Fear
Fear is a mental poison, unless it is used as an antidote—a stimulus to spur a person on to calm caution. Fear draws to itself objects of fear, as a magnet draws to itself pieces of iron. Fear intensifies and magnifies our physical pain and mental agonies a hundredfold. Fear is destructive to the heart, nervous system, and brain. It is destructive to mental initiative, courage, judgment, common sense, and will power. Fear shrouds the soul’s all-conquering confidence and power. When something is threatening to harm you, do not throttle your creative mental powers with fear. Instead, use fear as a goad to find practical solutions to avoid danger. When something is threatening you, do not sit idle—do something about it, calmly mustering all the power of your will and judgment. Fear of failure or sickness is nourished by thinking constantly of dire possibilities, until these take root in the subconscious and finally in the superconscious. These fear seeds germinate and fill the mind with fear plants bearing poisonous, fear fruits. If you are unable to dislodge the haunting fear of failure or ill health, divert your mind by turning your attention to interesting, absorbing books, or even to harmless amusements. After the mind forgets its haunting fear, encourage it to discover and root out the causes of failure and ill health in the soil of your daily life. Do not fear disease or accidents if you have had them once. Rather, fear to be afraid, for such fear will create disease- and accident-consciousness, and if it is strong enough, you will draw to yourself the very things you most fear. On the other hand, fearlessness will, in all probability, avert them, or at least minimize their power. Kill fear by refusing to be afraid. Know that you are safe behind the battlements of God’s eternal safety, even though you are rocked on seas of suffering, or find death knocking at your door. God’s protecting rays can dispel the menacing clouds of doomsday, calm the waves of trials, and keep you safe, whether you are in a castle or on the battlefield of life, with bullets of trials flying around you. When fear comes, tense and relax, and exhale several times. Switch on the electricity of calmness and nonchalance. Let your whole mental machinery wake up and actively hum with the vibration of will. Then, harness the power of will to the cogwheels of fearless caution and good judgment. Continuously revolve these to produce practical ideas for escaping your specific, impending calamity. A mental indulgence in fear will create a subconscious fear habit. Then, when something upsetting to the regular routine occurs, the subconscious fear habit will assert itself, magnify the object of your fears, and paralyze the will-to-fight-fear faculty of the conscious mind. Since you are made in God’s image, you have all the powers and potentialities of God. It is wrong to think that your trials are greater than your divinity. Remember, no matter what your tests are, you are not too weak to fight them. God will not allow you to be tried beyond your strength. Fear should not produce mental inertia, paralysis, or despondency. Instead, it should spur you on to calm, cautious activity, avoiding equally rashness and timidity . Uproot fear from within by forceful concentration on courage— and by shifting your consciousness to the absolute peace within. Associate with healthy and prosperous people who do not fear sickness or failure.
Worry
No matter how busy you are, do not forget occasionally to free your mind completely from worries and all duties. Dismiss them from your mind. Remember, you were not made for them; they were made by you. Do not allow them to torture you. When you are beset by overwhelming mental trials or worries, try to fall asleep. If you can do that, you will find on awakening that that worry has loosened its grip upon you. Tell yourself that even if you died, the earth would continue to follow its orbit, and business would be carried on as usual; hence, why worry? When you take yourself too seriously, death comes along to mock you and remind you of the brevity of material life and its duties. Mental relaxation consists in the ability to free the attention at will from haunting worries over past and present difficulties, dread of accidents, or disturbing thoughts and attachments. Mastery in mental relaxation comes with faithful practice. It can be attained by freeing the mind of all thoughts at will and keeping the attention fixed on peace and contentment within. By faithful practice you can divert the attention from worry to peace through meditation. Any time you are tired or worried, inhale and tense, then throw your breath out and relax your whole body; remain without thought or breath for a few moments, and you will become calm. Let go of your worries. Enter into absolute silence every morning and night. Try to remain for one minute at a time without thinking, especially if you are worried. Then try to remain several minutes with a quiet mind. Then visualize some happy incident in your life; mentally go through the pleasant experience over and over again until you forget your worries entirely.
