Category Archives: Cliff Notes (on fear)

Let Yourself Fall from the Plane

Imagine yourself high in the air, a passenger in a small plane. Mid-flight you are calmly sitting in your seat, eating free peanuts and enjoying the scenery from your window seat.

viewfromtheplane

Suddenly, one of the other passengers leaps up, and throws open the door of the plane. Shock fills the cabin.

Everyone else begins to exchange looks, the question written on their faces “What’s going on?”

Someone calls out “Hey, what are you doing?” but the sound of roaring air is all that anyone can hear.

The mystery passenger starts moving through the plane. Sickeningly you realise he is coming towards you.

“Why?!” you think as cold panic begins to creep up your spine. Before you can resist he has undone your seat belt and he grabs you by the shoulders.

Pushing and pulling he drags you towards the open door, air buffets your body and you understand that he means to shove you out into the empty space below.

Without a parachute and thousands of feet up in the air this fall would surely mean death. Wide-eyed, sweat springs from every pore. Your heart is pounding and your voice seems to have cruelly escaped you.

In silent terror you begin to struggle. You desperately grab at anything solid to try to prevent this fate. The fibres of your being are geared to resist, your body is tense.

Clinging to the door frame, your stomach becomes a sudden block of frozen ice as you glimpse the green and brown paddocks far, far below.

And then suddenly, it’s over.

Your hands have loosened from the door frame, the force of the stranger has won and you are free falling, hurtling towards solid earth below.

There is nothing left to do. Your will is surrendered to the fall.

Now, there is only your fear.

**********

My soulmate shared this analogy with me in order to help me better understand the emotional difference between feeling afraid and actually releasing fear.

I believe he was attempting to help me know that:

In order to release fear we must surrender to it.

On the free fall from the plane you don’t talk about your fear, you don’t reason with it.

You don’t intellectually analyze its root cause.

You don’t phone a therapist or a friend.

You don’t have a group therapy session to help you cope.

You don’t seek commiseration, compare notes or consult a text.

You are IN the experience of fear. It dominates your reality and you have no thought or space for anything else.

freefall

While any part of us struggles against fear we cannot let go of it. While we still act to avoid, to mitigate our terror or bargain that we can handle ‘only this portion’ and ‘not that bit of it’ we are not experiencing the emotions that will heal us and change us into beings free from fear.

As you struggled to stay in the plane, no doubt you would have described yourself as terrified. However much of your will was also still involved in resisting[i].

On the free fall to the ground, there is surrender to fear because you know that there is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent your circumstance.

Releasing fear also feels like this.

We do not argue with it or rationalise it or do anything at all to try to prevent it. The fear is there and we allow it to overwhelm our senses and experience without resistance or intellectual analysis.

The use of this metaphor is to help us recognise that even in times when we would describe ourselves as feeling afraid most of us are still resisting and attempting to control our terrors and fears. This state does not allow for the release of emotion or changes in our souls.

The story is there to illustrate the difference between fighting at the door and the free fall. In terms of the experience of emotion the two circumstances represent very different states.

But this is where the analogy must end. If I carried it to its completion I would be implying that surrender to fear leads you to physical death.

Actually quite the opposite is true.

Surrender to fear doesn’t lead to you ending up a splattered, dead blob on the ground.

Allowing surrender – without impediment – to the experience of our fears actually prolongs our life and often opens up creative and joyful parts of us that have long been dormant.

It is the denial and suppression of fear that results in certain death.

Surrender to fear actually averts danger.

Allowing our emotions, particularly our fear, means that we become more sensitive to the emotions and motivations of those around us as well. We have clearer, more truthful, perceptions of others and this means that we can make more informed choices and actually act sooner to ensure our safety.

When we release fear we avoid illness, we are more creative and for the first time make joy a real and lasting possibility in our lives.

The release of fear allows us to live in harmony with love and love is the way that we gain life.

If there is any death associated with the surrender to fear is it merely the death of our willingness to honour fear above all else. This is a death to celebrate not mourn.

The major block to the release of fear is that most of us believe that the uncontrolled experience of fear will lead to something worse than death. We believe that there is no point to feeling fear and instead protect and nurse it at all costs. And this is why change does not happen. When we live in these false beliefs, rather than challenging them, we shut down full surrender to fear.

