For those of us into Science Fiction and, particularly, the books of Dune, written by Frank Herbert, the above quote is not unknown to you. The "Bene Gesserit Litany on Fear" goes as follows:
I really like this a lot because it does 2 things:
1) it provides you with an easily memorize-able mantra/affirmation that can be used whenever excess fear (for whatever situation) is felt. It allows one to breath and to move forward engaged in whatever was being done and to complete it, hopefully successfully.
2) it takes you deeper into yourself as you think about it and recite it to yourself.
Fear moves. Fear feels sometimes like it is alive. It has a home in what feels like your upper stomach area or solar plexus and when you feel it, it is unmistakable. If it is extreme fear, you also taste copper on your tongue as the neuro-peptide chemicals that express that emotion are released from your hypothalamus, a part of your brain called the limbic system, sitting directly above your reptilian brain.
Fear awakens Fight or Flight, which is a visceral, bodily response to whatever stimulus caused the fear in the first place. So we either run or we fight, that is what our body wants us to do. These days and in our society though, we are often subjected to fear-based responses even when those responses are not equal to the stimuli.
We have to really think about how we let fear affect us. What it can do to us. Fear is intimately an individualized experience, but we can "catch" fear in large groups and that is kind of what we are experiencing right now. Disparate groups of us are being subjected to fears that play upon our sense of self and the sense of who we are as a nation. We are being called upon now by so many forces to separate ourselves from our fellow Americans, to see them as different and to act according to that difference.
But we don't have to fall prey to this strategy. Because that is what it is. A calculated, deliberate strategy. And it is being used by people all across the political spectrum!
If you are in a situation and someone is telling you to be afraid, you need to listen very closely to what else that person or group is saying. Because generally, whatever else they want to do is not in your best interest.
Our best interest is best served together, in service to each other and our community. We can't do that when we've got folks telling us that the other guy is the enemy, that the other girl over there wants to take your job or that person right there shouldn't even be in this country!
Fear got us to this point. Do you think that fear is going to get us beyond it, into something better for our children and their children?
We all need to consider this carefully moving forward. It is important.