Do you attract what you fear or is it just a catch-phrase? It is true that you attract what you fear but you also attract what you love, what you dream of and what you desire most.
We often hear this idea in the law of attraction and a lot has been written on this from a psychological point of view.
You may have big dreams and have great intentions to attract and manifest certain things but you end up attracting something that is often the opposite.
Why?
Your fears may give you a much greater insight into what you are attracting into your life and why. The law of attraction is universal and is always at work.
What you attract into your life are never random events. It is always in direct response to your dominant thoughts and feelings.
It is true that you attract what you fear but there is a lot more to it than that. You also attract what you love, what you dream of and what you desire most.
Let’s look at this in more detail and unravel this strange and wonderful thing called fear. When you understand something you can change it.
Fear is not something to avoid or to discard. We want to start “stalking” our own fears and use them as a teacher to help us navigate towards what we DO want.
What Is Fear Anyway?
Fear is a really interesting thing. Fear is both an emotion and a response. Human beings have what is called the “fight or flight response” which is more formally known as the acute stress response.
This is a response that is built into our nervous system and is designed to keep us alive. It is a physiological reaction that happens in your body and mind when you are threatened in any way.
This survival mechanism served us well in prehistoric times where humankind faces many physical threats on a daily basis.
In our modern world we face very few physical threats and we have since distorted this fight or flight response in a very strange way.
Our imaginations have taken over and most of the stresses we experience in our daily lives now trigger this fight or flight response. Even though these stress factors are not really life-threatening, we make it up to be that in our minds and our bodies respond.
Most of what you fear has no basis in reality. It is mostly stuff that you have made up in your mind to the point where you believe it.
There is an acronym for F.E.A.R – False Evidence Appearing Real. This is very important to understand because what you fear most may appear to be very real but it is in fact only something that was conjured up by your imagination.
Courage is knowing what not to fear.
– Plato
Your mind responds to fear in very strange ways. You may get an unexpected bill in the mail and all of a sudden your mind starts racing.
You start thinking of all your outstanding bills, how some payments are due, how you might not be able to afford your rent, how your job is not secure and before you know it you see (and feel) yourself living on the streets.
There is a very important rule of the mind to understand when it comes to fear and that is that your imagination will always trump your logic.
Your fears rarely have any logic to them but they will always trump your logic because your imagination will take over and feed off the fear.
Fear is a powerful emotion and can consume your mind and if you do not control it, it will control you.
Why Do You Attract What You Fear
The reason why you attract what you fear is simply that when fear becomes your dominant thought then that is what you must attract into your life.
The law of attraction dictates that whatever you focus on will expand in your life. What you think and feel most of the time will be attracted into your life.
To say this in another way: whatever you place your energy and your attention on will expand in your experience.
This is exactly where the problem lies. Consciously you may want to attract a certain job or more money or your soulmate. You may have it written down, have a vision board and focus on it once or twice a day.
When you step away from focusing on what you DO want, the fear starts taking over again and becomes your dominant thoughts again.
Simply focusing on what you want in-between long spells of being dominated by fear is NOT enough to manifest what you want.
It is why you attract what you fear.
Fear is a very powerful emotion and fearful thoughts feed on themselves and can create a monster inside your head – but only if you allow it.
You need to take back control of your own thoughts and the way you do it may be very different to what you think.
Trying hard to think positive and to keep your thoughts away from fear is impossible. What you resist persists.
There is a much better way to do this – and it requires no “fighting” with your fears.
The Opposite of Fear
One of the great lessons from A Course In Miracles is that the opposite of fear is love. Love is on the opposite spectrum of fear from an energetic point of view.
So, while fear can grip us in a powerful way, love can free us in an even more powerful way.
The way to remove fear is not to remove fear. The way to remove fear is to introduce love. The way to remove darkness is to introduce light.
Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.
– Yoda
This is a great analogy to help you visualize this. You can see fear as something dark in your life but as soon as you introduce love, the fear disappears.
Fear can not exist where there is love.
How To Stop Attracting What You Fear
You need to create an environment inside yourself where love will flourish and where fear does not feel welcome.
Have you ever been to a party where you were completely overdressed (or underdressed)? You felt completely out of place and like you did not belong there. The reason why you felt like you did not belong there was that the environment did not match your energy.
The same will happen inside you when you create an environment in your thoughts and your heart that is filled with love, peace, joy, and gratitude. Fear can not exist in an environment where love dominates.
