If someone pointed at your hair, claimed it was green, and then burst out laughing at how silly you looked, would you feel hurt? Probably not. (I'm guessing your hair is a more normal color than green.)
When you know your hair isn't green, you'd just figure this person is messing around, on something, or having trouble with their eyes. You know the problem is with how they see things, not with you. Someone making fun of you and laughing when you know it's their mistake doesn't bother you. What they think of you doesn't touch you at all.
When you don't believe you look foolish, what other people think can't reach you. Knowing that the picture of you in their head isn't actually you makes you immune to their opinion.
Once you see this, it becomes clear that other people's thoughts and words about us can't hurt us on their own. When someone thinks we're an idiot, that alone doesn't hurt. It only hurts if some part of us already believes we're an idiot. That's the real pain hiding underneath the fear of public speaking.
So the fear of public speaking was never really about what others will think of us. It's the fear of the pain that comes from believing something bad about ourselves. What other people think is just the thing that pokes our own negative beliefs awake.
Different people will think different things about us, and those opinions are just ideas inside their heads. We are not the same thing as an idea in someone else's mind. A person might change their opinion of us three times in one day while we haven't changed at all.
We only actually feel a change when we change what we believe about ourselves. Someone's opinion is only a trigger that sets off whatever we already believe deep down. We might be carrying a hidden belief that we're an idiot. We might also be carrying one that says we're smart. And the mind can flip between the two all day, sometimes in a single second.
Once you really get that you are not just a concept in somebody else's head, the rest of those beliefs start to come apart too.
Your thoughts are not you. Look at how they actually behave.
They show up on their own. You don't sit down and decide to think them, they just appear. They repeat the same patterns over and over, ones you never chose.
They contradict each other within seconds. One minute you want something, the next minute you don't. They drift to random things on their own, you're trying to focus and suddenly you're thinking about something that happened five years ago.
And on top of all that, you can watch them. You can catch a thought as it comes, stop it, or swap it for another.
So ask yourself this. If you can watch your thoughts, then who is doing the watching? It can't be the thought watching itself. There's something behind the thoughts that sees them come and go. And that something stays the same the whole time, no matter what the thoughts are doing.
That watcher is the real you. Not the thoughts, the thing noticing the thoughts.
Think of it like this. Your thoughts are like clouds passing through the sky. They show up, they move, they disappear. But the sky itself never moves. The sky is still there before the cloud comes, still there after the cloud leaves, and it doesn't change no matter what kind of cloud passes through.
You are the sky, not the clouds.
So your thoughts are just things passing through you, events happening in your awareness. They are not the source of you. The real you, the deepest you, is the space that was already there before the thought showed up, still there after it's gone, and stays exactly the same whether the thought was good, bad, useful, or random.
@MichaelSalla One just has to look at the Bible and other ancient texts to know they are benevolent.
Hollywood made it into something different, something to fear.
Christ Consciousness = Seeing the Divine in All
Forgiveness = Releasing Lower Vibrations
Faith = Alignment with Universal Intelligence
Grace = Flow State with the Divine
Prayer = Conscious Communication
Meditation = Inner Listening
Wisdom = Applied Awareness
Love = The Highest Frequency
Peace = Harmony Within
Truth = Direct Experience