The emptying of fear

Over a week ago I came across some words in a book by Jeff Foster, and I keep coming back to these words again and again.  I'd like to share them with you:


In liberation, everything changes and nothing changes.


Everything changes because it's no longer 'your' life, and it's now seen in absolute clarity.  Everything changes because it all becomes so wonderfully light and transparent.  Everything changes because now life is no longer in opposition to death.  Everything changes because everything you rejected, everything you denied, everything you pushed away is now seen to be nothing but an expression of unconditional love.


And yet, nothing changes.  Chop wood and carry water.  Eat, shit, grow old.  Get cancer.  Scream in pain in the middle of the night.  None of that stops.  This isn't about living in some New Age fantasy world.  This isn't about taking on comforting concepts and surrounding yourself with cotton wool.  This is reality at its most raw.  Nothing can be blocked out any more.  It's the end of control.  It's a free fall into an intimacy with everything.  It's a love affair with what is.  It's an absolute alignment with life.


(An Extraordinary Absence, p. 100)

While the life energy here that calls itself Colleen hasn't opened up into liberation, there's not much worry about that.  It is glimpsed that 'my' life is in no way apart from the one life, that 'my' life is a notion riding along with the one life we all are.  I have never been apart from the whole, even when I imagined I was.  Whether it's seen or not, oneness is the reality.  There is no one and nothing to fear, since I am apart from none of it.  While fear still arises, there is a real decrease in the amount of fear in any given day.  Less fear.  Less fear!  That has become the 'direction' of this life: toward less fear.  Less fear through recognition of the lack of separation.  Life becomes not about accumulating more of anything (there is such abundance in every breath that 'more' becomes an absurd notion) but about a natural shedding of psychological fear.  Shedding the erroneous notions that produce fear.

A powerful tool for releasing fear-producing notions is the meditative inquiry taught by Byron Katie.  Attending Katie's school and workshops has changed my life profoundly. Here is a link to her website:
http://www.thework.com/index.php

Thanks to Jeff Foster for his clear and powerful words. Here is a link to his website:
http://www.lifewithoutacentre.com/

"You either love what's broken or you don't love."

 I came across a poem today by Naomi Shihab Nye and I'd like to share some excerpts with you:

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

It is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

    Sometimes I feel I am trying to present a face to the world that will garner warmth, while I hide all the doubt about myself inside.

    The strange wanting to be liked is a cruel master.

    The torsion of  incongruency between the social facade and the being underneath is a drain of energy.  I am learning mercy of my own fear and of the fear of others.  Fear is not shameful and it is not a sin or a failure. Fear is the fabric underlying the mind, it is a layer that we can descend into and pass through.

     Purity isn't the rejection of impurity but the embracing of it.

     Is the energy of fear different than the energy of love?

     There is one energy that takes many shapes, it takes the shape of fear and it takes the shape of love.  I have rejected a lot of energy in myself, I have rejected the energy of fear and I have rejected the energy of anger and I have rejected the energy of sadness and I have rejected the energy of selfishness.

   Now I am opening to what I have rejected.

   In being more honest with myself and opening to the magnitude of fear within this body and mind, there is at the very center the discovery of fearlessness.

   I am opening beyond the mind and everything it thought it knew.

   I'm not running away from this moment.  I'm standing my ground.  I feel the life that is here, the life that I am. The substance of this moment is emptiness shimmering with being.

    Kindness is a living energy within every person beneath the fear.  As the poem says, it is what we have been looking for. Today I feel attention physically moving from the region of the forehead to the region of the sternum, right where the heart is beating.  Kindness need not be a pretense, it is something vital and real, a medium we feel at home in.

~
Note: The title of this post is quoted from http://wwwaphorismscom.blogspot.com/. Thanks to the blog author, nothing profound.

What is denied

What is denied cannot be integrated.

Denied feelings, thoughts, experiences clog up the energy pipes. What is denied cannot be absorbed, metabolized, transformed.

Fear is the force that pushes things down.

I'm afraid of my anger and I push it down.
I'm afraid of my sadness and I push it down.
I'm afraid of my arrogance and I push it down.
I'm afraid of my insecurity and I push it down.

Fear is a repressive force.

But what is there to fear?
This person I'm trying to protect is not there, this body-mind hurtling like a projectile through time and space from the cradle to the grave is in fact nothing but fleeting images appearing and disappearing on the motionless screen of awareness.

Seeing the insubstantiality of the time-bound self-sense releases long-held fears. The self-image is vulnerable in the extreme, but the core of being that is our reality is rock-solid power.

There is a shift from feeling that my identity is the story-of-me, to feeling that my identity is something real that cannot be described but that is inhabited effortlessly at this very instant and at every instant, whether it is consciously realized or not.

The absence of the me-entity as anything other than images in awareness is not something to be believed or disbelieved.

The absence of the me-entity is discovered by looking a thousand times: the me I think I am is nowhere to be found. While the truth of what I am is fully present. Only direct inquiry reveals this.

What had been denied no longer needs to be denied. It enters fully into conscious awareness and can be felt, accepted, absorbed, metabolized, transformed. Like ice melting into a flash of water, energy flows within.


~