ON FEAR AND WHY CHILDREN ARE THE BEST COACHES

One of the most important and delicate topics we discuss with my clients in Coaching sessions is related to their deep fears.

One of my teachers when it comes to learning to manage the deep fears, we all have is the great Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Physically it is obvious that we must have a sense of security. The brain can only function in a state of complete safety. The brain needs safety like a child.

Beyond the biological fear for survival, Jiddu Krishnamurti shows us another fear that he calls psychological which has nothing to do with knowledge.

It is a fear generated by the unknown, by the uncontrollable that life often is.

I often think in this sense when I arrived in Italy from Romania. I had a scholarship at the University of Rome but at that time in Italy the fear of immigrants was the political talk of the moment. Today not much has changed, but now politics incites people to fear Indians, Arabs, Chinese, Africans etc. etc., no longer Romanians. This is the kind of fear Krishnamurti talks about. We don't know the other, so we fear them, and this generates prejudices, conflicts and further fears.

We build a narrative, a scenario of what could happen. Meaning OUR MINDS build scenarios of what could happen.

The mind makes narratives such as building a house, but it also designs possible scenarios of my future and depending on how I am, optimistic, pessimistic etc. I see future scenarios that for me are absolutely true and real.

These scenarios are just ideas. Can you see that? These scenarios are simply thoughts that project themselves over time.

Krishnamurti says Fear is Time. PSYCHOLOGICAL TIME.

THE MIND builds its own reality which is perceived as absolutely real over which you can fight, argue, enter into conflict with yourself and others. WARS ARE MANUFACTURED ON FEAR. All wars start with the narratives in the mind of one person or more humans.

This is the space where fear takes root. INSIDE THE MIND!!!

Our mind's ability to remember also tends to focus on past wounds and thus tends to have an impact on our present. Our minds fit situations and people into the painful images we have from the past and we fear they may be repeated in the future.

According to Krishnamurti, freeing oneself from psychological fear consists precisely in observing the whole situation. This means BECOMING AN OBSERVER of your own mind and practicing this every single day from small to big situations and challenges. This also means TRAINING YOUR OWN MIND to incorporate the idea that YOU ARE ITS OBSERVER.

Seeing means when you begin to become aware that those painful situations cannot be repeated in the future. Seeing means seeing how I myself and you yourself, we crystallize something that happened in the past and carry that with us like a backpack.

One of the metaphors Krishnamurti uses is when he talks about the FEAR as THE COBRA ENTERING THE. ROOM.

If you saw what anger does to the mind-body organism at the moment it happened, he says, if there was such direct attention that put you in touch with all the intoxication that anger causes, if you saw it with the same awareness that you would see a cobra now entering the room, you wouldn't play with it.

When you see a cobra entering the room, you get up and walk away, go the other way.

It's not just about remembering but about seeing the violent anger that can arise in each of us and in others at any moment. It’s about becoming more and more aware of our emotions, thoughts, behaviors and beliefs.

Krishnamurti continues:

“Until human beings change, society will not change.”

But why is it so difficult for almost all of us humans to deeply understand that society will not change until humans don't change?

Because we have been trained to believe that what happens to us is determined by something external to us, coming from the outside. That someone or something from Heaven or Earth has the REMOTE CONTROL on us and we are mere VICTIMS.

Many times, the memories of past wounds, instead of generating a healthy ability to protect us from the same situations, generate new fears and, oh God, conflicts and violence, like the two extremely painful WARS we have in Europe or near Europe in this moment. We should let go of the painful burdens of the past, both at the individual and social levels, says Krishnamurti.

BUT HOW TO LET GO?

Krishnamurti makes us see how the mind can be a magnificent instrument that composes symphonies, that builds wonderful buildings and, at the same time an instrument that builds weapons that create death and destruction, that impose impossible living conditions on people. It is the same tool: THE HUMAN MIND.

What THE MIND does in the world of matter, of concreteness obviously has an impact of extraordinary beauty but when we take THE MIND into the world of interiority it is no longer the right instrument because it generates illusion and lies. When the mind becomes the controller of everything we cannot really see. We are blind.

And what is the tool to use in order to see the inner truth?

The heart and all the senses make us able to deeply listen and see what is really happening. Because the heart and all the senses are instruments of LOVE, EMPATHY AND COMPASSION.

When we see with the Eye of the Heart, we see from a perspective opposite to FEAR. WE SEE FROM LOVE.

Who are those who most easily and naturally see with the eyes of Love?

According to Krishnamurti, CHILDREN.

We can find a gaze free from imaginations about the future and prejudices of the past and this gaze is the gaze of children most capable of seeing.

Children are not yet placed on a clear flow between the past and the future.

We adults are already contaminated by this idea of continuity towards the future; instead, children are much more tied to the experience of the present. And for this reason, children experience the sensations that come from reality much more intensely.

Children are great TEACHERS OF LOVE because they read the poetry of the world, the MAGIC of the WORLD.