It may come in from time to time but it won’t stay long because it does not feel welcome. There is nothing for it to feed on so it eventually leaves and the more love there is the faster fear will dissipate.
To stop attracting what you fear you need to create this environment of love inside you and it is not about bringing love into your love.
Love is your natural state.
Experiencing divine love is all about removing everything that is not love. Removing all the junk and “taking out the trash” in your mind is liberating. We tend to hold on to the junk because it feels familiar even though it does not serve us.
Knowing this is a powerful tool in itself.
No matter what you want to attract into your life, if you bring the energy of love into your being, all fear will disappear and what you want to attract and manifest can connect with you because you will be living at a higher vibration.
Fear is an energy that keeps you closed off and contracted. Love is an energy that opens you up and expands.
So, how do you do this?
Here are a few easy exercises that you can do daily to allow love to flourish in your life.
You don’t even have to “work hard” at the things you want to manifest. You simply turn your energy over to love and what you want can flow to you with ease.
1. Whom do I love and who loves me
You want to do this once day and simply sit down, close your eyes and ask yourself “who do I love and who loves me?”. See these people in your life and focus on the love you have for them.
When I think of my mom or my children I can not have any thought other than love. I indulge in these thoughts and it fills me with nothing but love.
Everybody has people they love and who love them. Find yours and focus on it often.
2. I send you love and light
Just like we all have people that we love, we also have people that irritate us, that did things we don’t like or who we just don’t get along with.
This is quite normal since we all operate by certain beliefs and values. When someone is different then we tend to not have harmony with them.
Close your eyes and think of these people in your life. Then, send them love and light.
There’s no special technique here. Just say it out loud: I send you love and light.
3. Forgiveness
There might be people in your life that you resent. This is much bigger than people that you merely dislike or who annoyed you.
If there is anyone in your life that you “know” you should forgive but you haven’t then you are hanging on to a resentment that will poison YOU.
When you forgive someone completely, you do it for yourself – not for them. Forgiveness is one of the big barriers to love and it creates a breeding ground for fear to flourish.
4. Gratitude
Gratitude is powerful and when you start to practice gratitude you open the doors to love and a higher consciousness.
When you are grateful, your mind can not accommodate any fear, anger, or resentment. Gratitude is one of the highest vibrational states you can be in.
Gratitude is something you practice and it is something that you DO. At least once a day, you can close your eyes and direct your focus to everything that you are grateful for.
When you are grateful you do not experience any lack or scarcity. Coincidently, when you experience lack or scarcity, fear tends to take over and creates more of the experience of lack and scarcity.
5. Who you surround yourself with
Do you surround yourself with negative people who constantly gossip and hate on others. This happens to varying degrees with everyone.
You have a choice to not speak ill of anyone. Getting involved in these sorts of conversations with friends, family or colleagues are poisonous to you.
Make an effort to always find something great in every person. You can turn it into a habit and once you do it will completely transform your life.
You can even become the force of love and when you are in conversations where people are hating on their partner, their boss or the president – don’t participate. Instead, point out something good in them.
6. What you feed your mind
You don’t have to look very far to find something negative or something that will scare the life out of you. Simply turn on the news.
The news media feeds on fear. Fear sells and they know it. Getting sucked into that is poisonous. Virtually every story on the news is written around some idea of fear because that is what grips people and makes them want more. Fear is a creature that craves more of what it is.
You can keep informed without buying into the fear.
Become very careful with what you feed your mind. There are thousands of positive, inspiring and uplifting ideas you can feed your mind through articles, books, podcasts and even Youtube.
You do not have to read the doom and gloom in the newsmedia. You do not have to watch the violence on TV. These things are not insignificant.
Everything you feed your mind will have a consequence in your thoughts.
Attracting What You Fear – Conclusion
Do you attract what you fear? Yes, and fear is something that can completely control your experience of life. People who suffer from anxiety simply live in a constant state of fear.
They see things worse than they are.
Fear can be a teacher to you. If you closely look at what you want to manifest most in your life then you will see that there is some level of fear attached to it.
To some extent, this is normal because attracting anything new bears some fear of the unfamiliar.
When you expose your own fears and examine them closely you will see how irrational they really are. Don’t try and eliminate your fears. Focus on its opposite instead and let love flourish in your life.
Love dissipates fear and it opens the doors for you to attract what you really want instead of attracting what you fear. If what you want to manifest serves only as a reminder of what you don’t have you need to shift your focus.