Fear itself
About a month after 9/11, a gas-masked face stared from the cover of the news magazine, overlaid with the question, "How scared should you be?" If you're really concerned about your health these days, you ought to be just scared enough to wake up to where the real danger lies. The threat that demands our attention during these challenging times is not anthrax, but fear itself.
No one in the government or media would admit to engaging in a campaign to spread fear. "These are just the facts," they would protest if accused of fear mongering. "We must be realistic about the dangers we face." But for the sake of both your mental and physical health it is important to ground yourself in the fact that fear of conjectured threats is never beneficial. An atmosphere of fear creates more health hazards than any biological weapon.
Science long ago demonstrated the body's psychological and biochemical reactions to fear and named this state of heightened arousal the fight or flight response. It's useful for launching you into quick action in the face of real and immediate danger, causing you, for instance, to leap out of harm's way when a car barrels into your path. Fear can also be useful for propelling you out of unhealthy ruts, such as when a cancer diagnosis motivates neglected psychological housecleaning and prompts action that puts life back into balance.
But fear as background music is hazardous to your health. The fight or flight response is meant to come and go in reaction to actual and present danger, not to go on and on with no outlet of useful action. The increased state of arousal generated by purely psychological stresses, such as media-inflated bogeymen, can lead to or increase every kind of unwanted symptom, from high blood pressure to depression to insomnia.
Laboratory animals subjected to manufactured stressful situations from which there is no escape develop a condition called "learned helplessness," a passivity that prevents them from seeking an escape route when one finally becomes available. In humans, feeling helpless and hopeless has been linked to diminished immune response and a multitude of health problems. It also leads to disabling mental paralysis, fostering a debilitating pessimism that denies the possibility of solutions and refuses to take action to change things for the better.
Fear mongering is to be expected during times of conflict and controversy. When people feel fearful, they tend to stop thinking clearly and are easier to control. A look at newspapers and magazines from years of earlier wars clearly demonstrate how fear is used to sell the public on accepting limitations to their personal freedoms, to promote policies of questionable merit, and to legitimize use of tax dollars for government activities that would provoke protest if the populace didn't feel unsafe and threatened.
The situation is no different during these supposedly more enlightened times. When the media spreads fear it is always being used to manipulate you by those who want to sell you something -- their point of view; products, services, or actions to protect you from the fears they have aroused. The spores of frightening ideas are spread to infect your attention, influence your perceptions, and limit your ability to think.
How do you protect yourself from fear?
Let's take some hints from conventional medicine:
- Reduce exposure: Stop watching the news. Stop reading the scary stories. Stop thinking about and discussing worst-case scenarios. Stop looking for and anticipating trouble.
- Boost your immune system: Seek out calming inspirational messages. Listen to music that cheers you. Add humor to your day. Make a habit of remembering that it is more realistic -- and healthier -- to notice how much is going right in the world than it is to fantasize about or focus on what can go wrong.
- Improve sanitation: Notice how you feel throughout the day. Uneasiness, anxiety, irritability, and worry are signs that you're focusing on something you don't want in your life. Wash off those fear-provoking thoughts by turning your mind to what you do want.
- Get plenty of rest. Start a daily relaxation program morning and evening to reset your mind and body to a state of calm. Get out in nature.
- Keep your inoculations up to date: Every day make a point of recognizing that all is well where you are. Make a habit of noticing that you are, at this moment, safe.
Exposure to germs exercises your immune system and makes it stronger. Likewise, exposure to fear can strengthen health-promoting mental habits. The challenge of transmuting fear to strength of mind provides incentive for becoming discriminating about what you put in your head and for cultivating awareness of when you've lost your mental balance. Fear can motivate you to you teach yourself to relax at will into the fact of your present safety and to practice deliberately shifting your attention to thoughts that calm and center you.
Remember, the only mind you need to change in order to vanquish media-disseminated fears is your own. But when you hold to what you know to be true about the preponderance of well being in the world despite the unsettling propaganda offered by the media and mass beliefs, you contribute to changing the emotional climate of the times. And the truth is that right here and right now you are safe.
Practice
Is anything threatening you right now?
An animal…is alert to everything in its environment. A cat does not anticipate danger from a penned dog four blocks away, however, nor bother wondering what could happen if that dog were to escape and find the cat's cozy yard.
Many people, however, do not pay attention to everything in their environments, but through their beliefs concentrate only upon "the ferocious dog four blocks away." That is, they do not respond to what is physically present or perceivable in either space or time, but instead [dwell] upon the threats that may or may not exist, ignoring at the same time other pertinent data that are immediately present.
The mind then signals threat -- but a threat that is nowhere physically present, so that the body cannot clearly respond. It therefore reacts to a pseudo-threatening situation, and is caught between gears, so to speak, with resulting biological confusion. The body's responses must be specific.
The overall sense of health, vitality, and resiliency is a generalized condition of contentment -- brought about, however, by multitudinous specific responses. Left alone, the body can defend itself against any disease, but it cannot defend itself appropriately against an exaggerated general fear of disease on the individual's part.
Seth, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Jane Roberts
What are you focusing on?
If you are mostly an observer (and most of you are) you are thriving in good times but suffering in bad times. Because whatever you're observing is reflected in your vibration. So as you observe it, you radiate a vibration that matches it. The Universe accepts that as your point of attraction and gives you more like it which then you observe. So the better it gets the better it gets, or the worse it gets the worse it gets. But if you are a visionary, you thrive in all times. Because as a visionary, you have learned to hold your vibration in the place that matches your desire. Basically you have one function that breaks down into two activities. The two activities are: Line up your Energy. And realign it if it gets out of alignment. That's really all there is to it.
Abraham, Newsletter "You Are Creators," July/August/September 1997 www.abraham-hicks.com