On overcoming fear.

We’re a collective. It’s about helping and being helped. Not just with things like moving or cooking for someone or lending them money. It’s also about when it comes to the very deep part of your being. Learning to give is important but learning how to receive is equally important. Vulnerability. The subtlety, however, is not to feel bad for yourself and look for outside affection to soothe the mind. Your emotions and your mind are deeply connected, but one needs to let the energy of receiving pass the mind and touch the heart. When the heart feels love, it opens up again and joy returns.

The wall you refer to which keeps people out isn’t just a figurative wall. The wall is real and comes from within the mind itself. Let love permeate the mind by fundamentally believing that you are worthy of love. Every last bit of it.

I don’t think I’m worthy of love

is what many among us feel. In essence, the pain of not feeling love is so powerful, I believe it is the most powerful of them all. The key here though is to ask yourself who’s the “I” in “I don’t think I’m worthy of love.” The answer is the fear of not being worthy of love. The fear speaks in your stead. But, it isn’t you. You are worthy of love. Everyone is.

The way I see it is that, when you are born, you are a lush, virgin forest that stretches into the vastness of space. At its center lies the heart. When fear is infused within your being through painful circumstances or traumas, a wall is erected around the heart. How close the wall is to your heart and how high the wall is both depend on how strong your fear is and, thus, on how much control it has over you. If your heart is able to see beyond the wall of fear, it has the potential to overcome it. It can see the vastness of the world and the beauty within it. The heart wants to expand into the world naturally because, in my opinion, that is the nature of the universe: expansion.

So what if the wall of fear is so high and near, that the heart cannot see beyond it? In my opinion, I feel that even if there is but a millimeter between the wall of fear and the heart, it is enough for the heart to witness and feel love. The wall does not crumble. It is the small space within the wall and between the heart that expands. The heart can connect to the vastness of love by focusing on love itself. Love is the forest. The forest can be infinitely vast, but even within the smallest leaf of the tiniest tree within that forest, there is love. Therefore, within that tiny, tiny part of the forest, love is already there and already complete. Connect to it and from the heart more of the forest is born. Love expands from the heart and the wall moves away from the heart, as the heart expands and creates love.

Moving the wall can take time, but it is always possible. The fear within the mind will put up a fight to have its way and keep you under control. When it feels that you are trying to expand and move it away, it will try to make you believe with a burning, visceral and aggressive desire that the world is a dangerous place, full of circumstances and events that can cause you immense suffering and pain. Just like the circumstances and events that built the wall in the first place remember? So trust me and let the wall of fear right where it is, because this is what will protect you from the pain and suffering that is within the world.

The pain comes first. I experienced it so viscerally, that I believed the story within my mind too. My fear will keep me from feeling more pain and suffering is what I believed every day without even noticing it. The wall of fear will do its utmost to keep you within it and try its utmost to sever the connection with the world beyond it and the love within the world.

And so, to keep you within the loveless, black and cold wall of fear, your fear projects objects of desire onto its wall for you to desire. Material abundance, status, recognition, professional achievements, admiration, and so on. However, the energy it needs to do so and create these illusions comes from you. By believing in the fear, you give it energy. And so, you will become tired, irritable, resentful, angry, hateful, controlling, unfriendly, judgmental, and so on, because that is how fear diverts the energy within you, so that it may thrive and keep your heart and the love within it under control.

In a way, we have to be thankful for the mind though. It wants to protect you. And it does something else, which I believe, is fear’s greatest gift. It keeps you within its walls. The impenetrable walls can seem impossible to jump over and to be honest, often it is. So what now? Center yourself around the one thing the wall cannot contain: your heart. The vastness of the universe is contained within it and can expand from it. By trusting your heart can do it, you connect to your heart, you hear it, you feel it. You witness its potential to overcome fear. The projections within the wall of fear will subside to reveal a lifeless, movable object.

“Once we recognize that thoughts are empty, they will no longer have the power to deceive us.”

Once you familiarize yourself with this belief, the wall can be moved by the force of love within you. Your heart has within it the power of acceptance. The power of saying

Yes, I am worthy of love.

Love itself is always unconditional. It is the fear within your mind that limits its expansion and makes it conditional. Be fearless by accepting that yes, there has been immense pain in your life. Yes, there has been immense suffering in your life too. By acknowledging it with loving awareness, it will no longer have the power to hurt you again. Not because there won’t ever be pain in your life, but because you know that within you, within your heart lies the power of overcoming it.

So to me, this is it. All my thoughts and experiences have brought me here. This is what I will choose to believe in:

I will always be there, yet I never will.

Never, because as a new day is born, within it lies the potential for experiencing pain and suffering.

Always, because as a new day is born, within it lies the potential for the overcoming of pain and suffering.

As true as this is for the world without, so it is true for the world within you.

At every moment you can make a choice.

You can choose to be overcome by pain and suffering.

But, you also can also choose to overcome pain and suffering.

The force to overcome lies within you, in your heart.

That force is love.

So at the first light of dawn, as the sun shines its first light onto this world and you wake up tomorrow,

what choice will you make?