I Am Frightened Of My Own Body

There is a thing that happened and you do not need to describe it to me.

What matters for this article is what it left behind, which is not a physical condition. It is a habit of listening.

You listen all day. Not consciously, not all the time, but there is a channel open now that was not open before, and it monitors, and it reports, and it interprets. A change in your chest is no longer just a change in your chest. It is data.

And so you have quietly withdrawn from anything that produces a signal.

Stairs at pace. Carrying something up. Anything that would make your heart do something noticeable, because a noticeable heart is the exact input that channel is listening for, and once it has an input it does not let go of it for about two hours.

Nobody knows how much of your day this occupies. You have not described it out loud, partly because you are not sure it would survive being said, and partly because the first response would be reassurance, and reassurance is not what this is.

I am not going to reassure you. I am also not going to give you one word of medical advice, because this site does not, and because you have people for that and I am not one of them.

What I am going to do is separate two things that have got welded together, and then hand you ten minutes that is built for exactly this.

What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee

There is a line in Psalm fifty six that is unusual because it does not ask for the fear to go first.

What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee. (Psalm 56:3, King James Version)

What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.

Two things in one sentence, at the same time, with no gap between them.

You have a verse that puts the trusting inside the fear rather than after it, and Psalm 56:3 has never once required the fear to lift before anything else can happen. The trusting begins at the time of the being afraid, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present with somebody who is frightened right now.

You are able to hear how different that is from what people usually offer you, which is a version where the fear is dealt with first and then normal life resumes.

This one has no such order in it. The word is what time, meaning in the hour of, meaning during.

David is not describing a man who has stopped being afraid. He is describing what a frightened man does while still frightened, and that is a completely different and much more usable thing.

And there is nothing anywhere in the verse that treats the fear as a failure. It is stated as a circumstance, the way weather is stated.

You are able to be afraid and to act in the same hour, and Psalm 56:3 has never once made the one wait for the other. The Spirit of God is the one who is trusted in the hour of the fear, and the verse holds both of them in a single line without embarrassment.

Fear and danger are not the same signal

Here is the separation, and it is the only piece of analysis in this article.

Your body produces a sensation. Your fear interprets it. Those are two events and they have got welded into one.

You have two separate things arriving at once, and Psalm 56:3 has never once asked anybody to sort them out before trusting. It is written what time I am afraid, I will trust in thee, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in the four seconds while a man is deciding what a sensation means.

A raised heart rate is a sensation. That is all it is at the moment it arrives. It has no meaning attached.

Then something in you assigns a meaning, instantly, faster than thought, and the meaning is about what happened before.

And here is what makes this so difficult to argue with: the interpretation is not stupid. It is based on real experience. The channel opened for a reason and it is doing its job with the information it has.

You have an interpreter in you that is doing its job on the information it was given, and none of that has never once made you a fearful man by nature. Psalm 56:3 states the fear as a circumstance rather than as a fault, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in the four seconds while a meaning is being assigned.

So the work is not to convince anybody there is nothing to fear. That will not work, and I am not going to attempt it.

The work is to do something at a level so low that no sensation arrives at all, repeatedly, so that the channel has nothing to interpret and gradually stops reporting.

You are able to work below the level where the signal starts, and doing it that way has never once been avoidance. The Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody in the hour of the fear, and Psalm 56:3 puts the trusting alongside it rather than after it.

The slowest thing available, with somebody who knows

So here is the assignment, and every part of it is chosen for this.

Do ten minutes of the slowest thing available, with somebody beside you who knows, and stop before anything changes.

You are able to do ten minutes without producing one sensation, and ten minutes at that level has never once been a lesser ten minutes. It is written what time I am afraid, I will trust in thee, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is out on a level path with a man going deliberately slowly.

The slowest thing. Slower than a walk. Level ground, chosen for being level. If a hill would produce a signal, then no hill, and that is not a limitation, that is the design.

And stop before anything changes. Not when something changes. Before. You know your own margins better than anybody and you stop well inside them.

That is the mechanism: repeated experience of moving with no signal produced, so that moving stops being a thing that generates data.

You have one person who could be told this in a single sentence, and telling them has never once been the same as handing them the whole of it. Psalm 56:3 puts the trusting in the same hour as the fear, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man saying a hard sentence to his own brother.

Tell one person. Not the whole story and not the medical part. Just: I get frightened when my heart does anything, and I would like you to walk with me and not make anything of it.

That person's presence does something no amount of self talk does. It means that if something does happen, you are not alone with it, and the channel knows that, and the volume comes down for that reason rather than for any reason you argued yourself into.

You have somebody who would walk beside you and say nothing about it, and asking them has never once been the same as being a burden. Psalm 56:3 places the trusting inside the hour of the fear, and the Spirit of God is the one who is there in it with both of you.