in the inner ear has sensitive accelerometers that tell my brain when I'm moving and also tell about my orientation relative to the vertical direction. The muscles of the legs also send back messages about various tensions and the direction of gravity. Similarly, robots have accelerometers, GPS's, compasses, etc.

When in a moving car or ship, people feel dizzy because the different sensors send contradictory messages. The inner ear says: we're moving up-and-down. The normal action of the brain in such situations, for example when you jump up-and-down in the room, is to stabilize vision like a good steadycam system, by commanding an opposite movement of the eye: this is the vestibulo-ocular reflex. However when I'm in a car, looking at things inside the car, my eyes say that there is nothing to stabilize. Things inside the car seem perfectly still, as they are moving together with me. Some suggest the brain goes even further and says that the only plausible explanation for this mismatch between what different sensors say is poisoning. Thus the reaction of the body is the one that makes most sense: throw up the poison! That's why it helps to look out of the car, that's why it makes things worse if you read a book in a moving car and that's why you become dizzy if you close your eyes while spinning around.

Long story short, I think the reason why I have acrophobia and why I never feel sick in moving vehicles is the same: I'm relying too much on visuals for balancing, and I don't use the other sensors as much as I should. In an unusual environment, such as when climbing a rock, the visual cues are scarce or misleading. I can't find anything that I know for certain to be horizontal, I don't know for sure what is the vertical direction, there are a lot of rocks of strange shapes around me (not the objects I'm used to seeing), etc. So visual cues are next to useless, but I fail to use my inner ear and various muscles for balancing. If I closed my eyes, I'm quite sure I would fall. The fear of heights is just the rational message the brain sends that it is really confused and possibly unable to properly balance the body.

It could be that my other balancing mechanisms are deficient so they don't transmit enough data, but I find it more likely to be a learned (unlearned) behavior. Balancing on one leg I find very easy to do, but if I close my eyes, I tip over immediately. With 5-10 minutes of practice however I can do just as well with eyes closed. I can almost feel that I am using my inner ears and that I start paying attention to the small variations of tension in the leg muscles. The thing to do in the mountains is probably not to pay attention to the visual cues that much. That doesn't mean to close the eyes, just learn to take the vision as a nice panorama to watch, but not something that guides balancing. Watch your step of course, but learn to pay more attention to your ears and legs for balancing. I can't wait to go out and practice.

I'm pretty confident that training in this manner can help overcome fear of heights. Of course, fear of danger has many components and I don't mean to do reckless things or trails that are technically or physically too difficult for me. It is only the irrational part of the fear that I am targeting with this method. I would appreciate comments both from people who have fear of height and from experts in the matter.

Overcome Phobia

Phobia-what is it?

The literal interpretation of the word phobia, a Greek word, is feeling nervous and fearful. Using the medical jargon, phobia could be defined as a persistent, irrational, and abnormal aversion or fear of certain situations, objects, events, people and so on. There exist different levels of phobia, which almost every human being might have encountered at some point of his/her lifetime. However, when the intensity of phobia increases so as to interfere in the daily routines of a person, it alleviates into an anxiety disorder. There are umpteen possible reasons for a person to be inclined to phobias; however few general causes can be-

1. The person is traumatized by a certain event in his/her life.

2. Externalization of repressed feelings.

Overcoming Phobia

A phobia that causes irregularities to the health of a person or affects the behavioral patterns of a person need to be addressed by a qualified psychologist, however, for the other mild ones, a self-conscious and confident effort to get rid of the phobia, can cure it gradually. Few steps in that direction, are listed below-

Being positive and being optimistic is one of the driving factors in any change. So, be positive in your outlook. Be optimistic. Have a goal, a vision, visualize the change you desire.

Identify the phobia, the cause that invokes the phobia and if possible the reason that triggered the phobia (yes, phobias are irrational and usually has no reasoning behind it, but the presence of a reason for that irrationality to be developed in self, can be figured out through self-analysis).

List the causes that invoke phobia from the weakest to the strongest.

Learn few relaxing and self-control techniques. Develop a self-control mechanism, through exercise or meditation (that implies increasing your concentration power and self-awareness, not closing your eyes to go for a deep sleep!). Identify and understand the changes that occur in your mind and body when the object or person or situation leading to the phobia is encountered by you.

In a relaxed state of mind, visualize the weakest link from the list done earlier and try to face it without fear. Repeat it over and again, until subconsciously you can master it. Jump on to the higher links. Celebrate your riddance of fears and appreciate your improvement.

There are several other treatments to overcome phobias. Hypnotherapy, psychiatric techniques, psychological treatments are very helpful and perhaps the presence of a motivator in the form of a doctor can increase the effectiveness of the same techniques as that of self-treatment, by leaps and bounds. A supporting friend or a family member can prove to be a boon in such cases in order to help you in overcoming phobias. At the end of the day, it’s up to you, your mind to master your fear. Henry Ford’s words (although said in a different context) can be recalled here “if you think you can, you’re right! And if you think you can’t, you’re still right!

