Choosing to Move from Fear to Awe Allows You to Live Fully and Achieve Your Full Human Potential

These days, many people feel they have reasons to fear. They may worry that they will lose their job, their home or their life?s savings. Other people worry about their health and safety. Their worry may turn into fear, and fear soon can become terror.

Any degree of fear, however, stops us from reaching our full human potential. It keep us stuck in place, unable to move forward to achieve our goals. Plus, our fearful thoughts only create more reasons to have fear. However, learning to move through our fear, or to deal with it in a positive manner, allows us to achieve a new level of personal growth. In this way, we can, indeed, live our lives fully.

One way to remove fear from our lives, or at least to lesson its impact, involves looking at it differently. In fact, terror and awe represent opposite extremes of the same spectrum. Thus, we can find awe even in our terror.

To understand this spectrum and how it might help reduce fear, let?s first look at the definitions of terror and awe. Terror constitutes intense fear or anxiety. This is not simple worry but full blown, overriding fear. Awe, on the other hand, can include an overwhelming feeling of reverence or admiration?or the power to inspire these feelings, but it also can include fear or the power to inspire fear. So, for example, you can feel awe or fear of God.

In Hebrew, the word for awe, fear and terror are the same??yirah.? The reason for this comes from the fact that they exist in different places on the same spectrum of emotion. To understand how this works, imagine yourself feeling awe at arriving at the top of a mountain and seeing the gorgeous panoramic view, then moving closer to the edge of the cliff and feeling fear, and moving even closer, so close that your toes almost hang over and rocks tumble off the edge, and you feel terror about possibly falling.

If you can take your terror and physically step backward to fear and then backward again to awe, you find yourself seeing the miracle of life once again. You find yourself feeling wonder and exhilaration at the miracles around you; you feel awe for God?s presence in all that exists. Thus, you experience both ends of the emotional spectrum of fear?terror and awe.

Simply changing your focus accomplishes this as well. If you were still standing at the very edge of the cliff, you could focus upon the dirt and rocks falling and your toes at the edge of the solid ground, all of which bring up your feelings of being vulnerable and exposed to danger, or you could focus on the same thing you focused on as you came up the trail?the fabulous, awe inspiring spectacle of nature and God?s handiwork. Instead of fear, you would feel awe.

In this way you get back to awe not by physically stepping backward and away from that which causes you fear or terror. You simply back up your thoughts and emotions to the place where you felt awe, to the place where you experienced the thrill of life. You change your emotions by changing your thoughts and where you place the focus of your attention.

Or you can focus upon the fact that you actually are standing at the edge and are safe. Be in the moment. Allow yourself to feel the exhilaration of standing on the edge of a cliff and knowing all is well. Allow yourself to see the miracle in that moment, in the fact that you are safe on the edge of the cliff. Make a choice about how you will feel in the moment, how you will perceive the experience. Be in the ?now.?

You also can picture awe and fear as if they exist on opposite ends of a bridge and find a way to walk across the bridge from one end to the other, your goal being to find a place along that particular bridge that feels positive and comfortable. Hopefully, you will discover that as you walk along the bridge you end up at the opposite end of the spectrum. In other words, if previously you stood on the ?fear side? of the bridge, you now stand at the ?awe? side. Any other thoughts or feelings that go with your sense of fear can be used in this exercise. For instance, you can walk from the ?fear side? to the ?courage? or ?safety? side. If you felt ?insecure? before, you may now stand on the side of ?security.? Accomplish this by taking small steps?actual physical actions?that help your traverse the mental bridge as well as actually move through your fear. Also do so by making choices about where you place your focus (on fear, awe or safety).

If you remain conscious, you can choose fear or awe in any moment. By so doing, you can dictate if you are able to move forward freely and courageously towards your goals. If you do so, you will find that you are living your life more fully and achieving your full human potential.