Worry Fasting
If you are suffering from mental ill health, go on a mental diet. A health-giving mental fast will clear the mind and rid it of the accumulated mental poisons resulting from a careless, faulty mental diet. First of all, learn to remove the cause of your worries without permitting them to worry you. Do not feed your mind with daily created mental poisons of fresh worries. Worries are often the result of attempting to do too many things hurriedly. Do not “bolt” your mental duties, but thoroughly masticate them, one at a time, with the teeth of attention, and saturate them with the saliva of good judgment. Thus you will avoid worry indigestion. Whenever you make up your mind not to worry and decide to go on a worry fast, stick to your resolution. You can stop worrying entirely. Say to yourself: “I can do only my best; no more. I am satisfied and happy that I am doing my best to solve my problem; there is absolutely no reason why I should worry.” When you are on a worry fast, drink copiously of the fresh waters of peace flowing from the spring of every circumstance, vitalized by your determination to be cheerful. If you have made up your mind to be cheerful, nothing can make you unhappy. If you do not choose to destroy your peace of mind by accepting the suggestion of unhappy circumstances, no one can make you dejected. Be concerned only with the untiring performance of right actions and not with their results. Leave the latter to God, saying, “I have done my best under the circumstances. Therefore, I am happy.” Three times a day, shake off all worries. At seven o’clock in the morning, say to yourself: “All my worries of the night are cast out, and from 7 to 8 a.m. I refuse to worry, no matter how troublesome are the duties ahead of me. I am on a worry fast.” From noon to 1 p.m. say, “I am cheerful, I will not worry.” In the evening, between six and nine o’clock, while in the company of your husband or wife or “hard-to-get-along-with” relatives or friends, mentally make a strong resolution: “Within these three hours I will not worry; I refuse to get vexed, even if I am nagged. No matter how tempting it is to indulge in a worry feast, I will resist the temptation. I must not paralyze my peace-heart by shocks of worries. I cannot afford to worry.” After you succeed in carrying out worry fasts during certain hours of the day, try doing it for one or two weeks at a time, and then try to prevent the accumulation of worry poisons in your system entirely. Whenever you find yourself indulging in a worry feast, go on a partial or complete worry fast for a day or a week. Although the negative method for overcoming worry poisoning is worry fasting, there are also positive methods. A person infected with the germs of worry must feast regularly on the society of joyful minds. Every day he must associate, if only for a little while, with “joy-infected” minds. There are some people the song of whose laughter nothing can still. Seek them out and feast with them on this most vitalizing food of joy. Continue the laughter diet for a month or two, feasting on laughter in the company of really joyful people. Digest it thoroughly by whole-heartedly masticating laughter with the teeth of your attention. Steadfastly continue your laughter diet once you have begun it, and at the end of a month or two you will see the change —your mind will be filled with sunshine. Remember, specific habits can be changed only by specific habit-forming actions.
Nervousness
Fear, worry, and anger are the mental causes of nervousness. When you are angry, you poison the blood and burn the nerves. Anger changes the chemicals in the blood and affects circulation. When wrath comes, you become the tool of ignorance and do wrong things. When you worry, you paralyze the nerves . The cure is to be calm at all times and to do your best. If something has gone wrong, correct the error. Look at things intelligently and peacefully, and you will gain the right understanding. Cultivate peace, calmness, and cheerfulness. The more cheerful and calm you are, the better it is for you. The more you worry, or are angry or afraid, the less poise you have. The more peace you have, the less nervousness. You will find that there is a law of God that will protect you. Your nervousness will disappear when you realize that you are one with God. You must realize that you are not this flesh but the Spirit behind the flesh. Every night before going to bed, say: “I am a Prince of Peace sitting on the throne of Poise.”