Mindfully Me, ‘Fear Buster’
by meditative - February 9th, 2017.Filed under: Insights for Mindful Intelligence.
To ‘connect & redirect’ can be an effective technique for diffusing our fearful moments. It takes courage to acknowledge & engage our fears, but this is the best way to develop confidence and to help rewire the neural circuitry that regulates our tendency for fearful reactions. Once we connect or acknowledge the fear, we then redirect our attention & focus on something else like the breath.
Practice: Breathe in as deeply into the belly as you can. When you inhale… try & hold it for as long and as tightly as you can. Then exhale slowly. As long as the fear persists, continue to focus on your breathing… and simply following it ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the body. The objective is to shift our attention off the fear and redirect it onto our breath. Without the energy from our attention, the chain of thoughts & feelings often fueling the fear cannot sustain.
With practice, we eventually come to understand that our fearful states are quite transient. They come and they go, and ultimately, we have a choice as to how we respond & relate to them.
In many cases, our irrational fears are simply unfounded products of mind. A clever acronym to relate to these types of ‘cognitive fabrications’ is the following…
F- False
E- Evidence (of mind)
A- Appearing
R- real
Relaxing into our fearful moments with clarity, curiosity, and kindness can help us to better understand the nature of their manifestation- and to discern what may be a reflection of ‘reality’, or what may be simply a projection of an over-reactive mind.