"Enlightenment is simply this," said the Zen master. "When I walk, I walk. When I eat, I eat. When I sleep, I sleep."
Have you ever had one of those days, you know the ones, the ones where God has a sense of humor at your expense all day? I’m sorry I mean where God has a sense of humor for your benefit all day. The best lessons to me are the ones that are taught with just a little humor attached to them. Today as you may have guessed has been one of those days.
For those of you who regularly read my blog you know that my last post was all about my fear and a declaration to begin conquering one very specific fear, my fear of trust. I thought that realizing it, declaring to fix it and taking what I thought was a huge step towards conquering it was a good amount of progress for just a few days. Apparently sometimes it isn’t about taking the step, it’s all in how you take the step. I guess relentlessly trying to talk yourself out of something and then keeping yourself in a constant state of “what if” afterwards is not what it’s supposed to look like.
I am enrolled in a Mysticism program at Earth Spirit Center, the healing center I work at, and tonight was our last night of the class on Kabala. We have been working with a tool called “The 72 Names of God” throughout the class. The 72 Names of God comes in the form of a deck of cards, each week we pick a card and always they bring up the very issues we were already working on or that we most need to work on. Tonight’s card had probably the biggest lesson of the whole class, for all of us. My card of course…FEAR(LESS), what else !
“Life is not about coping with fears, it is not about surviving bouts of anxiety or just working our way through panic attacks. Life is about achieving absolute happiness, complete freedom, and true fulfillment”. This is where I began to see that it wasn’t about the step, it was all about how I took that step, and this was God’s funny way of saying “hey, you are not walking the walk”. “Incapacitating fear is an illusion. Fear is a bluff, and we must call the bluff- because on the other side of fear lies paradise! If we run away from our fears, we are fleeing from the fulfillment of our own deepest longings and needs”. Part of the humor in all of this for me, is the truth in you hear what you need to hear exactly when you need to hear it. I needed those words today. I needed the discussion that came with them, the laughter, the lesson…yes once again I have found myself in gratitude for the lessons learned.
Earlier in the evening one of my friends was talking about seeing a video posted by NASA on what it looks like for a star to be lost in a black hole. “Light won’t penetrate a black hole, so we have no idea what is in it”, yet she said “stars, light bodies are drawn not only to them but they are drawn to be a part of them”. My card tonight “Before we reach paradise and plentitude we must journey through a barren desert before there is light, there is darkness”. Lately when it comes to fear, it seems that I have been seeking out the darkness of it, and forgetting about the light that it will ultimately transform it’s self into. I myself have not even recognized the “crazy” girl I have been lately.
Ultimately I understand that the key to true happiness is not in who you spend your life with, but how you spend your life. Did you have more days that were happy then sad. More up, than down. More right than wrong. More lessons learned than missed. The key to all of the above is to stay in the moment and not let ourselves come out of the vibration of love, which is the opposite of the vibration of fear. With one the other cannot exist.
Just before class tonight one of the guys in the class says to me “I don’t know where it came from, but I just had the urge to reach over and poke you in the arm, you know, in a brotherly I can see your tired and I just want to bug you kind of way”. While I am glad he resisted the urge, the humor of the statement is not lost on me as I know I was given a gentle nudge back on my path tonight. Thank you God for showing me once again what I was missing.
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.~H. P. Lovecraft
Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here. ~ Unknown
“Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves – regret for the past and fear of the future.” ~Fulton Oursler
“You block your dream when you allow fear to grow bigger than your faith”. ~ Mary Manin Morrissey
“Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of fear is freedom”. ~ Marilyn Ferguson
I could go on and on with pages of quotes on fear. Everyone talks about fear, having it, overcoming it, fighting through it. We all talk about it because at some point in our lives we all experience it. I obviously do, or I wouldn’t write a blog that is ultimately the pursuit of living life with no fear. Most of the time I have a good grip on the things that I fear, or once feared and I am able to walk through them with little or no thought, but some things are proving to be much harder to overcome.
I had a disagreement yesterday with someone that I consider to be one of my best friends. In the end we worked everything out and I know we will be closer than ever. Truth is there wasn’t really much to the whole thing, the underlying reason for it all was I did something to bring his fears of trusting people to the surface, and in trying to talk about it he brought out the same in me. After all each person in our lives is only a reflection of our selves. The best part about the whole thing was to be able to look in that mirror and realize how deep my fear of putting my trust in others really goes. I knew I didn’t have much faith in people that I get romantically involved in, but I hadn’t realized that this fear had actually filtered into all of my other relationships as well.
The dictionary definition of trust; reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc of a person. I can count on one hand the number of people that I have ever let far enough in my life to ever become someone that I actually rely on. Which of course if you know anything about the theories of judgment means that the person that I really don’t trust is myself. It’s hard to trust someone else if you don’t trust the person you meet in the mirror everyday. All that fear that I am letting go of really comes down to one thing, do I jump off the cliff trusting in faith that I can fly or do I stay sitting at the top of the mountain because I’m afraid I might fall ? I guess the answer to that question lies in the next one….what’s the worst thing that could happen if I do fall, fail, pick the wrong person to be in my life, make a wrong turn or get lost ? Will it be the end of the world that I like to make it out to be or will I be able to see it for what it is, a stepping stone to becoming the person that I am meant to be. After all in order to grow we have to make a mistake every now and then.
My new challenge is to learn to trust myself. To know that no matter what the outcome, I did the right thing. To understand that even when the rest of the world thinks I’m crazy, I still know what I am doing and ultimately I am doing the thing that is best for me. If someone doesn’t live up to my expectations of them, I won’t take that as a sign that I can’t trust them or myself. It will be what it is, a reminder to not have expectations of anyone except myself. I am after all the only person that I can truly hold accountable for anything. If the other side of my fear is the freedom to completely trust myself, then I say freedom here I come.
I trust my soul. My only goal is just to be. There’s only now, there’s only here. Give into love or live in fear. No other path, no other way. No other day, but today. ~ Jonathan Larson
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