Fear-based decisions prevent us from accessing our deepest needs, values, and wishes. We are sometimes driven or stopped by fear because it feels too overwhelming for us. Fear may convince us that the worst will happen and that we will be unable to handle it. This is the powerlessness that makes fear so sinister.
Adult relating is in the capacity to commit ourselves without being immobilized by the fear of abandonment if someone pulls too far away, or by the fear of engulfment if someone gets too close. It will seem as if these fears result directly from the behavior of our adult partner, but these are phantom fears from childhood. What is hurting us is gone but still stimulates. We are reacting to the inner landscape of our own past, a landscape ravaged by archaic plunder that has never been acknowledged, restored, or forgiven.
Fearlessness does not consist in having less fear or no fear but having so much more love that we go beyond fear! Fear is the porcupine on the trail as we hike: interesting, but not stopping us and not to be eliminated, since it belongs to the ecology of the psychic path. We rally our power with the conviction that there is an alternative to what the frightened mind has construed and that we do have it within us to handle whatever comes our way.
David Richo
Mindfulbalance 