We might experience fear in brief moments but there is no ‘falling from the plane’.

Most people who have heard Divine Truth are at this time in a stagnant place. This is because they are living in their fears or still living in addictions that mask their deepest fears. There is still much ‘fighting at the door’ instead of surrendering to the emotions that are already present within.

[i] It should be noted that I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t resist if someone is literally attempting to throw you from a plane, only to be aware that fear is not passing through us in this place.

Living In Fear & the Freedom to Choose Differently

The sad truth is that the entire world’s population lives in fear in some or all aspects of their lives.

Some of us acknowledge some of our fears some of the time. But seeing our fear doesn’t mean that we deal with it healthily. In fact, most of us feel justified in our fears and demand, be it covertly or overtly, that our environment and the people in our lives make allowances for our fear driven limitations.

Then there are those of us who live in complete denial of large amounts of fear about any number of things at any given time. Denial is a perceived sanctuary and many people reinforce the barricades of the castle and pull up the drawbridge over which truth may have passed. Routines and addictions mask any sensation of fear, numbness becomes the norm, and even though the supposed ‘sanctuary’ can feel cold and damp at times, the real issue of fear is never mentioned and life is branded as normal.

We deny or diminish what scares us because in our souls we are actively resisting and suppressing the sensation of fear. This is how we choose to use our will.

And to aid us in the quest for avoidance we choose and create addictions, and attract relationships to help us navigate our days and unless we are sensitive or aware we rarely notice that the way we are, the way we do, the way we be is less about our real self and more about the escape from fear.

This willingness to live in fear is an affliction that inhibits growth on a global scale. It removes us from our true selves, it creates illness and suffering, it limits joy and discovery. And yet, I notice that most of us, when faced with this simple truth, wish to deny responsibility for our choice in this matter. We might acknowledge the affliction but want no part of the cure.

We resist the truth that living in fear and its multitude of negative consequences has come about through the exercise of our own free will.

What Does It Mean “Living in Fear”?

Living in fear or living by fear is very different to feeling our fears.

living in fear

Living in fear means that we allow the fear within us to guide and dictate our actions, our interests, our relationships, our work, our pleasure, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the programme we watch on TV.

Every action, inaction, decision and indecision is made with the direct purpose of preventing the experience of fear. In other words, we are constantly responding to fear rather than simply allowing ourselves to experience it as a feeling. Fear becomes our evil task master – literally.

It is very difficult to know and discover our true selves when we live in fear since in this state our desires are limited to things that do not trigger fear. What we commonly associate with the sensation of ‘happiness’ is actually a lot more to do with a sense of relief at avoiding fear and having addictions met than any pure experience.

The truth is that as we suppress fear we simultaneously strangle desire and most of us, most of the time, prize the avoidance of fear above the exploration of our wildest dreams and deepest passions. We rarely pause to consider what we would be interested in or inspired by if fear was not a daily part of life.

And while living in fear can come to feel routine and normal it actually requires a great deal of vigilance, effort and control. Whether we realise it or not, when we live in fear all our systems are alert and geared towards its prevention. We walk through life sapped of our vitality and never experience our full potentials for energy and creativity.

Living in fear ages us and limits us. But even more than that, because we honour its prevention above anything else, fear becomes our God, our ruler, the dictator who drives our decisions and assessments. In this state, we are apt to abandon morality and ethics and even rational thought if it means that we can allay fear. In other words, unless we are willing to be humble to the feeling of fear we will become horrible, unloving people when fear is triggered.

Living in fear damages not only ourselves but the world and the people around us. It is the reason we stand idly by when bad things happen. It means we bow to the threats of people who are clearly unloving, thus lowering our own condition and the potentials for love in the immediate environment.

The nursing and retaining of fear is one of the major causes of all evil and unloving behaviour in the world.

Living in fear keeps us silent and inactive when love would compel us to speak and to act.

Living in fear means we begin to prefer error to truth.

While we justify not feeling fear we are automatically going to be unloving and contribute to the evil in the world in our daily activities and through our interactions with others.

There is always a choice between humility to fear and the resistance to and suppression of it. And each time we choose suppression and resistance we employ means, methods and emotions that are out of harmony with love to do it. We purposefully choose to use our will to NOT love, to NOT be ethical, to NOT be truthful, to NOT be moral, and each time we do this we are seeding evil on this planet.

