When was the last time you were afraid? If you have to think about it you are either a very cool dude (dudess?), you are living in a retreat and in meditation the whole day, or you are swimming in that Egyptian river (in denial).

Television and newspapers are great at fueling our fears and expert at creating new ones. If you subscribe to mainstream media you might be fearing a dose of swine flu (although all evidence shows it to be a damp squib as bugs go).

The world economy will be generating income-related fears associated with failing business and lost jobs leading to a state of not having enough money and all that is associated with this.

In case you hadn’t noticed the world is in a rather volatile place at the moment so, dependent on where you live, there is plenty of scope for fears about personal safety and that of our loved ones.

All of the above are in the basket of topical fears but what about all the fears that we inherited from our parents and from our fragile days of childhood. Ahhhhhhhh!

Time for a couple of pat phrases in lieu of a valium. “The only thing to fear is fear itself”. “Fear is False Evidence Appearing Real”. Did that help? I didn’t think so.

The trouble with fear is that there is a newly rediscovered universal law (law of attraction) that states what you pay attention to will show up in your life. Yep, we are creating our lives by what we think about and a good way to get this happening quickly is to put some emotion behind it. Oops, we have a problem!

So here we are as a species universally equipped to create our reality with our thoughts and we are thinking fearful thoughts. We are attracting what we fear!

A good case in point is somebody very close to me (I won’t mention any names but you might guess). This person has a fear of rats (inherited) and this person used to live in Africa where these little furry creatures used to show up all the time – biting fingers at night, upside down in tea cups (dead), running along the ceiling and so on. Now there are a lot of rats in Africa but still an awful lot seemed to show up in this person’s life and this didn’t stop when they moved to New Zealand.

So, if all of us are fearing swine flu, recession, armageddon ….. mightn’t there be a danger that these things will show up? Might it not be a good idea to isolate ourselves from the fear-generating media and those people that love to share their fears in the hope that you will join their club?

They say that the choice between creating hell or heaven on earth is the choice between fear and love. I think we have done a good job of proving this as true and it is time to make another choice!

To finish on a lighter note – here is a little video of me overcoming the fear of plummeting headlong into freezing cold water nearly 50 metres below. Enjoy.