We endlessly discuss and gossip about questions of: What am I? Who am I? What is my self?

Layers of Fear hide answers to these questions. They must be lifted off to live in the essence of an effective life.

First Layer: As this first thin layer is lifted there is a growing awareness that ideas about your self are made-up. They only exist as ideas in the minds that hold them.

It doesn’t follow that ideas are useless, or at all meant to be ineffective. It means that at their core, effective or ineffective, they are not real; they are figments of imagination. They can be easily be made into dark heavy blankets.

So in unpeeling this first thin layer you face a question: “My self, what I am, who I am, is not real! It is just an idea or concept?”

You may shake your head or say: “Thanks. How does this help me live effectively?” Hold this question as the second layer is lifted.

The Second Layer: Hold back each peel as we proceed deeply inward.

If you have even considered that you are an idea, then you will, with fear, begin to more clearly see you don’t know who, or what you are; you don’t know who or what your self is, where you are, or how to make sense of anything. You have not owned that you’re entirely free to make this up. “If this is true, why isn’t it simple to make an effective self?” It ‘is’. And it ‘is not’.

Understanding you can create whatever you want or wish, the first difficulty with ‘is not’ arises with the realization that if you want freedom from the dark you have no choice about taking full responsibility for your construction. This is why the ‘is’ seems so difficult. It asks: “Do you want to own responsibility for the self you have created?”

The external world from conception on provides ready-made ways to avoid responsibility for one’s constructed self: Physical: “Born this way”, “Body/soul is damaged”, Environmental: “Tough life”, “Parents”. This is a fruitless nature-nurture debate. For the degree you choose to avoid responsibility for creating your self, using nature or nurture, you are making-up-a-self sliding into a dark pit of pain.

The Third Layer:  The second layer is heavy, yet as you lift the third layer you see it doesn’t mean there is no truth to the fact we begin life with others totally responsible for us. Here you see is where ‘is not’ makes its stand. Given the temptations waiting at maturity, self-deception is the ‘seeming-easy’ choice; or you can ask: “How do I regain responsibility for my self?”

Deciding you want an effective life, you must own the fact that all others including society, religion and culture have put ideas into your mind about who and what you are. “You’re ‘special’. You’re X age, sex, religion.” “You’re bad. You little devil.”

So all your dark, ineffective thoughts, feelings and behavior is exposed when the third layer is lifted. Through your whole life, as you decide to make up who and what you are, you have to deal with the effective and ineffective parts of you that were installed by others before you were responsible for yourself. Even though they were made-up by others, they still have their own ability, to think, perceive and even act AS IF they are really you.

The Fourth Layer: The lifting gets heavier but keep holding the layers up. Are those glimpses of light? Underneath is a further growing awareness that you also began, when not fully responsible for yourself, to slowly but surely make up ideas of who and what others were, based on your experiences and imagination. These parts of your self, others inside you, so to speak, also act AS IF they are real and autonomous. Holding onto guilt, shame and responsibility for the made-up ineffectiveness of others inside you, as part of your own self, is a cause of immense darkness. The power of negative emotions given to these made-up others is held over you only when you don’t alternatively find the light switch of owning responsibility for making them up. You can waste large amounts of creative energy trying to fix these ineffective ‘others’ parts. They can’t be ‘fixed’! They aren’t real!! You can only release in forgiveness and thereby free yourself from these guilty thoughts born of fear.

The darkness now intensifies before the dawn for as you lift this layer you are shockingly aware that what you see outside is what you have made-up inside. Perceiving or projecting these creations onto others outside your self by criticizing, blaming or denigrating instead of releasing them to forgiveness reinforces the darkness of fear. You are letting internal constructions, meant to protect and safely hold you, lead you and leave you, in the dark.

The Fifth Layer: Like ripping off a band-aid you lift this last layer of exquisite pain. Here you decide, “I will take responsibility for what I’ve made, surely the light switch must be there, right there!” But, no, you still have to face and lift off the final two scabs of immense fear and pain.

• 1st: You have to mourn and grieve the made-up ineffective parts of yourself installed by others and then mourn and grieve the ineffective made-up parts of others you created inside yourself.

