For as long as I can remember I have had a fear of spiders. No other known Phobias than that.
I have tried rationalizing it, facing it in different ways. To desensitize myself I will get close, take pictures, appreciate the art of web making and even handle small ones (less than a couple on millimetres in size) but can not seem to overcome it. I believe the source of this irrational fear comes from my childhood when I would get vegetables from the mud cellar at my parent’s home. I would get webs on me; see them lurking or scurrying and was always afraid one was on me when I came back upstairs. It frustrates me that my mind will not let this go.

Does anyone have any experience with meditation or cultivation helping to release a phobia?

I have had the same experience with claustrophobia, and I cannot bring myself to ignore or overcome my fear. I am interested in any of your ideas regarding this.

I would recomend a psychologist. They fix up that sort of stuff all the time / with various degrees of success. It's not that easy to help yourself sometimes.

I read that the only fear that you are born with is the fear of falling. All others are learned. I feel that irrational fears are a product of the ego mind. Exposure to our parent's fears, scary movies,stories and such have trained our ego self. Steps to dissolve the ego self may dissolve your fears also.

For me, fears are best addressed by simply asking myself why am I fearful of x? If there is no good reason, then I must simply use the wisdom mind to dispel...a matter of self control similar to not overindulging...because fear is a form of it.
But maybe that's just me:)

When I was doing my NLP practitioner training, we cured 4 different phobias. One of the sufferers had such a fear of heights that she had trouble going up stairs (and I mean 5 or 6 steps!) - she did 5 years of psychotherapy to try and cure it, it didn't work (after many many thousands spent) - we cured her phobia in about 30 minutes - she didn't quite believe that the cure worked so we had her go up on the top floor balcony, sit and dangle her legs from the side... which she did with no problem...

Our brain learns survival tactics very mechanically - rationalization, psychotherapy, emotional work, desensitization are all relatively ineffective. NLP is like the study of the 'software' of the mind - how it processes incoming sensory data and then reacts... so, some clever chap studied how people develop phobias and then studied (using precise NLP modelling strategies) how people naturally overcome their phobias. In reality both developing and overcoming phobias is very, very quick - because survival strategies need to be learnt (and un-learnt) quickly.

Anyway, for phobia suffering Tao Bums what I reccomend is finding the most experienced NLP master practitioner (or trainer/master trainer if possible) in your area and book an appointment!

the process is quick and painless.

then let us know how it goes.

EMDR (link) is something you can do on yourself, and/or with the assistance of a therapist. Very, very simple technique. Worth trying.

You could do any of those things that you mentioned, followed by self-EMDR.

Good information from all, I will look into your suggestions. Here is a sample of a picture I took last summer.

http://www.thetaobums.com/index.php?act=mo...=si&img=407

Spiders are amazing creatures. They are found all over the world, including the polar regions where they borough in the snow and prey upon small fish. They are the natural born killers of the insect world that even instinctively build traps (webs) to catch their prey. There are very few spiders that harm humans, but they rid the planet of more than their share of deadly insects (mosquitoes being #1) not only by eating them, but snaring them in their web long after they are gone.

Wow, I am getting a headache when doing that



That works as long as the fear isn't too deeply rooted into you physical or emotional body so that it wrestles away control from your mind. That's what seem to be happening to me. I loose complete control over my actions at some point, when confronted with my phobia induced circumstance.



Using a technique like this? http://www.hypnosis.edu/aha/articles/nlp-phobia.asp

Yes

reading about it probably wont help you though, you need someone experienced to guide you through the process.

EMDR is a technique developed from a well known NLP pattern - eye accessing cues. Our eyes make micro-movements depending which sensory system (visual/auditory/kinesthetic) we're accessing (and whether it's created or remembered) EMDR works well on very traumatic, single-event memories. Phobias are a little different in that they are traumatic memories that have generalised. So a traumatic memory may be of a battlefield and the incessant noise of the shells flying past. This memory might be hard to let go of and it may be in the back of your mind all the time, but it's not a phobia. If the trauma generalised and you started associating the sound of aeroplanes overhead and get plunged into the same sense of panic when seeing or hearing or reading about or even thinking about a plane or anything else that makes a similar noise - then it's a phobia. EMDR has a harder time dealing with phobias. Also it takes many sessions.

An interesting thing is the NLP explanation of why EMDR works. Moving your eyes to the different positions activates the sensory information associated with that position. So the idea is that we tend to block out some specific sensory information in these traumatic memories and that's what keeps them stuck. So with the example of the battlefield noise, the trauma sufferer might simply be blocking the visual memory of what was going on or may be blocking the feelings s/he was having at the time, and as soon as the information is retrieved, the memory may still be horrible, but it's not stuck and doesn't have a hold on the person any longer.

Cool, when I did undergraduate Psychology back in the 90's (depressing to think how long ago that actually was) we didn't have any idea how EMT was working.