Unfortunately we do this everyday.

And when we commiserate with fear and make allowances for the fear in others we only continue to foster conditions that lead to more evil and suffering.

contributetoevil

Signs We Are Living In Fear

We structure our lives to avoid situations that challenge us physically, emotionally or spiritually
We avoid situations and people that challenge our belief systems
We feel disconnected from our personality
We feel tired often
We get angry when challenged or things change unexpectedly
We are controlling of people or our environment
We lament our ‘inability’ to do things, to create, or to feel our feelings
We sense fear and get angry or we sense fear and go rigid or freeze
We suppress our desires. We might say things like “I don’t know what my passions are”, “I’m not sure what I truly desire or want from life”.
We discuss our fears frequently
We expect others to make allowances for our fears
We justify unloving behaviour due to our ‘special circumstances’ when we become afraid
We have difficulty making decisions. We procrastinate. We deny the need for action in our lives, we resist change.
We make jokes about our fears or the fears of others. We make fun of people who display fear.
We obsess about how others view us or how people feel about us.
We judge people or situations often
We stay busy – we resist spending time with ourselves doing nothing
We can’t be ourselves in front of groups of people – instead we resort to façade or we freeze up
We use as many addictive behaviours as possible
We live in denial and resort to wishful thinking about our progress and personal development.
We seen reassurance often
We distract ourselves from our true fears by inventing ‘fears’ we feel we can manage (emotions of self-deception)

Note: There are many more signs that could be added to this list. These are just some examples.

Denial

Most of us are in denial of just how many things frighten and terrify us.

I used to exist largely oblivious of what frightened me. I just didn’t think about it, instead I acted to avoid it and I had addictions that helped me do that.

Coming out of denial can happen as we attract events that make it impossible to deny fear any longer, like say meeting your soulmate who is Jesus (smile).

Or we can take a more pro-active approach by examining our lives truthfully.

We can for example look for three key flags that point to our living in fear:

1. Avoidance

This includes physical avoidance of situations, people and events. It also refers to (perhaps) less obvious avoidances which include every attempt we make to minimise, justify and shift the blame in relation to our fear.

2. Attempts to control & manipulate

This includes control and manipulation of our environment, other people, our children, animals, and spirits. Any time at all that you have the desire to control or influence the will of another away from what they truly desire you are acting in fear rather than feeling it.

3. Anger

This includes any sense of frustration, annoyance or irritability all the way up to outright rage, verbal and physical violence.

Examine the situations, habits, events and relationships which you either avoid, attempt to control or that trigger your anger. In every case you will find that you are living in a fear.

signsoflivinginfear

Awareness – It’s Not Enough

We can live in fear and avoid all awareness of our feelings by meeting addictions and controlling our experience and environment. But even after gaining an awareness of our fears, we can continue to live in them if we carry on doing as they command.

We can be aware that we are afraid of certain things but if our physical and emotional choices are still motivated by the desire to prevent the actual confrontation of fear no soul change has occurred. We will continue to live in fear unless we begin to make choices to challenge the messages fear gives us.

I notice many people who say that they have decided to ‘feel their emotions’ are still basing their life choices on fear – which demonstrates that they are not yet challenging their fears. The scope of their lives, limited by fear’s dictate, does not expand and this is proof of living in fear.

Another way I notice many of us not shifting into releasing fear is that we begin to have a sensation of fear or anxiety, but then not let it overwhelm us completely.

Many people live in a constant state they call feeling afraid but are actually just living in fear.

In reality they have slight sense of the feeling, allow it for a little while, feel it’s ‘all too much’ or ‘that’s enough now’ and then do one of two things:

1. Act to suppress it by controlling external circumstances or people
e.g. changing the subject, distracting oneself with a chore or the internet, leaving a situation

2. Shut Down the emotional sensations of fear internally in an attempt to manage or control its expression and prevent overwhelm
e.g. becoming harsh and judgemental of the experience of fear, panicking, intellectually attempting to analyse what the fear is about

While we try to keep the feeling at bay like this we aren’t truly experiencing it and therefore fear won’t dissipate.

While it’s important to recognise the problem of fear and even write a fear list, don’t kid yourself that self-awareness means soul changes. Becoming more aware of our fears and deciding to ‘feel our emotions’ doesn’t mean that we have stopped living in fear.

