Fear

According to Rick Hansen, a neurologist, who spoke on the Beyond Awakening Series recently, the human brain is hardwired for fear. His quote was, "Fear is Velcro, Good Feelings are Teflon."

There's an entire structure in the brain devoted to fear, the sympathetic nervous system, the oldest and most primitive part of the brain. We're basically running outdated software on outdated hardware, but all is not apparently lost. The reason that original wiring was put into place was that historically although finding food and procreation were important, not being eaten by wild animals was MORE important to the survival of the species. Hansen claims that 2/3 of the cells in the amygdala (the brain's router) are wired for fear with only 1/3 wired for anything other than fear.

Of course in this day and age, there are few tigers wanting to eat us and the fear response is only really useful if we're trying to avoid a traffic accident or something of that nature. Because the fear response is so ingrained and prevalent, we utilize that response for other events, like when our beliefs or our ego is being threatened.

Hansen claims that we CAN rebuild those neural pathways so that when a non threatening event occurs we're less likely to respond from fear. He claims that when a good event occurs that we can strengthen a non fear response by spending 11 seconds appreciating the 'good' event. That's really only a couple of slow breaths. He further stated that meditation supports the strengthening of non fear neural pathways. His statement was that 'if you fire it, you wire it'. In other words if you allow yourself to have a particular type of response, you strengthen that pathway.