I often compare this process of awakening to what happens when your foot falls asleep and then wakes up. As the blood starts to flow again and the vessels stretch and the muscles twitch, it experiences the pain of awakening before it can walk again. Only, in this context, it is the heart that is waking up... thawing out from years of contraction and denial.
In A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle beautifully describes what happens when we allow this fear and pain inside us to melt: "The energy that was trapped in the pain-body then changes into vibrational frequency and is transmuted into Presence. In this way, the pain-body becomes fuel for consciousness. This is why many of the wisest, most enlightened men and women on our planet once had a heavy pain-body."
My God, if that isn't ever a brilliant and inspiring statement. You mean, this pain is useful for something? You mean, Buddha and Jesus and all of these enlightened teachers went through this,too? You mean, all of this pain that I am feeling can miraculously transform into exuberant love and indescribable joy? You mean I can actually be free of fear?
Yes! It's just energy that wants to flow again - that's all! It wants to be loved and returned to the current of universal love that flows through us all. It's the welcome sigh after holding your breath, the flood through a dam that electrifies a city, the relief we feel after a long cry, the spark of flame negating all darkness. It is the essence of our being - altered by the intentions of a fearful mind. Nothing more, nothing less. Fear is nothing to fear.
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," and eventhatwe don't have to fear!
Actor Will Smith has said he's driven by fear. "All it takes is just one person telling me I can't do it, and I'll use the fear of failure as fuel. I keep going because I doubt myself... It drives me to be better. I've learned that the mastery of self-doubt is the key to success."
He has learned to recognize that the feeling of fear is not something to fear. He feels the fear and does it anyway, thereby disempowering the feeling altogether and invigorating his trust and faith in himself.
For me, I take a more measured approach. I know that if I do something from a place of fear, then that is the energy I will attract in return. So I tend to face the fear internally first, recognize that it's just an illusion based on an old belief from childhood or my environment, which then clears enough Presence space within me to know what it is that I have to do and then do it.
I recently had an extraordinary epiphany when I made a choice I had long feared doing yet knew I had to do. I said to myself, "I'm going to do this. I don't know what will happen as a result of doing this. I just know that,in this moment right now, this is what I have to do."
I ran through the fire.... And came out glowing on the other side.
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