Clouds of Fear and Overcoming Mental Barriers
There were some situations my wife and I came across the last times, where people were living in a state of fear of failure. Fears of disappointing others, fears, others could see some weak points in them or think bad of them. And above all: fear that others might do a job not sufficiently well. Seen from the outside, there were clouds of fear, cultivated for quite some time. The fears didn’t declare themselves as such, but showed up under the cover of over-identification with a task:
When someone comes from the outside and says, you’re o.k., this doesn’t take the fear away, but he’s going on with his fears. The clouds work like a blind spot: What you have inside is seen as problems outside. You see the fears you have inside with situations in the outside. So when an impulse comes from the outside, it is being reflected by your cloud and projected outside – as a criticism about a situation or how others do a task:
You are convinced that you know what is right and might want others to act in your way. Or you get angry about others that they have another approach and don’t act according to the way you think it’s right. You might start making prescriptions to others, because they don’t correspond to your way of acting – or you don’t to their’s.
As long as you stay on the level of argumentation, you remain stuck in the blockage of mental conceptions: “I (you) have to do this because…” You are pressing the other with arguments, and the other is pressing back. This way you don’t get out of the cloud of fear. (see the blogpost on “Communication or Riding a Bicycle“). You can observe this very well in politics.
When you come to see what is common between the standpoint of the other and yours, you are already about to overcome the obstructions and resistances. Focusing on what is common and not on what is separating lets you see that there is much more in common that separating. This way you come into a mutual exchange and flow:
With this vision you come to understand: “I do my best, because I love doing it – and it’s the same with you.”
This blog-post has been translated into Spanish, together with some other posts of this series.
