I read a book recently that was a real eye opener: The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker. It’s a book from a professional who runs one of the most effective protection agencies in the world. I was impressed by this because he is common sensical, not advertising his own business (too much), and is trying to combat media hype that is putting us in danger by misinforming us. The message comes down to this: People who do bad things aren’t different from us. They aren’t monsters. They are human beings who do bad things. Therefore it is not a mystery that they can and will do bad things. You can see it coming, you can know that it’s going to happen, and you usually do. The problem is that you’ve been taught not to trust yourself.
In a world full of information, media, and input, we don’t trust what we know. We have been taught to trust what others have told us is true. We don’t trust our instincts, which is our body knowledge, we don’t trust our lizard brains which constantly analyze events around us for danger, and we talk ourselves out of what we know by using ‘logic’. He cites example after example of people who survived because they acted on what they knew even though it made no sense at the time or survived to tell the tale and were able to trace that they knew the event was going to happen before it did and they forced themselves to act against what they knew. Because if you survive it, hindsight can be 20/20.
You know so much about yourself and everything around you. It’s not psychic woo-woo stuff, it’s the skills we are inborn with for survival that have been taught out of us because ‘we don’t need them’ in a ‘safe and highly evolved society’. 😛 Living by logic takes you outside your body, outside experience, outside of ‘you’. Living in your body frees you to see the world as it is, warts and all. And how can you choose your best life, the path that makes you most happy, the way to reach your goals, if you aren’t in you body and you’re living by someone else’s logic? Be in your body and you’ll find it’s not a fearful place, it’s bliss (drink responsibly in moderation) and when you feel the funny feeling about something or someone, trust it. Because you know.
