Emotional Pro

Please note: this is an article, not a radio show, please enjoy reading and learning from it.  – Ilene.

The Swine Flu–or whatever it is eventually to be called–is our latest human opportunity to master fear!

Have you talked with anyone recently on this topic?  If you haven’t, bring up the topic and watch people carefully.  You’ll see that momentary widening of the eyes, that “deer in the headlights” look that crosses over their face.  You’ll see the fear!

Fear is an emotion–energy.  It’s a tool we have been given to use.  It alerts us to times in which we are to exercise caution and be prepared to take measures to assure our own survival.  It is a TOOL; it is not designed to run our lives!

If, indeed, as I have accepted for many years, our earth is a “giant school” to which we have all come in order to learn and grow, then every experience–including the Swine Flu–is an opportunity for growth! What would be different if we view this experience as such an opportunity, instead of merely reacting in fear?

Here are some things we could see:

• In order to deal with this illness, the people of the world must work together (a really good thing).
• We have (what is now) a limited opportunity to look death in the face, and ask ourselves whether we’d like to clean up the earth and treat it right, instead of destroying it and our selves.
• We have an opportunity to choose to be fearful, or to choose to live in faith and love (not the religious type of faith, but the type we utilize when we go to sleep and expect to awaken)

Fear has a tendency to generalize.  Once we start focusing on fear, it just gets bigger and bigger. Epidemics naturally pull us toward fear, giving us a chance to choose “not fear.” The question is, will we use it?  So far, this flu is manageable if we follow the advice of health experts, get immediate medical attention for symptoms, and protect ourselves using some common sense about creating barriers for the spread of the organism. We can decide to focus on “not fear” instead of allowing the fear to generalize.

We also can practice focusing our energy where we want it to be.  Following the principle “Pay attention to what you want to become, and not to what you want to overcome,” we can learn to focus our energy and attention on health instead of either fear or illness!  “Energy follows attention.”  When we pay attention to something, we feed it energy, and it tends to grow.  By using our faith (instead of fear), we can pay attention to having a healthy world, being healthy ourselves, remembering what it feels like inside to assume the people around us are healthy and will do us no harm through association, and to keeping ourselves hardy through exercise, good nutrition and self-care, we can create a world around us that IS that!

What will you do with your opportunity?