Fear is a mover

One of the big movers is Fear. The question is still how to create change in the physical world by making changes in the spiritual one, and how the shaman is able to do that intentionally and directly. Often, in myself and my clients, fear is often a big factor in influences the events around us. Fear is one of our basic emotions and cornerstones of human existence. As such, there is no way for us to get rid of it or push it aside, but it always remains with us. So we need to learn how to have a good relationship with fear. I think about it as a power based relationship - either fear has power and dominance over us or we have power over our fear and can use it for our benefit.

When I think about it, talking about fear in this sense is more about not letting fear influence one's life, so more of a preventative. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people planning big events, about which they have a great fear, only to have numerous things go wrong at the last moment.

In my practice, I often see fear clearly in expectant mothers, though this is more about how our fear effects us personally than how it moves the world around us, but I think it's informative. I worked with a woman who was a trained nurse had worked in obstetrics in the past. She understood the birthing process very well, and had seen in numerous times before, but she also knew everything that could go wrong. And it scared her so much that she was preventing herself from going into labor. When she actually got to me, she was already post due date, though we had made several appointments prior to when she actually came in. She'd had to change and cancel the appointments as things kept coming up for her.

I was never sure if those things were under her control, but my sense was that there were things she was doing and things happening around her that kept her from taking care of herself. In the end, nothing I did could help her as the fear was too great and she ended up having a c-section. My personal fear was that her fear would cause something to go wrong with the baby, but was happy that her fears were about the delivery, not about the health of the baby.

Fear is an important emotion, it tells us when to think about something, and when to run for our lives. But if we fear something, and the fear has power over us, it can cause an internal result, of our own actions causing the fear to come true, or an external reaction, of causing the world around us to help the fear come about.

So how do we deal with fear? In Chinese medicine, fear is controlled by thinking (Water controlled by Earth). So one way of dealing with fear is knowledge. We can name our fear, we can learn a lot about it, we can study it, or we can do anything that helps our minds to understand it. The image is of a child who is scared of the cloths hung over a chair because they think it is a monster, but when you turn the light on, the fear goes away because the child knows what she is dealing with. So if you know what you are scared of, and can name the fear, then the fear is weakened.

But there is also the emotional component that needs to be dealt with. My approach to this is exemplified in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink. He discusses police officers "desensitizing" themselves to the fear of being shot, which allows them to enter dangerous situations and still exercise good judgment. Once the fear has been named, it's important to spend time with it, so that one is aware of when it is present, one is used to it's presence, and one can decide whether or not to act on it.

In regards to the main discussion, I think fear and other strong emotions influence the world around us, and to gain control over one's ability to move things spiritually, one needs to have control over one's fear.