Banish Fear and Start Getting in Shape for Summer.

Do you ever find yourself wondering if you can do it? Questioning that goal you've set for yourself. "Can I ever lose these last few pounds?"

"Will I ever get back in even decent physical shape again?"

You're not alone. Banish fear from your vocabulary and keep moving. Action is the key. Don't let fear get in the way of your better health and fitness.

Over one hundred years ago, A wise man put to words the following piece of timeless wisdom:

"In civilized life it has at last become possible for large numbers of people to pass from the cradle to the grave without ever having had a pang of genuine fear. Many of us need an attack of mental disease to teach us the meaning of the word."—William James.

We have all heard the seemingly discriminating remarks that fear is normal and abnormal, and that normal fear is to be regarded as a friend, while abnormal fear should be destroyed as an enemy.

The fact is that no so—called normal fear can be named which has not been clearly absent in some people who have had every cause therefor. If you will run over human history in your mind, or look about yea in the present life, you will find here and there persons who, in situations or before objects which ought, as any fearful soul will insist, to inspire the feeling of at least normal self-protecting fear, are nevertheless wholly without the feeling. They possess every feeling and thought demanded except fear. The idea of self-preservation is as strongly present as with the most abjectly timid or terrified, but fear they do not know.

This FEARLESS awareness of fear—suggesting conditions may be due to several causes. It may result from constitutional make-up, or from long—continued training or habituation, or from religious ecstasy, or from a perfectly calm sense of spiritual selfhood which is unhurtable, or from the action of very exalted reason. Whatever the explanation, the fact remains: the very causes which excite fear in most of us, merely appeal, with such people, if at all. to the instinct of self-preservation and to reason, the thought-element of the soul which makes for personal peace and wholeness.

BANISH ALL FEAR.

It is on such considerations that I have come to hold that all real fear-FEELING should and may be banished from our life, and that what we call "normal fear" should be substituted in our language by "instinct" or by "reason," the element of fear being dropped altogether.

"Everyone can testify that the psychical state called fear consists of mental representations of certain painful results" (James). The mental representations may be very faint as such, but the idea of hurt to self is surely present. If, then, it can be profoundly believed that the real self cannot be hurt; if the reason can be brought to consider vividly and believingly all quieting considerations;  fear itself must be removed "as far as the east is from the west."

   You can achieve your fitness goals. Summer is just around the corner. Enjoy Spring, get rid of those unwarranted fears and useless worry. Start getting in shape for your best Summer ever!