First and foremost, I express joyous gratitude for each new day because it is the first day of the rest of my life.

Secondly, the question I ask myself is how can I NOT love myself and all that is around me? I am a manifestation of God(dess) creating! I am perfect as I am as all things and everyone else because God(dess) only creates perfection in as many conceivable ways possible. The more different the better. How boring life would be if we were alike and behave like cookie cutter beings. Unfortuneately, that's how people want the world to be. I thank God(dess) that I am not!

I am completely with you on the notion of "pulling myself back up by the bootstraps" as I was lost in my fear for many months and am now coming out of the fog and taking the first steps toward creating a sturdier foundation for my life. My fear (of getting hurt in relationships, of abandonment and rejection) caused me to act wildly erratic, send my anger and negativity in the direction of the last person I should target (the man who gave me my copy of "The Four Agreements" and urged me to read it for months, *sigh*), and take everything personally. I became so wrapped up in the "me of it all" that I misplaced the ability to step outside of myself and view the motivations of those around me as anything other than a single minded disregard for my feelings.

In the past couple of weeks I've read and re-read "The Four Agreements" and now here I am, facing myself, recognizing, owning and cleaning up my messes and resetting the basic assumptions through which I view the world. This last is a key component, for me anyway, to opening myself to love. I am resetting my default to "I am a loving person which is why I am surrounded by people who love me" instead of "nobody cares, why bother, it's just going to end badly" which, of course, it inevitably does when I show those around me a tall emotional fence with a big sign saying just that.

I've also been reading "Learning to Fly: Trapeze- Reflections on Fear, Trust, and the Joy of Letting Go " by Sam Keen. I recommend it; his writing is comfortable and warm and very accessible. Here are two quotations I've been keeping in my pocket:
"Since fear is such a complex phenomenon, it creates illusion and unhappiness in so far as we allow it to remain unconscious. If we fail to separate, classify, decipher and demystify our various fears, they appear in disguised forms."

and this (which I attempted to trim but decided was best left in its entirety):
"The short leap from the trapeze to the catcher is a flight from primal fear to basic trust, from I to thou, from autonomy to communion, that can only be made by a total commitment to self. Flying, like faith, hope and love, is an existential act that cannot be accomplished by a spectator. Without the mutual trust and action of flyer and catcher, there is no trick, no art, no transcendence of individuality and isolation."

I just roll with the punches. I accept my fear as part of myself. As an emotion. As something that will pass. If I let myself freak out when I am overcome with fear, then I get depressed, upset, sad, angry, you name it. I find that in the past I used to resist my fears so much that it kept me in fear. Kind of like I was afraid to admit my fears or even feal them. Am I making sense? Anyway, I still have my moments, certain "triggers", but I find that I am much more kind to myself now. When I am upset or afraid, I just talk to the little girl inside me and assure her that everything will be allright. When I am gentle and kind to myself, love comes easy.

What you describe sounds to me like "living from dependency" instead of "living at source".

I've been working on this one since I can remember.

"All roads lead to core material."

For me, the shift from dependency to source requires me to notice what I am doing and then making a conscious change to shift my perspective.

Sometimes this works better than other times.

On the one hand it is really very simple. The trick, of course, is in the implementation.

I have learned the best information and tools for this at a seminar about 15 or 18 years ago. I still attend them from time to time, and remain impressed with them.

H

Hope this helps;

I learned along time ago to let fear go, it comes and goes like the eb and flow of the tide. there is nothing I can do to control it and like so many things in life the attempt to control it just drags you under. When most people learn to surf they try to fight the board and the wave, if the board sags to the backside they natural adjust to the front, but they are trying to control it, so they push to hard and dive in/fall off. The same goes with learning these negative, poisonous emotions. I had to learn to flow with the emotion, letting it come in recognizing what it was and letting it pass again, it always will. I firmly believe that everyone has something like surfing in their life that has taught them the concepts of total surrender to achieve total mastery, and if you have, when you are feeling fearful and feel like the brain is on "auto pilot" just stop take a big breathe and in the back of your mind visualize that thing place or whatever that brings you back. For me, I see, feel, hear, and taste that wave, and then it is as if I remember who I am again.

MASTER YOUR FEARS (excerpted from Day by Day with James Allen)
by Vic Johnson

"Doubt and fear are the great enemies of knowledge, and he who encourages them, who does not slay them, thwarts himself at every step." - As A Man Thinketh

I've heard it said that we're born with only a few fears - like the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. All other fears we learn along the way. Like the fear of failure, the fear of rejection - even a fear of success. I believe our greatest enemy in life is fear, because fear keeps us from doing many of those things we would like to do that would make our life more complete and more enjoyable.

Doubt is the firs cousin of fear and precedes it. We weren't born with doubt. Our habit of doubt has grown throughout our life. If we dwell on a doubt and give in to it, it then grows into fear. The Apostle James reminds us that doubt makes us ineffective, "a sea that is tossed and driven by the wind; and every decision you then make will be uncertain, as you turn first this way, and then that."

If most of our fears and all of our doubts are learned along the way, then we can "unlearn" them by becoming masters of our thoughts. I've heard Zig Ziglar quote Mark Twain when he said, "True courage is not the absence of fear, it's the mastery of fear." The people who live the life of their dreams have just as many fears as those who live miserable, unfulfilled lives - they just learned to master their fears instead of allowing their fears to master them.

Norman Vincent Peale, writing in "You Can If You Think You Can", provides us with a prescription for mastering fear and doubt. "You can cancel out fear with faith. For there is no force in this world more powerful than faith. The most amazing things can happen as a result of it…there are tow massive thought forces competing for control of the mind: fear and faith, and faith is stronger, much stronger. Hold that thought of faith's greater power until you believe it, for it can be the difference between success and failure."

Ambrose Redmoon said that, "courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear."

Everyone is afraid at some time of another. Those who succeed in conquering fear have put their focus on what's more important to them rather than on the fear. If your young child darted into the street in front of traffic, you'd easily overcome the fear of any physical danger that retrieving the child would pose. The child's life is more important to you than the fear. So focus on what's beyond the fear - what's on the other side - whe3n you overcome the fear.

Brian Tracy has a great way to fight doubt. He says, "Don’t' wonder whether something is possible - Over and over if you have to, but ask how can you do it, not whether you can."

And that's worth thinking about.