Universal Energy For a Successful Life

We all are filled with universal energy. This energy is the essence of our existence, our consciousness, our soul. The universal energy moves through the physical, emotional, and spiritual bodies and sometimes with the flow of life it can become imbalanced, stagnant, or blocked. We experience it many times and it is called "disease", disease which is lack of ease. It is the inability of one's universal energy to flow freely.

Scientific research has proved beyond doubt that huge amounts of energy exist at different levels. Even a piece of rock contains energy within it. Ancient scholars were keen observers of nature. They keenly observed the mysteries of human body and developed holistic forms of complete health maintenance system. By disconnecting us from the latest technical marvels gives us the opportunity to get back to nature and realize the existence of Universal Energy. The ancient and modern sages agree that Universal Energy exists in abundance in open spaces. We can feel it at the mountains, lakes, beach, fields, forests, and in the desert.

One has to be in harmony with the nature for cultivating Universal Energy. By coming out in the open, taking a walk and being mindful of nature, will make you feel at ease with yourself. Life energy technique has provided help to people around the world to live happier and healthier lives. This technique was used for providing them with a unique and effective tool that has empowered people to take excellent care of their own health.

This method gives us a sense of peace, inner strength, while the practical application of the principles that we learn helps us to cope with our daily life, improving and restoring our health, developing our inherent self-healing power and learning how to bring more harmony and balance to both body and mind.

Reiki is loaded with universal life energy. This 2,500-year old practice is the art and science of being able to channel this universal life force energy to promote mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Reiki is the provider of holistic medicine, possessing considerable healing power. It is a technique for complete healing, stress reduction and relaxation. By using Reiki it is possible to have access to the unlimited supply of universal life force energy for improving health and enhancing the quality of life.

Many people, who work mainly in the outdoors, have an attunement to nature. Nature is generously endowed with its own form of energy, and each life form within nature has its own energy. It is important to understand that the power of the mind can change a lot of things in our prime material plane. We all have a stockpile of thoughts that are stored in our memory. These can be either negative or positive at certain moments. Having negative thoughts and always being negative will only produce an accumulation of negative energies that will not only bring you bad luck but will also feed the negative energies. Abandon all your negative thinking. Think positive.

The Power and Energy of Meditation

We often hear people propagating the benefits of meditation. People are enriching their lives with meditation, healing with meditation, reducing stress with meditation, and literally transforming their lives in numerous ways with it. Meditation has the tremendous power to affect our lives.

Meditation affects different areas of our lives because it involves interaction with a Universal power or energy that transcends everything. This energy strengthens our mind. It is inseparable from us and we are surrounded by this energy. We always have the privilege to extract positive higher energy for experiencing a positive change in our life.

We all have the power for improving our life. Anyone can tap into this abundant source and when that job is accomplished; our fear for the uncertainties of the future disappears and develops a positive attitude.

Meditation provides guidance to the mind to move into a fresh direction. It often involves thinking about something contemplatively and preparing a plan for achieving our objectives.

Meditation works because through meditation we are able to put our thinking minds temporarily on hold and access into something that is powerful and infinite. By suspending our thinking and rational minds, we can slip into a state of higher consciousness. We are then able to free ourselves from our stress, receive spiritual guidance, and experience the supreme bliss that comes from the feeling being connected with all things.

Meditation is not an easy task to perform properly. Many people cannot stop their mind from thinking about mundane things. Yet, they get inspired to practice it regularly. There are ways for making meditation easier. We shall have to find out first what form of meditation appeals to us. There are different types of meditation and not all forms will work for everyone. Some are more difficult to practice. Others are more accessible and do not require a lot of study. One can enjoy different types of meditation and, depending on the time frame and mood one is in, a selection can be made for a suitable form of meditation. People are not energetically the same everyday. If you are finding it difficult to find time to meditate, mix it up a little.

Meditation helps you to raise your consciousness to higher levels. That enables you to make optimum use of your personal resources, allowing you access to cosmic consciousness. Your negative energy finds an escape route through meditation and replenishes it with new vibrant positive energy and thought patterns. It then provides more clarity and direction, leaving you more vibrant, more energetic and more innovative. You get inspired to improve relationships, satisfaction of completing tasks, self-motivation, self-esteem and self-confidence.

The power and energy of meditation releases repressed emotional issues, clears stress, anxiety, fear, hatred, and blocked energies. This unique and very powerful process connects your breath flow to the universal source of energy, which provides the new vibrant flow of energy into your system. When the flow of energy increases it opens up the feeling of compassion. We are then able to experience a deeper level of love.

Overcoming Your Fear

Fear is a manifestation of our personal unconscious. It arises from our conception and through our socialization. Fear is a state of mind that threatens us constantly with uncertain anxieties and reminds us about who we are and what we require, and then, to overcome fear, sends a signal from the body to the mind. This is an action, a communication between the body and mind that things are about to happen. Fear warns us about any looming danger and gives us an opportunity to prepare us for overcoming it by taking necessary action.

