By Daniel J. Benor, MD

Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then, for the second time in the history of the world man will have discovered fire.
                    – Teilhard de Chardin

The opposite of fear is unconditional acceptance and love. This is very difficult to perceive, much less to accept, and much more difficult yet to adopt as a guiding principle by which to live. Yet releasing fears is not only possible but is actually relatively easy. It is also easy to build and strengthen love in our lives.

Problems and challenges that generate fear
When we are living in fear, we may be responding to real dangers that threaten our happiness, health, security and even to our very life itself. Under circumstances of privations, persecutions and growing global scarcities there is no lack of reasons to develop fears.

This easily becomes a vicious circle. When we respond from fear it is usually with anger, selfishness, vengefulness and even malice. These attitudes and behaviors generate further fear in others, which generates more negative behaviors towards us, which further raises our fear levels. Little wonder that our world is in the sorry shape we see today!

One would hope that governments and educational institutions would work for the benefit of the people, in ways that reduce fears, and that they would teach people to deal with them. One would think that employers would see that fear is damaging to workers’ emotional and physical health and interferes with their productivity. But this is far from the case.

Modern society is governed by leaders who are themselves in fear. Politicians tend to be motivated by personal gain and power. They fear losing control – over others and over their own lives. They distrust others in government, fear negative public opinion and fear loss of financial and voter support.

Leaders in business tend to be motivated by power and personal gain. They fear loss of power and loss of profits.

In all of these circumstances, a further problem is often at play. In western society we tend to favor thinking as our primary way of relating to the world.  Logical, linear reasoning is a function that is the specialty of our left brain hemisphere (LH). Our emotions, which are the specialty of our right brain hemisphere (RH), are often outside our conscious (LH) awareness. We may be experiencing fear but might not even be aware of it. Our conscious mind may sense we are unhappy, anxious or irritable but may not understand why this is so.

I see hope in the Occupy movement. Many are waking up to the need to bring love back into our lives and to change the old ways of relating to each other and to the world.

Fear and love are contradictory.  Love is reckless in giving away, oblivious as to what it gets in return.

Love wrestles with the world as with the self and ultimately gains mastery over all other feelings.  My daily experience…is that every problem lends itself to solution if we are determined to make the law of truth and nonviolence the law of life.  For truth and nonviolence are, to me, faces of the same coin.  The law of love will work, just as the law of gravitation will work, whether we accept it or not…the more I work at this law the more I feel the delight in life, the delight in the scheme of this universe.  It gives me a peace and a meaning of the mysteries of nature that I have no power to describe.
                      – Gandhi

Loving ways for dealing with our fears
There are many possible approaches. First, of course, is to identify that we are out of harmony in our lives and wanting or needing to do something about this. Next, we need to clarify what it is we are experiencing, and then to decide what we wish to do about it.

I have been helping people do this for over forty years. I have explored dozens of techniques for identifying and clearing stress, anxieties and fears. The combination of approaches I developed, called TWR (Whole Health – Easily and Effectively; AKA Transformative Wholistic Reintegration/ TWR) is the most efficient and effects method I have ever known. Within minutes, TWR can help to clear and transform anxieties and fears – even when they are quite strong.

‘Wilma’ was living in constant fear over the limitations of her 9 year-old son, ‘John,’ who has Asperger’s Disorder. As a single mom, she found it enormously stressful to sort out time off from work to be at school periodically when John got into behavioral difficulties. This was happening with increasing frequency, and Wilma was beginning to feel frustrated and angry with her son. She started to fear the loss of her job, and these fears interfered with her thinking and made it difficult to do her job. She was very pleasantly surprised and relieved to find her fears melting away with TWR. At the same time, she realized she had been increasingly irritable with John due to her fears, and as she calmed down, he did too, and consequently had fewer difficulties at school. The generic TWR affirmation that included “I love and accept myself, wholly and completely, and God loves and accepts me, wholly and completely and unconditionally” was enormously helpful to Wilma in releasing her fears.

‘Peter’ came for help because he was in conflict with his wife over her frequent drinking to excess. He was upset seeing her drifting into a serious alcohol dependency for dealing with stresses over her mother drifting into an Alzheimer state and needing but resisting a move into assisted care. In using TWR to release his anxieties and stress reactions, Peter found himself also reconnecting with, reaffirming and strengthening his love for his wife, his empathy with her difficult challenges surrounding her mother’s problems, and his impatience with his wife that resonated with his frustrations and impatience with both of his parents who had had drinking problems.

Again and again, both in helping others and in my personal life, I find that love is the best way through our difficulties – both large and small. TWR is a godsend in helping to identify and clear the blocks to letting love back into our lives and in strengthening this love so that we find he healings we need for our challenges.

At some ideas you stand perplexed, especially at the sight of human sins, uncertain whether to combat it by force or by human love. Always decide, ‘I will combat it with human love.’ If you make up your mind about that once and for all, you can conquer the whole world. Loving humility is a terrible force; it is the strongest of all things and there is nothing like it.
                      – Dostoyevsky

 

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