When I stop running from, and avoiding my fear, but instead turn to face, accept and allow it, increasingly allow it to be a part of my experience, the fear dissolves, losing its force.
From the time I began serving at Fear-No-More Zoo I have progressively, if not "suddenly", gone through a clarifying process with regard to fear. Today, fifteen years later, I find I am choosing simply to love my fear. In any moment where I let myself feel it, deeply feel it, to the degree I do I am engulfed by a life impulse within which fear is embraced and exceeded.I don't love fear because I like it or in order to encourage it. I've come to love it because it is present and active in everything I do, in every moment, and it's not going away through any effort or struggle or search. Finally, my only real choice has become loving it. This is not romantic or infatuous love but an essential impulse that overwhelms me. In part, too, I love the fear simply because it is afraid, and pitiful, and needs love in order to be free. Loving the fear is equal to loving myself, loving the entire event of the life within which I somehow exist.
In daily meditation, the WALKS I've been doing, in my service to the animals and at other times, feeling notices fear, dissolves it, and opens to un-thought-of life and mystery.
Animals' constant bodily sense and awareness of being part of the food chain, th
at death is potential in any moment, swells their contemplative residence within the Mystery of Life, and the Divine, anchoring them in the disposition of "fearing-no-more". They don't philosophize that death might happen to them. They know it will. And when the time arrives they know how to yield and release themselves into the process of mortal death with a grace few humans are practiced enough to equal.The tacit knowledge of inescapable death inspires animals into fully embracing their situation without argument or complaint and, through their natural meditative depth, feeling is released to move life into the place, and disposition, of "fearing-no-more".
Described by Adi Da Samraj as "Fearing-No-More", this disposition abides not in the absence of fear and threat, but through the fully feeling acceptance of fear and threat, perpetually releasing through love-surrender to life and mystery.
Fear-No-More World WALKS invoke our human embrace and acceptance of mortal fear, loving life beyond all apparent deaths past, present and still to come...
Stuart
