From time to time, I have the lovely opportunity to witness someone’s fear completely vanish. Poof! Like a wispy cloud, the fear evaporates, leaving nothing but the truth, love, and occasionally some giggles.
Because what else can you do but laugh when you see how vacuous, vaporous, and insubstantial fear really is? Truly, fear is nothing. It does not exist. While we can momentarily put aside the biochemical aspect of fear when an old survival instinct is triggered (such as a loud noise that makes you jump), fear predominantly is nothing. And in my sessions, some of my students occasionally have that truth come through loud and clear and find themselves suddenly with no problems or issues in the space of presence.
The immediate next question on everyone’s mind is, “How do I get there?” Is there a trip I book on Expedia to get to it? Have they made app for that yet?
But seriously, the reason this arises is not because of action. It is because of the inaction of letting go. When we momentarily–for whatever reason–stop trying, the clouds clear up, and suddenly, we are in the clarity of our own presence.
The Cloudiness of Our Lives
Maybe it is because it’s a cloudy day here in California, but I really like this weather metaphor. The sky is your presence. It is always there. It is always embracing whatever your current experience. If you are feeling happy and joyful, then these sunny moments are embraced. If things are dark and dim, then the dark night of your life is embraced. If things are stormy and scary, then fear is embraced. At no time does your presence reject any of these experiences.
Yet, we obviously have a great deal of influence over our inner experiences. I can’t emphasize enough that we choose our emotions and not the other way around.
But typically, we don’t realize that truth. We think that life is making us feel a certain way. This leads to all kinds of control as we attempt to get life to play by our rules to make us feel what we want to feel. Additionally, we set up all kinds of boundaries, limits, and restrictions to hide from the feelings we don’t want to feel. The end result is that we’ve booby-trapped our whole lives, and we keep stepping on our own landmines. Again and again, we are blown up by our own intentions to feel and experience our lives in certain ways. All this debris and smoke leads to quite a bit of fog, haze, and cloudiness. Simply put, we are so blinded by fear, hate, guilt, anger, shame, sadness, and depression, that we can’t see anything at all.
Learning to Like the Light
Strangely enough, people are so mired in this kind of constant haze that it takes time to like the light for most people. The haze of fear and upset feelings has blinded people to the truth and numbed them to point that people think this way of living is normal or for goodness sake normal.
The minute someone tells someone else an inconvenient truth, a whole bunch of landmines are set off. The second person wants to fight off the other person or run away from that person. But the inner reaction is not the first person’s fault even if that person didn’t offer their advice in a kind and gentle way. To be sure, a lot of important life lessons aren’t going to be offered in a kind and gentle way. Sometimes, a major car accident is the only way to get someone’s attention that they’ve been driving the wrong way for three decades.
That’s why learning to like the light of truth, love, and clarity is an important taste to acquire. It typically is a lot gentler even though it tastes bitter at first to hear that you’re wasting your life doing a job you hate. You didn’t want to hear that. You had a story in your head that said you were enjoying this life, and hey, everything was going to be better when you got that promotion (You’re not going to get it, by the way. They’re giving it to Jed in accounting instead. Sorry. I thought I should tell you).
Even when someone is kind in delivering the truth, we are so truth intolerant that we tend to choke and gag. But it’s important to swallow it down. It’s your key towards a much healthier and loving life.
Sitting With a Spiritual Teacher or Other Lightworker
In few places does it feel like our truest intentions and our deepest integrity is met than with a spiritual teacher or other lightworker. I am using lightworker broadly, so that can include doctors, psychologists, counselors, and so forth. There are lots of levels of healing, and a lightworker is simply someone who is helping another come into health and harmony within themselves and with life. So turning to a lightworker is an opportunity to start to acclimate to the light. It involves getting used to it shining from another and getting used to it shining from within oneself.
