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Healing Fear

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To heal fear, I suggest starting with healing the shame we may feel for being fearful.  Feeling fear and shame is too much. We should tackle only one at a time!  Without shame, confronting our fears will be much easier. We may need to approach the scary stuff one little step at a time. We may need a lot of time. We’ll be able to make progress very slowly without feeling horrible about ourselves. We won’t try to bully ourselves into throwing ourselves at the deep end and fail for not being prepared enough. We’ll be kind to ourselves. We may even laugh!   It’s true that in some cases, all that's needed is to muster some courage, push ourselves and move forward. Sometimes, the fear is not so deep, so immense and so intense that it can’t be overcome this way. Sometimes, what we have to confront is not that unknown, we are not that unprepared, we had opportunities to build up our confidence before… We can push forward and win!  However, in other cases, let’s be humble, it’s just too muc
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Healing Shame

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  When we explore dark feelings, we often find out that they are reactions to some underlying pain, which can be another dark feeling.  Rage and anger are reactions. A moment of anger may be a boost of energy that helps break through an obstacle. If anger settles in the long term, that’s a sign that a feeling of powerlessness has probably grown roots in the psyche. We feel the anger. We don’t have enough energy to confront the problem (which may not even be clearly identified) but keeping the anger alive is not as bad as feeling like a complete loser in despair. Anger may even serve us as an illusion of power. Our deeper feeling of powerlessness can be suppressed.  (Reconnecting with the dark goo at the bottom of our feeling pit is not an enjoyable experience, but healing is the purpose)  We may feel powerless for various reasons. One may be that we haven’t been able to overcome some fears. Fear is paralysing. In its grip we are powerless. We may also avoid feeling the fear, because it
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  One day people asked Jesus one more stupid question: What is the Greatest Commandment?  Jesus gave an impossible answer - He didn’t come up with it, he repeated some old stuff tracing back to Moses:   “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. This is the first and greatest commandment.”  Was it a joke?  In the Bible, it’s written in Deuteronomy Chapter 6 after a caveat about fearing God and complying with his various commandments and prescriptions. Fear, Obey, Love! In that order!   In the same chapter, the Good Lord tells the people of Israel that he will give them, I quote “a land with large, flourishing cities they did not build, houses filled with all kinds of good things they did not provide, wells they did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves they did not plant”  As for the people who lived in these cities and houses, just destroy them, says the Lord.  If Moses was in touch with a Special Power From Above, it was the God
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In the psychiatric ward

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  When I was twenty-one, I found a job in a psychiatric hospital. I worked there for two years as an auxiliary nurse. Auxiliary was the lowest rank in the hierarchy. Lower than that you’re just ill! I am still thinking of the people I met there… Let me introduce them to you.    Mauricette was about thirty years old but she looked sixteen, the age she was trapped by schizophrenia. She wore that kind of dull clothing you wear when you’re an inmate in a psychiatric hospital, she wore socks but no shoes, she had shoulder length dark and untidy hair and she was perpetually possessed by acute anger. She spent her days walking to and fro in the doorways or turning round the tables- always anticlockwise. Her fists clenched, she was churning out an unceasing string of the angriest and crudest words… Her anger is my anger.   One day Mauricette stood in front of me in the middle of the path, hands joined over her head, on one leg as if practising a yoga stance called “the tree” Sh
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