Come to think of it, most of our fears are private.  We don’t go around publishing them – because they are our own personal demons and mostly we like to keep them private.

My own private fear is public speaking.  I’ll do almost anything to get out of speaking in public and I’m not proud of it.

Mostly our private fears cost us one way or another and not being able to speak in public has worked to my detriment many a time. But it is my own personal demon and somehow I’m stuck with it.

To someone else it may look like a very insignificant problem. “Get over it!” they’ll tell me.  “Confront your fears,” and so on.

But does it help?  Of course not!

And that is why this little Japanese print in the picture on the left caught my eye.

It speaks volumes.

Here is this big, strong leopard cringing like a frightened dog with his tail between his legs.

And what is frightening him?

A tiny little rooster sitting on the window-sill.

Clearly it won’t help to tell the leopard not to worry.  In his mind that little rooster is huge – and it terrifies him.

Our private fears and personal demons may look small to someone else but in our own minds they loom hugely like dark, threatening shadows.

The important thing is that even though our private demons may be unimportant in themselves they have a significant effect on our decisions, our actions and ultimately on our lives.

As with that leopard in the Japanese print, when confronted by our private demons we act out of character.  We crumple.

But the strangest thing of all is that our private fears have such a hold on us that we don’t even admit them to ourselves.

We submerge them in our psyches to such an extent that we don’t recognize them for what they are. Even when our lives feel out of balance we don’t realize that our personal demons are once again playing up.

If only we could see them in perspective they would lose their hold over us. If only that leopard would realize that the rooster is really no threat to him, he would gobble him up.

The trick then, is to be able to see our fears for what they are and also for what they are doing to us.  And we also need to understand the price we are paying to keep then alive.

But then we don’t do we?

We cringe before them like the poor, hapless leopard.

Our Fears pop up in the strangest places.

Interestingly, the fears that we think are so well hidden will emerge in the most unwanted and often strangest places.

When they have become completely ingrained in our psyches we find evidence of them popping up all over the place.

One of these places is in our handwriting.

Now I’d like to remind you that our private demons are no longer private when they start to emerge in our handwriting. It means that they have started to establish themselves so securely in our psyches that they have begun to encroach on our lives.

In the next few posts I’ll tell you how you can see some signs of fears in your handwriting even though you may think they aren’t obvious to anyone but yourself.

I’ll show you what some of these “private fears” look like in handwriting and how you can identify them for yourself.

So until then, think about that poor leopard in the Japanese print and consider what his private demons are doing to him.

Strange how we can see the problem so clearly in someone else isn’t it?

Your comments below will be highly appreciated – so please let me know what you think.