Really Releasing Fear

First things first, these things are essential:
1. Stop kidding yourself that you are dealing with fears if your life and relationships remain the same
2. Notice how often and in what ways your actions, decisions and opinions are guided by fear

Then in order to change, start to do the opposite of what fear commands, seek ways to challenge fear and, surrender to the experience of the fear that comes as a result.

In order for fear to dissipate it must be experienced emotionally. There are no shortcuts.

Here are some words from my soul mate on this matter:

“I have had to process through a lot of fear myself. My fears were intense, and many times I thought that the effect of it would kill me. But I always felt relief after my experiences. I learnt that we need to do a number of things if we want to get through fear:

1. Always allow the experience of it.

2. Do not go ‘out of body’, do not go away from the experience, do not try to run away. Going ‘out of body’ only allows spirits to take over the body, and running away only increases the fear.

3. Deep breathe all of the time during the experience. Never stop breathing diaphragmatically. This assists you to stay in your body.

4. Have faith in God, and pray for God’s assistance to not only stay in your body, but also to help you go through the experience. Always pray from your heart.

I found that when I did these things, I always got through the fear, even though the pain was very intense, and lasted up to 4 hours at a time, and sometimes longer. Also, once I was through the experience, I allowed myself to sleep, and I looked after myself. Because I allowed the experience, the next experience was always shorter. If your next experience is not shorter, then you are doing one of the above things incorrectly.”

Understanding the Power of Choice

Fear when left unchallenged pervades our life.

By living in fear we are agreeing to the lie that we really do have things to be afraid of and that love is not the most powerful force in the Universe.

Sadly, the more we tell ourselves these falsehoods and live our lives according to them, the more fear grows.

By avoiding dealing with fear we are avoiding the potentials that love and truth can bring to our lives and to our planet.

Conversely, as soon as we stop living in fear, it will begin to loosen its hold on our lives. We begin to feel more freedom and joy. We make room for Truth.

As we begin to experience fear this liberates our true self and opens up our heart to desire and possibilities previously subdued.

godisreadytohelp

To overcome fear I believe it is necessary for each of us to recognise the individual power for change that God has granted us through the gift of free will. We can harness that gift, and use our will to love.

In fact, it is only through the engagement of our will in opposition to the fear that we currently allow to govern our planet and our lives, that deep, true and lasting fulfilment becomes possible. And through this same use of will we cease supporting the fear in others, which actually assists them towards the possibility of personal fulfilment as well.

Fear fights for itself, it justifies inaction, and it makes us experts at excusing our lack of love. Unless we challenge fear and the hold we’ve given it over our lives, we have no hope of change.

Even the smallest choices made in fear send ripple effects that impact not only ourselves but our environment, our children and those people around us and carry on for longer and in more ways than we can currently conceive of. And each time we make these fear-based choices we reinforce fears commands, we live in the lie and we create more inertia to challenge and confront when we do finally decide to choose love.

We are exercising our will to make choices in relation to fear minute by minute, day by day. The cessation of life lived in fear does not depend on any external circumstance, event or person. It is in our hands alone and depends upon only one thing – the personal choice to cease listening to fear and instead to use our will in the direction of love, truth and ethics. Without making courageous choices that grow integrity to principles such as these, feeling emotions is not only useless but the emotions felt are not those which will heal us.

Yet when we are willing to be steadfast and humble as we challenge fear, emotions will begin to flow from us. Change will happen.

I encourage you to examine your choices- these precious expressions of will. They can be your catalyst for change and growth or simply a manifestation of excuses made to live in fear.

Sometimes I Think of Dogs

I once had a friend who was afraid of dogs. I didn’t know this until some years after we had met. She visited at a time when I was dog-sitting for an acquaintance and the dog scared her so much so she couldn’t stay in the apartment.

My friend’s fear didn’t bother me but I simply couldn’t relate to it.

Zen, the dog, was a tiny little terrier who was completely cute and harmless.

This is me and Zen the dog. He is actually very small.

When I have a huge fear, that seems so important and justified, I sometimes think about that particular friend and the difference in our feelings towards dogs.

I grew up with all kinds of dogs as pets. I loved them all and have never feared any dog.

My friend on the other hand had been attacked by a dog as a child and as an adult just being around a canine sets her on edge.

