April, 2012

  1. Where was I when the power went out?

    April 30, 2012 by Dina Wilcox

    Oh, yes; I was talking about fear.  That’s what this conversation is about:  FEAR.

    The point about fear is this:  Your brain came with a default setting for fear.  It’s automatic.  Fear forces you to act when you are threatened.  You don’t have to think about it.

    But, then, there’s another kind of fear.  You CREATE this, other, fear by thinking about it.  It might be a fear that you’re not smart enough, or beautiful enough; or that no one will love you; that you’ll never be successful.

    That’s a fear of another color.  That fear is in your brain because your thoughts put it there, and the more you think about it, the more your brain will reinforce your thoughts.  It’s like a vicious circle that is powered by your thoughts.

    In chapter 4 of Why Do I Feel This Way?  fear is laid out so you can see it for what it is.  The whole conversation is right there, in the book, along with a choice you can make.

    Check here tomorrow for more information.

     

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  2. This morning, I woke up afraid

    April 24, 2012 by Dina Wilcox

    It was still dark, just barely, and my eyes were already open wide: the end of sleep.

    My mind was racing, whirling around nothing in particular.  What am I doing?  What have I done?

    Nothing, really.  I just had a dream for my life.  A plan to make it come true.  I stepped outside my comfort zone by imagining me, happy and fulfilled.  How could that hurt?

    Our brains are all about keeping us safe.  Maybe that’s why they do so much automatically, without our having to think about it.  In our brains, we don’t like challenges; we like survival.  We create fear, perhaps to stop ourselves from chasing after every dream that we dream up.   We have no choice but to feel fear–it’s one of the ways we respond to life, automatically.

    On the morning I woke up fearful, the sun also came up automatically.   I took my fear to my journal, where I wrote it down to size, and then I started to take action in the face of it.  One small step to keep my fear at arm’s length, for this one day.  One day at a time.

    In chapter 4 of Why Do I Feel This Way? What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You, we’ll learn about our fear, where it comes from and why we can’t prevent it.  We’ll also speculate about how we can meet fear head on and put it out of business.   Let’s talk about this! 

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  3. It’s so much more than George Zimmerman

    April 13, 2012 by Dina Wilcox

    I wanted to blame him and punish him and be done with it.  It was too horrible,  too painful, and I wanted it to end with him.

    But George Zimmerman is the tip of the iceberg, and even if we break him off and throw him into the water, there’s still the iceberg to deal with.  It’s the town, the lawmakers, the NRA–everyone who put that gun in Zimmerman’s hands, along with the message that he had the power to shoot to kill as long as he remembered to say he felt threatened.   It is the rest of them who need to be brought to justice, if there is to be any justice.

    I see a courtroom filled with victims–you and me, the parents who lost their child, Trayvon Martin, and everyone who might be walking into the wrong end of another gunslinger who got a pat on the back as (s)he was sent out to do something lawfully heinous.  I see We, The People and I just have to ask, where are we in all of this?  It’s not easy:  we all want to feel safe in our communities, protected against people who would harm us.  And we all want to be safe, to keep our children safe, protected against people who would harm us.

    We don’t have much control over the individual acts of individual people, but We, The People have control over the laws that we agree to live by.  Right now, we can and must say it’s enough–too much, really–and it has to stop.  Every human is valuable, none can be spared for such cruel brutality, and government must not be used to rob us of one another.  If the world is spinning out of control, we must be the brakes of last resort.

     

     

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  4. Excerpt from the New Book!

    April 10, 2012 by Dina Wilcox

    You know those fears that feel so powerful they can stop you from taking any action–especially from doing what you think you want to, more than anything?

    Fear started out as a mechanism to keep you safe. And then your thinking brain came along.

    The fear that actually keeps you safe works automatically. You don’t have to think about it. This other fear isn’t the same thing, because you create it with your thoughts.

    And that’s good news, because it means you can also think it to death.  Ask it a few questions: Why do I feel this way? What’s it about? Is it keeping me safe? By doing that, you can dissolve your fear.

    In Chapter 4 of “Why Do I Feel This Way?  What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You,” I’ll tell you about my Fear Weekend, an unscientific experiment about learning the truth about my fear.

    It’s so gone….

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