The vibrant life underneath Fear

When the veil of fear is lifted, you must watch closely.  You may not get another chance like it in a very long time.  …And, if you can hold your gaze for long enough, you can create a new reference point and thus chisel away at least one of its mighty strongholds.

This happened to me once and I've never been the same…  I was at work one day and noticed something different about my demeanor, my heart rate, and my pace.  This was not something that came about by willful force or intentional aspiration.  Rather, there was, a kind of mysterious visitation from an unknown relative within my psyche.  The emergence of this family member immediately slowed down the pusher -- that psychological part within me that likes me to respond to all of life with a sense of urgency.  There I was with a pile of work the size of Everest and for some strange reason I felt no longer compelled to attack it.  Instead, I quite naturally with the help of this new advocate took a one task at a time approach just seeing what I could realistically get done and accepting the fact that I would not complete it.  I was somewhat in shock with the suddenness of the switch.  What happened to the guy that hated feeling "behind" in his work?  What happened to forcing it beyond my means?

Truthfully, I am not sure what caused such a significant shift and I'm not sure that really matters at this point.   It is more important to describe the landscape that emerged as I gazed further into its infinite horizons.  The first falling star was fear of failure.  Simply put, there was no such thing as failure in this arena but rather the simple acknowledgement of my fundamental limitedness as a human being.  Previous to this moment, I was prone to fighting and pointing fingers.  Settling on a "systemic" origin of my troubles provided a temporary relief for me to feel good about myself and thus could consider myself a"success" in my own right.  However, this language and the experience itself becomes like sand between the fingertips when you're looking at life from this angle.  Instead, what matters most is the light but ever present pulse of being there-- not just witnessing what is happening in front of you as a member of the audience but rather staying embodied within the oscillation between the animation of soul through you as well as watching soul animate itself in life -- classic subject-object relations transforming into a kind of non-dual well of unification.

Staying with this pulse is an elusive project -- especially if your view, like mine has been dominated life-limiting forces.  The next fear that fell away was fear of rejection.  Instead of being motivated first by the internal pressure to be accommodating and pleasing to others in order to win approval, there I was just doing my thing with full acknowledgment that I simply cannot get to everyone's needs and that inevitably this means that others will not think favorably of me.   How liberating!

So, hold your gaze my friends!  When fear leaves the scene, we are greeted with the incredible opportunity to pierce reality from a more open and precise vantage point.  And in that precision,  we are faced with the summons to drop into life more authentically…  There is a preciousness there that is truly a treasure to behold!