What is so terrifying to her is absolutely not real for me.

It’s often like that with my soul mate and I.

I’m so afraid of how others think of me, of men, of women, of violence, of anger, of judgement, of being wrong, of being right, of hoping, and of loosing.

To my mate, all that fear is just not real.

It’s like I live in some foreign country where reality is strangely skewed off kilter while he lives free and strong across the border, grounded in truth and sensing things I don’t yet see.

When we have released a fear about something, or it just didn’t exist in us in the first place, we see the world with more clarity. We easily recognise the untruth that drives the fear in others about that particular issue.

Yet, when we live in fear, the object of our terror becomes like a huge mountain overshadowing everything in our lives. We are desperate to avoid it; we base decisions around it. The fear’s existence becomes a vital factor to consider as we live each day. We elevate it’s untruth into something significant and our hearts constrict in response.

Fear can make us believe that avoiding it is the most crucial thing and really the only thing to do.

That is how fear deceives us. It is how fear controls us.

It’s time for me to turn the tables on fear and to call its bluff.

There’s a rabble-rouser roaming in my heart telling me its time.

Thinking about my friend and dogs, reminds me that what terrifies me now will one day be, at most, a scarce consideration.

On Fear, Quick-Fixes & Standing by What We Believe

Recently someone forwarded me the following clip:

My first thought was – why send me this?

What is shared in this clip is one very basic truth that is discussed and built upon in far more depth and detail in recordings of events that I was present at and can be viewed here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here… in fact there are over 1200 hours of video on our youtube channel that bring a far broader context and meaning to the importance of emotions and discuss how they relate to the human soul, God, absolute truth, eternal growth, physical healing, and much, much more.

So this video is not news to me. The people involved are discussing something that I discovered a long time ago.

So why send it?

I can actually think of about four reasons why a person who knows me might send me this clip.

Below are two.

These are also reasons why I think this video will likely be forwarded in unsolicited emails and shared on Facebook feeds by many people who I know and who come to our seminars.

1. The Dynamics of Living in Fear

I often hear excitement from people we know when an element of Universal Truth that we teach becomes more widely known and discussed.

I know that many would like to claim that this is an innocent joy that arises because of knowledge and feeling that more truth in the world might mean improvement in the lives of others. But mostly I don’t believe it.

Greater than their love for humanity, people who attend our talks often have a fear of being judged and considered outside of the mainstream.

When some element of what is already shared in depth via Divine Truth becomes more ‘acceptable’ to ‘normal’ society it can help those of us who fear this kind of judgment to feel less afraid. ‘Excitement’ can actually be because fear is momentarily avoided, and the addiction to popular acceptance seems like it might be able to be met while still loving Divine Truth after all.

In the six years since I met AJ again I haven’t met a single person who was drawn to him because of his (our) identity claims. Most people listen in spite of the fact that the guy making so much sense is also saying that he is Jesus.

No one worships him. In fact, the reality of how Jesus is treated is so starkly in contrast to this idea that the thought of people blindly adoring him makes me laugh out loud. Most people want to argue with him, to doubt him and delay engaging their hearts with what he teaches for as long as possible.

Nevertheless they still attend and if you ask them why – and I have asked a great many – resoundingly they all say that it’s because what is spoken is the most meaningful spiritual truth that they have ever encountered. They say it satisfies questions they have asked for a lifetime.

Yet I know for a fact that many, indeed most, of these same people don’t talk about their excitement for what they have heard from us with others. They don’t mention that they know us when others speak of us publicly, and most certainly don’t forward our youtube clips.

In fact, people I have known for years, who have asked us to their homes, shared their deepest fears and sought advice from us, still wish to hide from everyone in their lives that they know us at all.

Jesus and I currently exist outside what the mainstream accepts as normal. While many people like what we have to say they still live in fear of themselves being ostracised by others. This means that they often ostracise us. But even more sadly for me is to know that while in the company of others they often diminish or minimise their passion for God and don’t speak freely about what they believe. Instead they speak in terms that they think will be less contentious to others. They do this rather than sharing the broader context of God’s Love, God’s Laws and the human soul and how that has made so much more sense than examining only the fragments that the world currently presents and accepts.

