by Kevin Emery

Created on: January 20, 2009

Stop Allowing Fear to Block Your Path to Abundance

Today we use science, statistical data, patriotism, religion, popularity, wealth, health, and love, as ways to control. We are manipulated by what we may or may not be, have, lose or never get if we do not do, think or verbalize, exactly as we are told to.

Hung over our heads are images of everything from physical suffering, isolation from our tribe, to imprisonment or death. Even then, we're threatened with the loss of our eternal souls, cast into the hell fires of damnation. These are among the ultimate forms of peer pressure.

Did you think that peer pressure stopped when you graduated from high school? It didn't. High school is just the training ground. It prepares you for a lifetime of conforming to peer pressure.

Your peers include your family, workplace, church, age group, educational level, and even your class level. You spend your whole life surrounded by varying groups of peers with various rules. Whether or not you follow those rules determines whether you're accepted, ostracized, or even punished.

When applied with enough authority and tenacity, those rules can seem almost unshakeable. Even if misused information and power are revealed, their power to intimidate and control doesn't seem to lessen. Generations of abuse may continue before the victims challenge the fear mongers. It took decades of abuse for American colonists to declare their independence from the mother country.

Likewise, hundreds of years of abuse transpired before for the Protestant Reformation reached critical mass.

It's time to examine fear as a factor in our personal and spiritual growth.

Fear is a powerful weapon of control because so much of our early training and role modeling tell us not to believe in ourselves. We are taught and guided to doubt our own experiences. We learn to question our ability to process and reason. We become afraid to trust our own intuitive connection, especially if it is not in alignment with the beliefs and thought process of the authorities in charge.

Fear mongers prevail because we do not challenge them. We don't risk the consequences of speaking our truth.

When we find other people ready to speak the truth, we estimate their size. The greater the number of people on our side, the less the risk and the more likely we are to join that group.

Unfortunately, the more a group becomes cohesive and grows, the more likely it is to recreate its own peer pressure. Within it, we see the same need to control and authoritarian

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