Most of our parents did the best that they could, but some had little awareness of proper parenting skills. As a result we may have been neglected, criticized, invalidated, or even abused.

Early experiences can affect us as adults. Negative feelings that arise as a result of these experiences, if not processed, can get stored up in our psyches and carried into our current relationships.

None of us can change the past. We can however, heal ourselves and move forward: We can forgive, forget, and break the chain, so that what happened in the past does not follow us into the present.

The saints and sages tell us that the world is nothing more than the projection of our own minds. This means that we all create our own reality.  So rather than assume that others know how we see things, we have to realize that every person comes to a situation with a different mindset.

If we wish to engage in effective communication, we need to know the places from which others are coming. The better we understand ourselves and others, the better we can communicate and  avoid  misunderstandings  and “hard’ feelings such as fear and anger.

I once had a very close relative who was a great human being.  She had many challenges in her lifetime which she overcame with resourcefulness and dignity.  But sometimes, particularly when she was tired, she would explode and lash out at whoever was around her.

It is now common knowledge that peoples’ negativity can be picked up by others. Sometimes I would come away from those encounters feeling ill.  But as I developed more awareness, I came to know that her reactions had little to do with others and more to do with her own mindset. A lot of that anger was governed by fear: fear that she was not good enough, fear that she would not be accepted, and ultimately, fear that she was not lovable.  Though she was extremely competent and confident on the exterior, deep down she was a frightened soul who had no idea how to express love or that anyone could and did love her.

This story is familiar to everyone. It has a universal theme.  And as we begin to understand human nature, we realize that there are only so many variations of the same theme.

So an anchor is something you can create and then call upon if you need it to trigger a change in your state. The skydiving song was not the first time I used an anchor to achieve something that required courage on my part. Once at a Life Mastery event in Hawaii, Tony Robbins had us climb a very tall pole in pairs and walk across a high wire.  The feat required that we navigate the wire and not lose our balance as we walked across it. I recall telling my partner that I would help us maintain our state while he provided instructions on where to walk. I knew that if either of us looked down for too long, we would lose our balance. So every time he started to look down and I saw terror begin to register on his face, I shouted a mantra I received from one of my spiritual teachers. I had already been conditioned to believe that these words were very powerful.

The fellow with me on the high wire had no idea what I was shouting, but I said it with such confidence and force that he snapped back into a balanced state every time I shouted it.  We were actually the first two of only a few who accomplished the feat. Many of the others ended up falling and then dangled in mid air in their harnesses until they were rescued.  I attribute the power and confidence I had in that mantra to helping us make it across the high wire.

I called upon the power of those words yet another time when a group of us were rowing down the Colorado River. When I signed up for that trip, I had little experience kayaking and had no idea we would be facing strong headwinds for most of our journey.   We had 13 miles to navigate from Nevada into Arizona, and had to travel alongside larger boats that impeded our progress.

At one point, when I felt unable to move forward, I asked my rowing partner if she minded if I said my mantra to get energized. She told me to go ahead and do whatever I needed to help us get to our destination at Willow Beach. I began repeating it, got reenergized, and soon we overtook some of the other boats.

“I don’t know what you are saying,” she yelled to me,” but keep saying it!”

One way to deal with fear is to reprogram ourselves out of it. This can be easier than it sounds because we can only experience one strong feeling at a time. Begin by getting yourself pumped and into a peak state where you are feeling fearless. An easy way for me to do this is through music.

For example, recently while virtual traveling,  I became fascinated by a particular YouTube video of crown Prince Fazza skydiving over Palm Island in Dubai. He was gliding calmly and effortlessly, engaging in various acrobatics during his descent. I am not particularly fond of heights, so was impressed and then began to feel exhilarated while watching him having fun in a situation that would have terrified me.  I noted that in the background of this video, music was playing, and the words, “You can do anything you want to,” were being repeated.

I had already been introduced to the concept of anchoring by Tony Robbins, where you deliberately set up a trigger to achieve an emotion that you want to feel. So, I took that opportunity to make the song an anchor for me that would trigger the visual and subsequently that peak state of fearlessness whenever I needed it. I put the music on my playlist and now it has become something that I call upon whenever I want to feel fearless. Here is the YouTube video of which I am speaking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE8iJg421mQ

 Someone once asked my teacher Swami Satchidananda how to get re-balanced after being thrown off course by negative emotions such as fear and anger. “What is it that you are fearful of?” he asked. “Fear of loss? You came with nothing and will go with nothing. Fear of abandonment? No one can abandon you if you do not abandon yourself. Fear of rejection? Do things for the right reasons and not so that people will approve of you.” We lose our contentment, he explained, when we put false value on things or have expectations that are not met.

Only recently I had to learn this lesson on a deeper level myself. Before sitting down to write this blog, I was told that my major credit card had been shut down because someone gained access to my number and attempted to withdraw a large sum of money at a local teller. This action would cause me a week of inconvenience having to contact all of the vendors who received regular auto-payments from that account.

“How could anyone be so evil as to cause me to lose all of this time?” I asked grudgingly? After working myself into a tizzy, I finally realized the lesson: I still had little compassion for certain types of spiritual stupidity, particularly when it affected me.

Soon the words of Eckhart Tolle came to me: “All stress comes from resisting the present moment.”

Most of us are aware of at least some of our fears. They have been living inside of us for a very long time. Some come to the surface from time to time and prevent us from doing things we wish we could do. Others have been unknowingly stuffed deep inside of our psyches, and at some point we may have even forgotten they exist.

Fear is not always immediately recognizable as fear. It may be disguised as anger, dislike,  jealousy, or some other emotion. But at the root of it all, most negative emotions stem from some sort of fear.

The fact is that our souls are here to evolve. Life is designed that way. So as time passes, the fears we have not dealt with will begin to come to the surface. They will interrupt our normal daily functioning in some way. If not acknowledged and addressed at this point, they could take ultimate control of our lives by causing us physical or psychological imbalance.