And when someone more ‘publicly acceptable’ than Jesus or I states even a small element of the extensive truth that we have been teaching for 2000 years then the sudden rush to share their message is not always altruistic or noble. It is often led by the desire to have someone else to pave the way, to ‘take the heat’ and to make things easier to live and believe Divine Truth freely without fear of attack or criticism.

Coming from a state of fear, it’s tempting to search for ways to present Divine Truths in a form that isn’t so challenging to others.

But Divine Truth by its inherent qualities and existence challenges all error. So, in order for lasting change to happen challenges can and must occur both within us and around us. The fears in you, and in me, the false beliefs the whole world over, are all going to need to be exposed and dealt with. There is no quick-fix or magic bullet that will get us over that line.

2. The Quick-Fix Phenomenon

The second reason I believe that, at least in the short term, that the E-motion clip will get more hits than most of those on our youtube channel is that most of western society has a diminishing attention span. We are also becoming increasingly comfortable with, and even demanding for, things that require little effort on our part in order for us to feel better.

In this fast paced, globalised, fast food, iPad, facebook world that we live in – that is all geared towards instant gratification – we love sound bites. We love small morsels that we can digest without much mastication, or thought. We want things that are easy.

We live on a media staple of programmes in which someone has already made up their mind about a topic and simply tells us what to think. Journalism, once a profession filled with idealists engaged in the quest to discover and expose truth, has become increasingly dominated by big industry concerns about profit and driven by the need to please a consumer that no longer desires to be challenged. Journalists I meet seem jaded and cynical about the world around them.

The 10 minute grab used in the E-motion promo uses devices we are all by now comfortable with and welcoming of. I suspect that the longer movie will be in keeping with the format of the clip – present a simple idea, expound a little, move on to the next idea. Colour, movement, nicely packaged portions to digest.

While this format can be a handy way to expose people to new ideas, it lacks capacity to delve deep into topics. And sadly, this is what we all seem to want.

We are so geared towards instant gratification that we feel it’s an imposition to attend for longer than brief periods. We want to be able to know without learning. Our attention span is quickly diminishing through conditioning of a world that’s news cycle is so ever changing that we hardly have time to process one great crisis before another is upon us. We are loosing the will to think deeply, to reflect, to consider and to engage in processes that require reasoning and learning. Ironically we are loosing the desire to do exactly what this video is suggesting we need to do – to feel deeply and to change emotionally.

By and large the trend in the west is that more and more people want change to happen in neatly packaged parcels that they can control and direct. Before we even begin, most of us want to be told what to do, for how long, what to expect and what we get as a result of doing it. Frankly, we are becoming dummies limiting our lives and our experience simply because we want to avoid fear and discomfort. When I think of great explorers and discoverers that have changed the face of how we live and the comforts we enjoy today, I know that they did not approach life in this way.

In fact the greatest person I have ever known – across two centuries and much experience –is one who’s spirit of exploration, dedication, patience, humility and desire has led him to discover the Great Truths of God and how we may each encounter them. He did not achieve this quickly; he did not purchase the pre-packaged all expenses paid deal. He set out on a voyage of discovery, without all the answers, without Google and without a therapist.

By contrast to popular mainstream culture, Divine Truth tells us that we are responsible for who we are what we do; that healing is first and foremost in our hands and we can place it in hands of God but only if we will it. It calls us to search ourselves in honesty and humility and to summon our deepest desires and longings in order to know our Creator. It doesn’t give shortcuts.

It does give solid, practical answers that aren’t always easy to hear or to implement when we live steeped in addiction and the desire for immediate gratification. And I happen to know the guy who teaches it best.

He has dedicated his life to sharing these Truths with anyone who will listen, and often in very harsh conditions. I am proud of him and I want the world to know it.

Watching any two hour presentation on the Divine Truth channel is sure to challenge you on one or more levels. It won’t offer you a two minute technique, a tapping exercise or rote prayer with which to engage your Creator or commence your healing. And really, thank goodness for that. Surely our Loving Parent wants more of us than an intellectual recitation or a 5 minutes practice per day. Surely in Her Infinite Love she would want to know our hearts, what pains us, what we dream of and what makes us come alive? She would want us to engage our desire and longings in our relationship with Her. Anyone on Earth who wants to truly know us wants those things from us.