• 2ndly: You have to face a feeling of dread as you release these made up parts of yourself, BUT, because these parts have made up so much of your sense of who you are, you will feel you are falling into a ‘seeming’ abyss. It feels AS IF your whole self is being annihilated.

But as these layers are lifted the light switch is revealed: “I’ve made up who I am. I own responsibility for it, but not a shred of it is real”. The ‘power’ of money, fame, sex, ambition, drugs, power, roles and all negative emotions are jettisoned. You see your ineffective creation was meant to encircle you with an effective creation of love and forgiveness. You willingly release the ineffective.

The answer to who and what you are arises inside to tell you from Itself, and every temptation a chance to choose again for weakness or strength, truth or lies, peace or war, your will be done effectively in innocence and Love.

Dr. Clark Falconer is a Guest Blogger for PickTheBrain. He is a practicing Psychiatrist from Vancouver, Canada and the author of the new, critically acclaimed book The Three Word Truth About Love And Being Well.

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In my last piece I outlined the place that the sale of fear is taking in our life. I noted the role fear plays in creating illness. I highlighted the major role of particularly guilty industries: the pharmaceutical companies, politicians, insurance companies and the news and advertising media, to name just five. These are entities that go out of their way to create a culture of fear to sell their products.

Because it is not a one-way street, however, this is not the whole story. Here in FEAR II, I outline the role we play in putting our self at the mercy of fear and dread and the personal responsibility we must own to manage these feelings. If you are interested, I explain this in greater detail, with clinical examples, in my book.

The first difficult and complex reality is that fear and dread are a very large and significant part of being human. These feelings and others, like a sense of doom, are essential elements of the human experience. Repeat this to yourself: “If I want to be fully human then I accept that fear and dread are a part of what I am.” Only by accepting this can you utilize your essential inner energy and at the same time ward off salesmen selling you more fear. You already have a plentiful supply.

The second reality is inherently more difficult to acknowledge. This is because most of us spend so much time trying to rid ourselves of fear or trying to avoid fear all together. In doing this we are denying the reality that it is quite normal to feel profoundly scared every day. If you have no sense of this you are likely cutting yourself off from your feelings and the vital energy and creativity that goes with them.

The third part, the hardest, is to realize how much it is in your interest to look into your own doom enclosed as you are as a physical entity. Close your eyes and stare into the abyss, the dark, the nothingness, the end, the loneliness, the abandonment, the sense of fading away, the terror that is in you. It is here, often to your shock, that you will find the light and source of energy that shines most brightly.

When, shaking with fear, you accept your fear the next step is to look it in the eye. Allowing your self this experience several times a day will ease your being at the mercy of your lower consciousness feelings. Doing this is only useful, of course, if you otherwise get on with what you WON’T and what you WILL do each day while accepting this experience as only one important part of feeling alive as you live. This practice frees you from being manipulated by the authoritarian voices in your own head or the voices outside who would encourage you to not feel, to look away, to seek safety and security, or conversely to attack, seek revenge, or retaliate against yourself or others.

Remember, finally, this decision, is a choice: to LOVE and BE WELL, or act out on your feelings as if you are a separate, isolated, strange specter alone with your ghoulish thoughts and fears. This you will recognize is the essence of all vampire, monster, horror and slasher books and films. This is commonly known as evil.

To know it, our fears and our dread, so we may contain it within ourselves, is to not inflict it on others, but instead to put it into the world in art or symbols of art, narratives or images. This allows us to then take it back inside our self in a more refined and less terrifying version. Here we may know our feelings and our self with comfort again.

This all, of course, depends on our having had a necessary amount of affectionate holding by parents or parent substitutes. If you have not had this amount of holding a therapist may be able to help you develop a sense of safety inside yourself. If you did have security as a child and you follow the practice outlined you will see that you think you are afraid of the forest, the dark and nothingness but you are really afraid of ‘nothing’. And, of course how can ‘nothing’ be fearful, except in the sense Augustine and Nietzsche said evil is ‘no-thing’.

As words are also not things, the words you choose will determine the thoughts that lead to your actions; this in turn will lead to consequences in terms of your peace of mind and your overall health and creativity.

