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Chapter 19 Face What You Fear

Chapter 19 Face What You Fear. Robert Holmes. This material may be used without fee or charge, providing relevant acknowledgement is made about authorship. No replication, printing or use in training Institutions without prior written permission. . Disaster strikes.

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Chapter 19 Face What You Fear

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  1. Chapter 19Face What You Fear Robert Holmes This material may be used without fee or charge, providing relevant acknowledgement is made about authorship. No replication, printing or use in training Institutions without prior written permission.

  2. Disaster strikes • You live on Broadmeadow Avenue in a pretty standard home. • A violent storm has reduced your city to a nightmare. • The streets are flooded, the dams have filled to overflowing, and one of the local levies is showing signs of distress. • Power went out an hour ago.

  3. New Orleans • Welcome to New Orleans after TC Katrina • 80% of the city was devastated, some of it buried in 20 feet of water. • The city’s worst nightmare had happened, because TC Katrina caused two significant (and unmaintained) levy’s to break. • How would you react to losing everything?

  4. Consider Job • Job’s story is stellar, and known by just about everybody. • A rich man who lost it all, a powerful man stripped of his glory. • He lived and died in the land of Uz, on the borders of Edom in the Middle East (to South south in modern Jordan).

  5. Sickness comes first • Modern day physicians conclude that he probably suffered simultaneously from elephantiasis, erythema and smallpox. • He was thrown out of the city, considered a byword, a cursed man suffering the judgements of a Holy God. • Torn apart by grief, reeling under his sicknesses and being treated like a pariah.

  6. Then everything else • Then he lost his house in a collapse (probably caused by fire) in which his children also died. • He was finally delivered the humiliating news that all his cattle had been stolen by raiders. • Job declares, “That which I greatly feared has come upon me.” (Job 3:25).

  7. Primal fear • Neuroscience has explored the interaction between our “base” emotional reactions and our “higher” rational decisions. • The limbic system is a part of your brain structure, buried deep. It is the seat of emotion: fear, aggression, contentment, peace. • The cortex (folded grey matter) wraps around it: controlling interpretation of input, decision making, forecasting, reasoning and memory.

  8. The amygdala • The amygdala (in the limbic system) controls your fear response. • Depending on how powerful the signals it sends, and what part it plays in your brain response, you may be paralysed, react in a completely incalculable way or you may be very rational. • It responds at the speed of light!

  9. Below neutral • We should be happy that our amygdala warns us not to walk in front of a moving truck. • But what can we do when it causes us to shirk from responsibility (e.g. Bronwyn). • Worse still, what about when it stops us boarding an aircraft (e.g. Perth)? • Or what if it automatically works to bring us the very things we fear!

  10. Facing what you fear • We need to face what we fear, and overcome it (this is called re-training). • Here’s my previous list of fears: - Fear of heights – abseiling and now bungie jumping - Fear of enclosed spaces – caving - Fear of dark – night caving

  11. What are you afraid of? • We feared losing Elijah. • We lost him twice. • We need to surrender our fears to God. • He alone can deliver us from them before they destroy our lives.

  12. Re-training • I retrained my amygdala, I overcame it’s natural response to stop me exploring exciting new opportunities. • I now enjoy walking deep caves with my children. • On my honeymoon I went scuba diving, snorkeling with sharks and night diving (so much for fearing the dark). • For my thirtieth birthday I went skydiving.

  13. The response to suffering • A physician once told me that a broken bone is stronger than an unbroken one. • Once it has been reset, it will be wider and denser than before. So too, a broken man is stronger than an unbroken person. • Suffering is a gift, suffering can bring great and helpful change, or it can destroy your soul. • [There’s no payoff in suffering for stupidity].

  14. Conclusion • Adventure training is used by the Australian army to face situations. • Make an honest assessment about what scares you and therefore limits your life. • This is not a one off deal, fears will surface and resurface, but we can overcome them.

  15. Contact Details For more information contact Storm Harvest www.stormharvest.com.au www.balancingact.me Cootamundra, NSW Australia Cape Girardeau, Missouri USA Johanessburg, Gauteng Sth Africa Ponnur, Andra Pradesh India Cagayan de Oro, Mindanao Philippines

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