“Fear is like a little garden spider that makes us jump back or the poor lost bee on the steering wheel that we blame for our automobile wreck. The problem in fear is our RESPONSE – the way we treat animals or insects that frighten us. Fear is the cornered animal within us, baring its teeth, the lowest common denominator of human experience. Fear crushes the delicate spider or slender wasp. Fear is also the universal scapegoat we blame when we take flight from intimacy or shrink up inside ourselves in a thousand little ways.
Nevertheless, let’s appreciate fear for its whispered or shouted warnings. Fear calls to you like an overprotective mother to whom you should always listen but not always heed. Show more respect but less obedience to the frightened child inside you who, after all, may be wise or foolish, helpful or disabling. Appreciate fear as a voice of caution, but view it as a wall to scale, a hurdle to leap, a challenge to meet, a call to action.
You cannot control your fear. You CAN control your response: You can slow your breathing. You can shake loose and relax your muscles. You can feel the fear and do it anyway.”
Dan Millman, in “Everyday Enlightenment”
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Jeff Maziarek, author of Spirituality Simplified and Codi’s Journey, launched Pondercentral.com in April 2007 as a Web-based forum for “PONDER on THIS,” a series of weekday inspirational email messages he began sending to subscribers in March 1999. A FREE service since its inception, “PONDER on THIS” provides subscribers with meaningful content to assist them on their individual paths of spiritual growth. In addition, it benefits subscribers, authors, and publishers by including links to Amazon.com where subscribers can learn more about the book being quoted, and also purchase it.
