Hello Dear Ones!

Fear. I’ve tasted it’s bitterness from time to time over the course of my life. No matter how old or young – we all have. It seems a natural occurrence of the human condition. And yet, is it really?

An infant well cared for- nourished, protected and loved – has no need to experience fear of any kind. Yet in today’ s society, fear is known to our children. We subject them to experiences that instill uncertainty and threaten their sense of safety – raising their levels of adrenalin to a state of the critical fight or flight response. And when the flight is not possible and their small beings have no capability of fighting – not with words or with muscle -  they are left at a loss as to how to respond. And so, rather than acting upon the feelings within, it is a sense of re-action that occurs. Begun early enough in life, and repeated regularly and over time, it becomes a patterned response. Patterned response becomes instinctual. Once fear has a foothold into our instincts, it is the first, foremost and primary response mechanism to all new or unknown situations we face in our lives – even into adulthood when we should know better and have the ability to grant ourselves a sense of safety – it has become a spontaneous body response to re-act in a fearful way … to all new things real or imagined.

Sometimes the fear is third-party initiated – most often from the parents. Take a child growing up in a home where there is constant financial worry. Though the child does not know or understand what is happening, children are sensitive to the chemical and emotional fluctuations of their parents, whatever the source; possibly a parent is dealing with the devastation of alcoholism and its impact on the family unit; potentially there is physical and/or sexual abuse. Again, the fear response instilled in the child as a result of parental behaviours is one of re-action and becomes ingrained into the child’s innate physical and emotional patterning.

For many of us it may be a combination of things. Over time, the body only knows survival at its basest. When the physical response is ingrained, the rationale makes no sense – it doesn’t have to. Fear becomes instinctive. Misinterpreting the signals as a need for fight or flight is all the body recognizes. The imagination takes over and that’s where the False Evidence comes in to play. Something new or unknown occurs. The body, from years of habit, goes into instinctual response. Fear arises. It doesn’t matter that this new happening is placid or fun or educational or to our benefit. The body’s physical and emotional pattern is set and the knots grow within the solar plexus and the desire to get angry, to feel little-child scared, to fight or to flee has many running away – literally or figuratively from something that may be in their best interest, or might learn and grow from or may delight them beyond belief. It may, in fact, be something that really should instill caution. The point is that most often the cause is not recognized for its true value and as a result the actualization of perfect and true response is not possible. I hope this makes sense. It’s a tough issue.

I spent forty years of my life being afraid: afraid of trying new things, meeting new people, going new places, even simple things like raising my hand to answer questions in class as a child and youth or in a business meeting once I ‘matured’ to the work world. It has only been the past fifteen years that I have recognized my own strengths, growing into the spiritual amazement of acknowledging my own innate potential and honouring the divine within me. And yet, as much as I have grown and blossomed into my wholeness, my body’s first and instinctive response in the majority of unknown situations remains one of fear. Once I recognize the symptomatic feelings – having learned the way my body reacts – I am able to calm myself to a more logical and pure perception of what might truly be occurring.

False Evidence Actualizing Reality. It’s all a sham. There is nothing and no one to fear. We create our own reality. Why would we create something, anything, that would cause us grief? And yet we believe that our world is not safe, that there are situations and people that might harm us in some fashion. We believe that the fates might have a hand in placing us in unhealthy circumstances beyond our control – such as a tornado or an earthquake or the driver in the car approaching us.

Yet, if you believe that you do create your own reality (I certainly do) then if you find yourself in such a critical situation it is because you have chosen to experience that very happening in all of its dramatic and sweetly painful glory. Fearing it simply anesthetizes the purity of the truest possible unfolding – dulling the experience rather than heightening the exquisite perfection of its expression.

Learning to live life to the fullest demands honesty and openness to all that is known to be part of the human condition. Accepting the unhappy, the bad, the fearful, the less than ideal as merely being human is, to me, denying the perfection of who we have come here to grow into – powerful, multi-dimension spiritual beings living a physical life in all of its incredible beauty and potential.

I had the privilege of reading the following verses apparently taken from a religious organization that I know little to nothing about and from someone I only know by her first name. Yet these verses grabbed me right away and I took them truly, deeply to heart. May they inspire you as they continuously do me:

Suitheist Verses: Self-Surrender

by Claribel

I surrender my limitations to my infinitude.

I surrender my fears to my eternal indestructibility.

Not a surrender to a “Universal All” that is not me, but to this particular infinity that is mine, the universe that dwells within this contour of flesh.

Not surrender to something above me, but to something as enmeshed throughout me as my nervous system.

Not surrender to something not-my-ego, but surrender to something which is as much a part of my ego as tissue is a part of muscle.

Not surrender of my control, but surrender to the fullness of my control.

A surrender not in humility but in pride, not to my diminishment but to my extension.

I surrender to the universe within, and let it spread throughout my cells, my nerves, to the very tips of my fingers, to the very ends of my hair. I surrender to the stars that yearn to dance amid my follicles like beads of light through optical fibers. I surrender to the infinite vacuum, and let it inflate into infinite uniqueness.

In Light and Laughter,

Marcia

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