Journey From Fear to Love

 

Photo Credit: QuoteFancy| Marianne Williamson

Journey From Fear to Love

There are two motivating forces which are fundamental to our existence – fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we feel love, fall in love, we open our hearts to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. First, we have to learn to love ourselves with all our imperfections. If we are unable to love ourselves, then it becomes very difficult to love others.

While meditating I realised that the opposite of love is not hatred, but fear. Fear with its sense of contraction, isolation, tension, diffidence and coldness towards others and towards life, and Love with its expansion, inclusion, trust, relaxation, empathy and compassion towards each other and towards the planet. Fear wants to control and makes you more easily controlled, and love gives freedom and makes you realise that you are free.

The biggest fear that man has is the fear of death. While this fear preys on the minds of everyone, there is one simple way to get rid of this fear. Meditation helps us see our own self for what we really are – just souls encased in a physical body. The soul has seen several bodies and is eternal – it is on its own journey to liberation.

Fear is a sense of lack of contact with existence. Imagine a child in a cradle, left alone, the parents have gone somewhere. The child wakes up and finds that it is alone and starts crying copiously in its cradle – left alone with no contact, nobody to protect, nobody to give solace, nobody to love, a loneliness, a vast loneliness all around – that is fear.

I see, understand and know this fear in me as I am sure almost all of you do, and these are the moments in which it is triggered and oftentimes even exploited by those who have their own private agenda; but these are also the moments in which our spirit can rise from the dark valleys of fear and move towards the luminous peaks of one of the most powerful qualities that man has within himself: the ability to love.

Love in the true sense of the word. A love that is bigger than our small world. A love that can embrace not only the other but all living beings on the planet. This is the glory of man who is able to destroy but at the same time able to feel and share love, one of the most divine creative forces that resides right in our hearts. It is up to us now to let it awaken. The time is ripe.