Don't know why this is echoing in my head now...

[sabrinamari]

"...[And] Fear replied, 'My weapons are that I talk fast, and I get very close to your face. Then you get completely unnerved, and you do whatever I say. If you don’t do what I tell you, I have no power. You can listen to me and you can have respect for me. You can even be convinced by me. But if you don’t do what I say, I have no power.' In that way, the student warrior learned how to defeat fear."

Pema Chodron

Comments

[brock-tn.livejournal.com]

George Patton was more succinct about it: "Never take counsel of your fears."

But, more broadly, courage is little more than going forward and doing what you know you ought to do, despite your fear.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Though at times, I envy the more impetuous souls around me.

[citabria]

A very apt quote for me today. Thank you!

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

You're welcome.

[showingup.livejournal.com]

I recently came face to face with my Crippling Self-Doubt, who, it turns out, is the one responsible for a weird pseudo-flashback experience I've had since my teens, having hijacked a bunch of physical and emotional associations for its own purposes. Having decided that the best way to deal with the dark stuff is to invest love and light and respect, I've been petting it and holding it in the light and sending it love. It HATES it. It rants and raves and tells me I'm just for feeding on, and shrieks and seethes and sometimes begs me for its life. I tell it it can stay with me and be transformed into something useful and helpful - all my Inner Allies have welcomed this and accomplished it very quickly - and it rejects this out of hand.

I tell it that this is its decision. What it does is entirely up to it. I am no longer prepared to accept its abuse of me. It doesn't like that, and hurls insults and me, or whines about me murdering it.

My decision is to treat it with Love, impersonal benevolence, and to assert my boundaries by refusing to do anything but sit kindly with it.

It immediately got much, much weaker. It's still here, sneaking up and trying to freak me out. It turns out that lovingly asserting my boundaries and finding strength in peace makes me stronger than if I decided to fight it.

This will take a while, though I have no doubt that it will work.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

I am listening. I am thinking.

Koh

[mage-imbroglio.livejournal.com]

And for the children's version, we visit Koh the face stealer from Avatar.

Re: Koh

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Koh is one of my favorite Avatar characters. So creepy, so deadly, and so difficult to defeat. Yet, the rewards of confronting him successfully are spectacular.

Re: Koh

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

And the metaphor of Fear as the Face-Stealer: there's so many layers of meaning buried in that...