There are several steps for overcoming fear. Let us first identify the first step. Fear of the unknown haunts most of us. We do not know what would happen next. Everybody has to go through various vicissitudes in life. Pessimistic thoughts and the fear of failure cause tremendous turmoil. There is absolutely no reason to anticipate problems all the time. Good things also happen in life. Critically analyze the cause of your fear and prepare yourself to combat it. Banish negative thinking.

We should be able to combat fear successfully by planning our future pragmatically. The next step for overcoming fear is to train us to develop a positive attitude. If the cause of our fear was the uncertainty of securing a good job, we should prepare us to improve the quality of our professional abilities and explore possibilities for better career opportunities. Motivation is necessary for achieving success. We should think positively about the way our life would improve when we get a better job.

Success is always surrounded by uncertainties. The third step is the preparation for encountering failures and rejections. The world would not collapse if that happens. We should critically analyze the causes of failures and make better efforts for improving our performance next time. We shall have to endure a few failures until we succeed. The story of Robert Bruce of Scotland should inspire us.

We often tend to exaggerate the causes of past failures because of our entrapment with previous experience of failure to achieve. What is needed at this fourth step for overcoming fear is to take the past failures as good learning points and focus only on the present. It would enhance the chances of our succeeding because it would enable us to concentrate all our energies for achieving our objective on this occasion and not letting our energies and thoughts being wasted by worrying about past failures and future uncertainties.

Finally, we shall have to prepare us for sustaining our winning streak of overcoming fear. It is useful to create a support system comprised of like-minded people for constructive interaction, exchange of ideas and benefit from each other's experience. We should be able to motivate us to achieve more and fulfill our objectives. Our success depends on our ability to remove all hurdles before they confront us. Our confidence in our ability to persuade people to achieve professional success, personal contentment, maintaining a positive attitude would help us all to overcome our fears. It is easier sometimes to work with someone else like a trusted friend or a professional and ask for help when needed.

Procrastination and Fear

Today, as per the psychology, around 20% of people consider themselves chronic procrastinators. There are many books, articles and programs available to help you to overcome procrastination and fear but as all of us know daily planners and to-do lists do not work out. A better way has to be there to end the procrastination habit. Experts say that the main cause of procrastination is "FEAR", fear of incapability, fear of failing, fear of success, fear of disappointment, fear of critics and many more.

The important step to end procrastination starts with ending negative thought pattern and creating fresh new thought patterns. This means you need to silent the voices inside you head that make you feel stressful and depressed. You need to recognize fear inside you and need to transform that fear into motivational energy. Just give yourself chance to make mistakes, it doesn't matter. Learn to clear your mind, achieve concentration and focus as much as you can. Try to view your task as small manageable parts rather than one large and impossible task. The negative thought patterns are deeply ingrained into most of the people and procrastination is a deep-seated habit.

These days, Hypnosis has become a proven and widely recognized method which is helpful in changing habits and ending procrastination. It helps people in changing their behavior and thought pattern. One of the famous articles "Psychology Today" stated that procrastinators learn to change their behavior with the help of highly structured cognitive behavioral therapy. During this process, you enter a highly relaxed and focused stage. During this stage, your conscious and subconscious mind is able to communicate in an effective way. With the help of a psychologist, you can control the way you want to respond to your surroundings to some extent.

Other than Hypnosis, there are several ways which can help you to reduce procrastination to a great extent and I have explained them as follows:

First of all, when are going through procrastination, the major cause for this is Self-Downing. This happens due to minimizing your own skills and abilities to succeed. You start disbelieving yourself, even when you are successful. To overcome this you need to practice accepting compliments about your work performance by saying 'Thanks You'. Always remember to praise yourself for the work completed.

Secondly, you can link tasks you don't like to your goals. It helps to mentally tie these tasks to one of your main goals. For example, keeping a tidy and clean home allows you to have clarity of mind and thoughts which is something you highly value. By having clarity of mind you will be able to work on your goals and you will have less anxiety.

Thirdly, when you think of a task as a burden that you have to finish will automatically ensure that you put it off. If you are not able to think of steps to complete a task, you create a feeling of overwhelm. So, just replace "How will I finish this work?" with "What steps can I take to complete my work?" Instead of finishing everything completely, you should focus on what you can do right now.

Another kind of thinking that leads to procrastination is perfection. Once you make this thinking that you have to do the work perfectly, the first step will likely to prevent you from ever starting the work and it further leads to stress. To overcome this situation, all you need to do is realize that an imperfect task completed today is better than the perfect task delayed forever.

Now that you understand how procrastination works, and how you can greatly reduce its influence in your life, you'll experience more freedom and greater personal self-satisfaction. All of us have the potential to improve the quality of our life and overcome procrastination. Just remember few things which I discussed in this article, I am sure that it will help you in many ways.