Fear – August 1 2020

Fear – August 1 2020

Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here.

Marianne Williamson

 

Sometimes our minds are a steady stream of what should be feared–out there in the world, in here with myself, everywhere. As if there were nowhere to be safe.

 

These fears seem so real. Everything they say seems true. In reality, though, they are our thoughts moving through the structures of the stresses we have accumulated over the course of our lives, like wind whistling through a canyon in the desert, its music determined by the shape of the rocks through which it blows, rather than by the wind itself. For most of us, these stresses and the fears they sing seem so much a part of ourselves that we rarely question the veracity of what they tell us about ourselves and our lives.

 

Then we begin to meditate, and immediately these stresses begin to melt away. We begin to be able to see through the fears. What relief. We are on our way to being able to experience life as new, as fresh, perhaps for the first time ever.

 

But still, our mind runs rampant, the stress release phenomenon itself triggering thought upon thought upon thought, all of which thought, expressive of stress release, will speak to us of our unworthiness and unlovability. But now we have tools. We do not have to be at the mercy of this mind anymore. 

 

Each day, this same meditation that allows stresses to be released from within me, also gives me the undeniable experience of knowing myself as something other than my thinking. I am, truly, this other thing. This deeper Self, unchanging, untouched by the thoughts, the fears, the worries, always pure, clear, fresh and alive.

 

Today I will know the fears within my mind for what they really are–the music of stress release–and I will insist on hearing another tune along with them.

Woman with Firewood, Jhilmil Gufa, Uttarakhand, India