A Guide to Rewriting Fear

Fear is ultimately a series of repeated scripts that become stories and when left unchallenged, become beliefs. We each have thousands of these fear scripts. Many of us spend our days battling them, suppressing them, distracting ourselves from them, or otherwise trying to function in modern life. In fact, some of us get so consumed by our fears that they become our identities.

Fear feels so damn real. But unless there are actual life-threatening circumstances, fear is not real. It is just a story that our brain thinks is true.

We can consider our mind a projector and our conscience a screen. The mind projects onto this screen a series of stories ranging from highly pleasant to highly unpleasant. Part of the work of mindfulness is to realize that these projections are not real. And that we have two significant things we can control: 1) we can turn the projector off (at least for a while) and 2) we can decide what stories the projector is playing. I believe that much of the work of consciousness is to rewrite these scripts and dismantle these stories so that we can live more freely, joyfully, and creatively.

“Fear is a natural response to the world as we see it. Our fears are also reactions to the story we believe.” - Gareth Higgins