fear

Fear is a natural part of life, serving as both protection and hindrance. Recognizing and overcoming fears is crucial for growth. Fear can shape decisions and prevent living authentically. Tension between personal desires and societal expectations can fuel fears. Creating a relationship with stillness can help transmute fear into power. Seeking guidance and facing fears through stillness can lead to increased awareness and personal growth. Embrace your path and confront fears to live authentically. Fear. Fear is something I've been contending with my whole life, as I imagine many people have in one form or another. I remember when I was a little boy, I was afraid of things. I was afraid of murderers and robbers and bad people and all those kinds of things. We come into the world with a certain disposition towards fear because we live in these bodies and we are vulnerable, very vulnerable. Fear is a very natural part of living in a human body. There are so many different kinds of fear too. We have to fear, I mean, it's correct to fear certain things. If you walk into the middle of a freeway, you fear that you're going to get hit by a car, and so you don't walk into the middle of a freeway. Fear can serve as an agent of protection in a lot of ways. Then there is, of course, the kind of fear that doesn't serve us, all of the psychological fears that stop us from doing the things we want to do, stop us from being courageous, stop us from taking action, stop us from taking risks. Ultimately, fear can really paralyze your life. The tricky bit is that we might not even recognize that we're operating based on fear and that the choices that we're making are rooted in fear. It takes a certain amount of awareness, self-awareness, which I really maintain comes from creating a relationship with your inner world, your own being, which really can only be accessed deliberately and consciously. If all we ever do is relate to the outside world as a person with a persona who goes out into the outside world of objects and relationships, and we don't cultivate a relationship with our own inner being, then we don't, in my experience, have that kind of self-awareness that leads to the recognition of patterns of fear that can be operating in our life. Fear of not achieving the things that I want to achieve, fear of not being the person who I projected myself to be, fear of dying, fear of aging, fear of pain, all these things I've experienced in my life, as most of us have, I'm sure. If you're listening to this right now, I'm sure you can think of a fear. How is fear, even that word fear, it's got a color to it and a shape to it and an intensity to it, fear. I see it as a flame, that word. I think a flame is a good analogy, actually, because a flame can be a very wonderful and helpful thing. It provides heating for cooking. It provides warmth, all sorts of things, but it can also burn you. In that same way, fear can have a positive and a negative attribute. There's a positive side of fear, I think. Again, this is where definitions and words can be limiting, but fear itself can have a positive, if taken correctly, it can lead to positive outcomes, like we just said, or like the famous example, I fear that a tiger is going to attack me if I'm too close to it, so I stay away. But when fear takes over the mind and doesn't allow you to flourish and to act courageously and to achieve growth and expansion in our lives, then that's something that we really have to look at and work with. How has fear shaped my choices? For as long as I can remember, I have had a fear of boxing myself into a life that doesn't work for me. If you're a creative and you're listening to this right now, you have likely experienced the tension between what the mass culture, the popular culture, expects you to do and wants you to do, outside forces, the expectation of how you're supposed to be and how you're supposed to live, versus your own desires of how you want to live, and then your own desires, the life that you want and envision for yourself isn't congruent with what society wants from you or what your family wants from you or any outside force, and so that creates a tension. For me, my fear of, I always used to say, as a placeholder, I would say, when I was in my earlier years, I'm 48 now, but when I was in my late teens and my 20s, trying to figure out how I was going to make a living, how I was going to exist, I always said, I don't want to sell insurance. That was the placeholder. That idea of being an insurance salesman, for me, was a placeholder for living that life that I wasn't interested in, and this is a very big topic because we have to often do things that we don't want to do in order to pay the bills and put bread on the table and have a place to live and all of that, and so, yes, we have to achieve a certain amount of material success, of material gain, so that we can feed and clothe and house ourselves. That's true, and that's something everybody has to contend with and look at, but the idea of living a life that wasn't aligned with a higher calling or my own calling was a very great fear of mine for many years, and so many of the choices that I made in life, most of the choices that I made in life were in order to avoid that insurance sales job. Again, that's just a placeholder, but it mostly was to avoid that. I had a tremendous fear of being trapped in a job that I didn't like, and again, this is a very tricky territory because if you're listening to me right now and maybe you're working a job that you don't like because you have to put bread on the table for yourself or for your family, that is something that you have to do, and there is nobility in that. So, we have to understand, each of us has to look at the cards that they were dealt in this life and play them as best as we can. Fear, fear of being talentless, fear of not being good enough, fear of not being creative enough, these are all things that I've contended with, but staying grounded, recognizing that fears often come in the form of thoughts about the future, and recognizing those to be just thoughts, not allowing them to overwhelm you. How? By creating a relationship to stillness, by finding a bridge of one form or another to a place of stillness, and from that place, allowing yourself to experience the fear and thus, in some strange way, transmute it. I'm not a master of putting these things into words. I think that if you're listening to me now and this is something that's really resonating with you, this idea of fear and how you can use stillness to transmute it, you can go to Eckhart Tolle's Power of Now, you can go to so many different teachers and thinkers and philosophers and spiritual guides of all kinds of traditions that circle around this concept one way or another, and I think that if you have the intention of finding teachers, as they say, the guru comes when the student is ready. Ready yourself. Sit in a quiet place. Ask for guidance. Who are you asking? Who knows? It doesn't matter. If you open your heart and you are humble enough to ask for guidance from a higher power or from your own self, from a part of your own self that you haven't been able to access yet, there's real depth and power in that. We have so many platitudes. Face your fears. It's become something of an empty concept, an empty set of words, but behind those empty, overused words, there's real truth. How do you face your fears? From where I'm sitting, you find in life that bridge to stillness, whatever it may be, meditation, art, exercise, some form of outward activity that lends itself to allowing you to have a relationship with stillness, where in that stillness, there's a trust that what needs to come through will come through, and you can deal with it. You can face it. You can confront it. You can watch it and ultimately transmute it in that place of stillness so that you can go back out into the world of objects and relationships with increased awareness, increased depth, increased resolve and power. Keep walking the path. Your path.