And surely a Parent who really wants the best for us wouldn’t want us to settle into addictions when we could have real joy. He wouldn’t want us to lack ethics and morality, a state that harms not only us but those around us, all for the sake of short-term comfort. He wouldn’t want us to ignore a challenge and limit our lives just because of something as illusory as fear.

Walking the Way means facing our fears, embracing challenges and giving up our addictions to minimum effort for maximum comfort. While I believe that a growing focus on emotional healing would do much to assist the world, I know that it will take more than that for the world and us as individuals to be authentically and lastingly happy.

What is required is humility to new ideas, a love of truth, and a loyalty to ethics and morality no matter the threat or fear we encounter.

Postscript:

In this post I speak to you not as someone who is free of fear or who is without the desire for a quick-fix solution to my problems.

But I am someone whom, from lived experience, understands the temptation to want to have others share the journey with Divine Truth so as to not feel so alone and weird. In fact I really would have preferred the entire world to join me in acceptance of who I am and what I believe before I fully committed my heart and life to it.

I long ago left the world of facebook but freely admit that while still a user myself, I was much more likely to share snippets of what I knew to be truth if they were presented by someone other than Jesus. While I knew that Divine Truth was the answer to ending war, poverty, starvation, illness, abuse and every type of suffering I had ever encountered or heard about, I lived in fear about how other people would judge me if they knew everything that I believed. I also thought that I should be a ‘special case’ as my fears were ‘bigger’ since they involved, not only what I believed, but who I am.

Over the years, many times, I have had to face the decision to stand by what I knew to be true or to run and hide in fear. I didn’t always make the moral choice. But sometimes I have and it’s been very, very good for me (smile).

Know this, the fear of being judged, the fear of negative public opinion won’t be gone from you just because Divine Truth becomes more acceptable. Our fears reside within our souls and their existence is not dependent on what happens around us.

Challenging fears and releasing them is a process under our sole and direct control, and even if external acceptances of Divine Truth change, the fear of being ridiculed will not be gone from us until we engage our will to make it so.

I also think that the dynamic I outlined in the post poses some interesting ethical questions to us all:

When new people in the mainstream begin to present other small elements of Divine Truth in a way that society finds less confronting than a man called Jesus stating it, will we be sharing and forwarding that on in all eagerness?

Or will we state that we’d heard it long before from an unassuming Australian guy who practises what he preaches – Truth, Humility & Love – even in the face of attack and condemnation?

Another thing I know for sure is that no truth is easily accepted by the majority if it’s very existence challenges large fears and addictions within that same group.

The world is pretty messed up right now and in order for it to change someone, or some people, will have to show up and disagree with what everyone accepts as normal.

That is my passion, to surrender to what I believe in so fully that no fear will impede my journey, and no threat will be enough to silence my voice or halt my steps towards living an example that demonstrates the power of God to heal all things.

Love,

Mary

Fear, Reality & the Gap Between

The law of attraction has been bringing me many opportunities lately to work with and communicate with people in a lot of fear.

I am myself a person who still has many (many) fears.

But in recent time I have been dealing with people who have somewhat different fears to my own or in situations that I don’t find as scary as they do. This has been an immense gift as it has allowed me to see what it must be like for people around me when I resist experiencing my fears and instead live in them and let them direct my thinking and actions.

I have been given insights into just how damaging living in fear really is and how much fear impairs our perceptions of reality.

I wrote a note to a friend about some of this and I thought others might find it useful as a tool for their own self-reflection.

Dear Sister,

I think that the major lesson or emotion I would encourage you towards is to see how much you feel controlled and pushed when a situation is simply triggering one or more of your fears.

Often the communication or events that are triggering your fears are not controlling or bullying but you feel that they are. This happens because you are resisting your fear. Internally you still believe that feeling fear is ‘impossible’ so you interpret that the person or event is being unreasonable and ‘pushing’ you toward something that is crazy and unloving. In reality they are often just being logical or direct.

I’ve noticed this dynamic in my own life a lot. That is, how I often feel pressured or controlled when fear is triggered. If I allow myself to soften to fear or sometimes even just recognise the fear, I see things far more clearly. Feeling and releasing our fears is definitely the best and most loving thing we can do. It allows us to see reality, not just interpret events through our investment in avoiding fear.

Love,
Mary

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Notes Along The Way

A place to find helpful, heartfelt stories & tips for living God's Way