As I write this, I am feeling like I am at a transformational inflection point. Tomorrow, Jacqueline and I resume teaching from our studio on Bowen Island. It has been over a year hiatus from teaching in that space. In that time, the property has undergone a major renovation and restoration, and, in a sense, it feels like our own psyches have gone through a similar process. The transformations we have been going through individually, and together, seem to have unintentionally mirrored those happening on Bowen. There was a full surrendering to the process of co-creation by allowing everything to be taken down to the original foundation and to be rebuilt in line with a new purpose and design for living. The fears of change and scarcity were let go of and replaced by faith and abundance. Our own hearts and the heart of the studio feel more aligned with Spirit than ever before, and I sense that the co-creation that is wanting to go on in that space will plunge us more deeply into Wholeness than I can dare to even imagine.
We are starting with a 4-week series on releasing fear which seems fitting, as “spiritual transformation”, in its most basic form, is simply transitioning from fear to love. Love is what you are, and fear is the absence of love. It really is that simple. We were born pure love and yet we find ourselves living in fear of everything. We were brought into this world as an agent of infinite creative potential and then proceeded to trap ourselves into a cul-de-sac of limiting beliefs and a very constricted and finite view of reality. Why did we choose this? We have all lost touch with our divine nature and so much of the emotional, mental, and physical pain we experience is the pain of separation from our Wholeness and we need to address this. Fear is the root cause of that separation and our Wholeness (holy) is the return to love.
There are two types of fear. The fear that is real and the fear that is an illusion. Real fear is critical for our survival. If there is a tiger in the room, fear tells me to get out of the room as quickly as I can. The feeling of fear engages my sympathetic nervous system, moves me into fight or flight, pumps adrenaline into my body, moves all my focus and hyper awareness to the threat and gets me out of the room. Once I am out, and I am safe, that fear is no longer needed as it doesn’t serve me anymore and my body moves back to being fully and peacefully engaged in the present moment. It is transitory in nature. It is a beautiful process.
The fears that are illusory in nature are different, in that there is no immediate threat, just a potential threat in the future. The future “threat” is also more likely to be something that triggers a childhood wound than anything that truly impacts our survival. The fear of losing our job, never finding a partner, being judged, etc. These fears illicit the same response in our body as the tiger in the room and place us in a constant state of fight or flight and cut us off from the present moment and our birth right of being the love that we are. This type of fear is so engrained in our society and culture that we have come to accept it as normal, and we can see the effect of that in the world around us. This is the fear that we all need to let go or transform. This fear is trapped in our bodies and plays on a loop in our mind. We need both a bottom up process (moving the body) and top down process (intellectual understanding) to spring the trap.
As a simple first step write down everything you fear into a journal. Be as thorough and honest as possible, write it all down to the smallest thing. Then one at a time, starting with the silliest one, ask yourself what your life would be like if you let go of that fear and then just be with it for 5-10 minutes.
“What stands in the Way. Becomes the Way” – Marcus Aurelius
The Way
