Defeating Fear

We are facing a crisis of fear in the world, playing out in many ways on many platforms.  And trying to keep fear at bay in the current environment is challenging as we are subjected on a daily basis to horrific reports of violence, destruction and hatred along with an accompanying onslaught of images, sounds and threats—and outright encouragement– of anger and hostility. All this is in part designed to create and sustain fear in order to further the assorted goals of the fear mongers.  Exaggeration and distraction are important tactics used by those who wish to advance their own agendas, and are employed manipulatively and without compunction. It is not unreasonable to worry that our most valuable resources and revered institutions are at risk as civil discourse struggles to survive. In short, fear has been weaponized.

Things can seem quite grim. But don’t be disheartened.  We have a not-so-secret power of our own, and we need to access it and appreciate its influence and hold it and sustain it and share it.

The antidote to fear is love.

Sounds simplistic, even banal or saccharine, to some.  But it is not.  Love is our greatest resource, and accessible by each of us. It allows each of us to make a difference, and negates our sense of helplessness.  It is the stuff of creation and vision and change and hope and possibility.   It also disables anger.

I am not talking about how to engage romantic or familial or neighborly love and generosity here. I trust that you are already practiced in these familiar expressions of love.  I am talking about how to connect with the field of love, and hold it, how to stand in it and become infilled by it and supported and secured by it, how to become it. I am inviting you to access and build the vibrational field of love in subtle, inner ways.  The nurturing and development and reinforcement of your feeling sense of love not only protects you by restricting fear, it allows you to stand in the strength of your self with courage, and to radiate and reach through the field to support and protect life and what is sacred.

So how do we gather this resource, our capacity for being love, and apply it here?  How can we actually disengage fear?

The first step is to connect to your own feelings of what you love in ordinary daily experience.  I find an opening to the feeling sense of love in simple ways, tapping into some small aspect of joy in the beauty and wonder of my worldly experience.  Perhaps it is a walk in the woods, the smell of a rose, the taste of chocolate, the feel as my hands wrap around a warm morning cup of coffee, the thought of my child or my grandchild, the fun of an entertaining movie, the sound of music. This only requires little steps of awareness and appreciation.  Pause a moment, look around you, or in you, and pay attention to something that delights you. Is there one thing that gives you a sense of pleasure just to think of it? Something that raises an inner smile, a softening? In other words, what makes you feel good?

No matter how small or mundane you might think your object of good feeling is, there are no inconsequential openings into the expansive field of love. By finding some resonance with it, in even the smallest way, you connect to the field of love and may grow and expand and anchor your own feeling sense of love. Once you have connected to something that makes you feel peace or beauty or joy or delight, you have found the way into your own feeling sense of the love field.  Explore it, play in it, immerse yourself in it with special attention to simply feeling it! Blend with it. Be it.

When we resonate with the field of love and light, through our feeling sense, we reinforce it, and what’s more, we become transponders.  As we hold the feeling sense of love, it emanates and reverberates through the field, expanding it even further.  This is how the power of love works.

As Martin Luther King said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

Fear cannot defeat fear.  But love can defeat fear.