Fear

“Fear properly channeled yields wide-awake engagement….”Fear is a vitally useful emotion. It places you on alert, catalyzes your senses and heightens your awareness in the face of danger. Fear is your friend, your radar for your voyage through life. It is a basic instinct of human survival — physical, psychological, spiritual. We need to have an acute sense of what threatens our well-being. Fear teaches us to pay attention to what’s going on, and a well-honed sense of fear allows us to maintain dynamic equilibrium in an inevitably unpredictable world.” -Gabrielle Roth, Maps to Ecstasy.

I find it unhealthy when people completely negate fear and reduce it to only a negative force. To completely deny and disregard this very real aspect of human nature is to turn away from the divine–as every aspect of who we are is a tool for our awakening. Gabrielle goes on to address what happens when our fear are denied, suppressed and unreleased.

“Unreleased fear tightens the throat, neck, and lower back, raises the shoulders, stiffens the jaw and contracts the forehead, immobilizes the pelvis and locks the knees… It paralyzes our life energy, seizes up our feelings…What we need then is to free ourselves from our old, diffused, imploded anxieties so that we are able to fear what actually threatens our well-being.”