We come from the womb as our truest nature – Love – and as we grow up, we learn to be afraid. There’s a lot to be afraid of…physical hurt, emotional hurt, opportunity lost, and loss of love…
So we learn to be safe. We lock our car doors, put a seatbelt on, drive defensively, and pay more for a car with airbags. Safety first. And a lot of times, like with the common car, our fear is useful in order to protect our physical selves. If our body dies, that’s kinda the end. So an extra couple hundred bucks for airbags? No problem.
But there’s another kind of fear, outside of the realm of your physical body, that we respond to. I believe it could be argued that the loss of love – another way of saying it is that our heart might get hurt – is at the root of all emotional fears.
We do things to “play it safe” with our emotions. We erect walls around our hearts, we put on personas in public that we believe others will more readily accept, we hide our deepest and truest selves, and we generally don’t let people in past a certain point. If we did, if we truly opened our hearts to someone, we risk heartbreak…a risk with consequences we believe are far too great.
We go through life getting people to like our personas. We enjoy the company of “nice,” and “safe” people. People who are just as messed up as us and disallowing of their heart to be seen. After all, they couldn’t risk heartbreak either. And there we go through life, falling in love with personas who have fallen in love with our own personas…our egos fighting each other…wondering why we’re never truly seen and why we’re always struggling to relax into our own deepest nature.
And we do this in the hopes that people will see our heart, yet we’re not willing to show our own.
And then someone comes along. And they want you to see their heart. They want you to see that you’re in their heart. And they want to help you dissolve the protective walls around your heart with love, one at a time, day by day, for the rest of your life.
And if you believe the risk of the consequences is too great, you won’t let them in. The problem is that the love you want requires risking your heart. To be Love is to be vulnerable.
And the fear that started all of it becomes the fear you live with. Its insidious nature preventing you from the thing you wanted to be all along: Love.
The opposite of fear isn’t courage. Courage is taking action alongside or in the face of fear. The opposite of fear is Love. When you are Love, you are not afraid. When you penetrate fear with love, it’s as though you’ve turned on a light in a dark room – lightness always penetrates darkness.
Fear is the only thing in the way of loving. Fear is why we settle. Fear is why we’re unfulfilled. Fear is why we’ll always be seeking fulfillment. And fear is a choice.
You can be fulfilled and as your deepest, truest self whenever you want, so long as you choose to be Love and move from Love.