If you choose to LOVE and BE WELL, then each day, morning and night, take a moment, close your eyes, let yourself relax, breath in and out, then say:

I WON’T deny my fears.

I WON’T let others project fear into me.

I WILL accept my doubts and fears.

I WILL extend love to the world.

I AM light and energy and LOVE in the midst of all darkness.

Dr. Clark Falconer is a Guest Blogger for PickTheBrain. He is a practicing Psychiatrist from Vancouver, Canada and the author of the new, critically acclaimed book The Three Word Truth About Love And Being Well. To receive daily tips on the power of words follow Clark on Twitter.

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Everyone knows sex sells. Greed sells too, and again, this is something we all know. But little did we know that the really big, best seller of all is FEAR and it’s companion, dread.

Here are some current ‘epidemic’, ‘impending’ ‘catastrophe-in-the-making’, brilliantly-marketed FEARS: Fear of recession, depression, terrorists, war, disease, food, air, climate change, computer crashes, natural disasters, breast size, impotency, break-ins, drug czars and addicts, immigrants and aging.

Here I focus on an area closest to my own experience as a physician-psychiatrist: the fear of illness and dying. As you read about overcoming and transcending this fear, think of it as an effective metaphor for the other fears listed above. When you come to the end reread the piece substituting each fear.

Start with this fact: To fear our body is a powerful way to create disease. Why is this? Because fear is about being attacked and when you think you are going to be attacked you are both hard-wired and soft-wired for flight or fight. This, in simple terms, is bad for your physical health when carried on continuously or repetitively on an intermittent basis. Your body is not set up to be constantly on the alert for danger or shocked repeatedly by the unexpected. It is not necessary to go into the physiology of why this might lead to high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke and even cancer. Here is the rub: If fear can be created it leads to disease thereby proving that the fear was warranted. This is every politician, salesman and businessman’s dream: to create a need for snake oil.

In the external world we no longer buy a car or a house just for comfort and to raise a family, former symbols of success and stability that they were. We now buy an alarm system surrounding a car or house to protect us from an attack that is inevitably coming.

Similarly in our internal world, in the case of fear of illness, we are taught to wait to be attacked from within by scary pathogens of all types, prions, viruses, bacteria, fungi, worms or ravaging cancerous cells. We are then inundated with words and images encouraging us to attack back with drugs and vaccines. Television sets, both advertisement and news, are now literally more like warning systems for an impending attack, even if it is a sneak attack like impotence. Get them, (it), before they, (it), get us. This simply doesn’t work to ease fear; it creates fear. In the process a lot of drugs are sold in pharmacies and in the streets, for when you are talked into fear and then become an attacker you solidify the idea that attack must be coming and complete a circle of dread. If I need one drug, then I must need another. If I attack anything I inevitably will be more afraid as I wait for retaliation.

The facts are that, as I point out in the book, your body is a perfect part of the perfect whole always healing itself. It is an error to think your body is defective or that you have a basic fault, or that you are split and separate from a perfect whole. The words you use to overcome fears are central to your sense of peace of mind and joyful living.

Focus the words you choose on wholeness and unity and thereby stop ‘buying into’ fears such as the fear of illness and the enticement to attack and demonize your body. As you see you are part of larger wholeness your immune system is strengthened so your body can naturally do what it does best, serve as an amazing communication device.

Put your attention on remembering yourself. Make it your intention to do the following simple exercise daily. With your eyes closed take a deep breath in and repeat these three phrases ten times, morning and night as you breath out: 1) I Won’t indulge in fear and I Won’t identify with my body 2) I Will love the world and I Will forgive myself and others, and 3) I Am whole and healed. I AM LOVE.

As you work these Three Words, Won’t, Will and Am, you will begin to experience recovery from their healing power.

Dr. Clark Falconer is a Guest Blogger for PickTheBrain. He is a practicing Psychiatrist from Vancouver, Canada and the author of the new, critically acclaimed book The Three Word Truth About Love And Being Well. To receive daily tips on the power of words follow Clark on Twitter.

Don’t Forget To Follow PickTheBrain of Twitter!

Photo credit: Lrn Megan

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