In the first paragraph of this post, I mentioned an occurrence that happens when someone doesn’t resist the truth. Everything gets so clear, easy, and simple. The connection with me tends to be fairly strong, so I simply remind people that they’re getting used to connection within themselves as well as with me. And there are more kinds of deep connections than people realize. Most of humanity is standing on the beach without even a pinky toe in the water, and there’s a whole ocean full of deep and profound connections to explore.
However, most people resist (involuntarily and voluntarily) against their inner light and think that the ocean if full of sharks and barracudas with nothing better than to eat them up. The people who resist most are the worst students, and they tend to think that they are resisting or fighting the lightworker. But truly, all the upset emotions and pain coming up is coming from none other than you. Other misunderstandings include thinking that the resistance in yourself makes you a bad person. It doesn’t. It just means there’s pain there, and the divine never rejects your pain. It’s important that you don’t either.
Embracing Pain With Your Own Presence
Everything I teach is an encouragement back to listening to yourself and resting in your presence and divine awareness. It is ultimately very simple. It can feel complicated only because we have over-complicated our lives. Thus, when you have a moment when fear simply vanishes, I encourage you to breath deeply into this space. Marinate in it, as other teachers will say. Let yourself steep in this awareness as much as possible so that you can notice when you get pulled back into your ego story and pain.
Because that’s what tends to happen. We last thirty seconds to fifteen minutes, and then our story comes in. There’s a worry about the future. There’s a fear about failing to “hold onto” this space, which you can’t do. You can’t hold onto something you are and always are and have never not been. This isn’t Muffin your pet dog. You can hold Muffin. You can’t hold presence anymore than a molecule of air holds itself and all the other air around it. It is as it is. You are as you are, and that requires no action of you.
But you can embrace pain because pain lives in duality. There has to be separation to have pain–something that is hurt and something not hurt (and there will always be presence which is never hurt or cut off from the divine). The more we resist or avoid our pain, the more walls we create that slow down our own healing. Thus embracing pain with presence is the most sane thing and most natural thing we can do.
Think of pain like ice in the sea of your consciousness. Turn your attention to this ice, and it will begin to thaw and melt. With it will come more energy that has been frozen away in this space as well as old memories, emotions, and other pain to process and heal as you move towards unity with yourself.
The Deepening of Unity
The first time we feel unity is like the first time we make love (assuming it was a good experience for you–just think of a good first time experience if it wasn’t). It feels awesome, and the ego–for whatever reason–decides it’ll never feel this good again. But the first time fear vanishes in the face of this unity or your glimpse of a awakening or a full spiritual awakening is just the beginning. It’s the start of understanding how cut off you are as well as how deeply you can dissolve into union with yourself.
And the deeper you drop into union with yourself, the deeper you drop into connection with all of life. Nothing is left out. Nothing is ever left out no matter how dark, mean, or abhorrent. I can’t stress this enough. If any of you are too busy fighting “evil,” you are perpetuating a duality that is not real and strengthening that evil. It’s a hard concept for most people to understand, and that’s why the experiential reality of this truth is typically the only thing that can help people truly understand it. Love embraces all. There’s nothing to change, and yet from this space of love and presence, change likes to arise in its own divine way with us co-creating with it. It is truly quite beautiful, and it flowers and grows even more as you deepen into unity.
Working With a Spiritual Teacher Regularly
As many of my spiritual students know, working with a spiritual teacher can bring up a lot of stuff. It’s often not quite what people expect. And how could you expect something like your spiritual teacher? Expectations are only mental ideas. Your teacher is a physical reality–not an idea.
Because of the power in the relationship, many people are quite overwhelmed or scared away when they meet their teacher, and as I mentioned earlier, if someone resists union, then fear only grows. And that brief vanishing I mentioned does not arise. The clouds darken, and the person is confronted with an issue.
It’s important to practice being in your own presence and working through your issues while sitting with someone who is in that space of being as well. That further assists us in seeing what is real and what is not to help us banish our fear. And ultimately, there is no real banishing. It’s just a vanishing and evaporating as the fear energy transmutes into a different energy, and you can find yourself flowing towards whatever life feels most nourishing and supportive to you.
