If you are like me, you have spent several years studying many different paths to oneness and wellbeing. We have so much amazing information regarding personal liberation right at our fingertips.

 

When we are implementing these teachings, we usually feel our best or at least a lot better. We feel more connected to our souls and maintain clarity of perception. This usually shows up in our bodies and personal success levels.

 

For most people, their daily spiritual practice and routine diminishes and the knowledge fades over time. Life takes over and its demands on our time and attention move the practice to the back burner. When this happens, we start to forget the life changing phrases and clarifying cliff notes that had kept us on track.

 

Fear is a vibrational energy. Fear is an organic, natural energy that is shared by all animals, unlike guilt and shame, which are not natural. When animals experience fear they feel it and shake it off, literally, and move on. We refuse to feel it and it accumulates, causing density. Then we prove to ourselves that the world is an unsafe place. We keep it locked in place to protect us, but then it keeps us locked in place. Fear limits and restricts us. We stay in unsatisfying relationships, unsatisfying jobs, invalidating the universal principle of more. We play life safe. We hold onto our limitations.

When we experience fear we fight, flee or freeze, all of which stop the flow of energy and impede receiving and expansion.

Fear is an immature, primitive reaction. It served primitive man well and served us well as children to protect us. It keeps us safe, but small and needy and weighs us down even as it seems to support us.

Fear exists on the mental level and much of our mental activity is being run on the energy of fear. It is like a membrane that enshrouds us, protecting us from deeper vibrational density within, mostly sadness. It is a self-defense mechanism. 

Courage isn’t the absence of fear. Courage is a willingness to feel fear and move forward anyway. Fear sets up a barrier both to us receiving our magnificence, and experiencing and giving out our Divinity. Fear is a vibrational membrane that locks energy in place. Courage allows our energy to flow by restoring movement. We feel the fear and walk through that barrier of fear. Fear is not wrong but it is limiting. Courage is sustaining momentum and moving through this barrier of fear, moving beyond our comfort zone. Fearlessness equals doing, moving forward, keeping momentum.

There is one symptom of the fear of un-lovability and unworthiness and that is sadness and depression. This wound of un-lovability expresses itself in the feeling of depression. The reason sadness arises from the experience of unworthiness is that it is untrue, yet you believe it. Lack of worth, lack of acceptance, lack of lovability is the great fallacy in life. But you hold worthlessness as a belief on some level and as long as that false belief is in place you will feel the symptoms of sadness and depression.

You believe you are unlovable not because you truly are experiencing yourself authentically that way but because you are gauging and judging your worth based upon the conditioning and experiences of parents, teachers, society, friends, family and spiritual beliefs. You have to fit in, excel, look, act, respond and think like they want you to in order for them to love you. And that is an impossible job with an unattainable result. You live in-authentically to be loved and you dis-connect yourself from your essential self, always living in a created self, seeking to be loved.

When you don’t get what you want you react with anger or you hide yourself away. Either way, deep inside you feel a deep and ever-present sadness. You can’t achieve being loved outside and you aren’t experiencing it inside, where it truly exists, because you are dis-connected to your essential self. As this cycle continues sadness turns to depression.

Worth is determined by how you value something and Self-worth is determined by the extent to which you deem yourself excellent or lacking and how you value yourself.

How do you see yourself? You are, to some extent, living an in-authentic life. You have created an image, a created self to fit in, to be accepted and to be loved. Everything you think, say and do is caught up in your quest to be valued by others. So your self-worth is being determined by an outside person or group of people who have never been able to see the authentic you.

Sometimes we make an intention or a resolution and break it. We feel guilty. We feel bad and angry that we let ourselves or others down, sad we have broken our promise, or fearful we are going down a slippery slope. Maybe we think we have sinned. All this combines to form guilt, a learned and conditioned response to what happens when we violate our sense of integrity. Guilt is self-inflicted. It is not an organic emotion. This dissonant feeling of guilt is telling us we are drifting out of alignment. Guilt is the gap between our behavior and who we want to be. It is an incredible chance to see ourselves clearly and grow.

Guilt impedes our ability to receive everything life has to offer us. Guilt is the foundation for unworthiness and when we feel unworthy, we sabotage life. Guilt locks unworthiness in place. Guilt comes from ourselves, other people, religion, and family. We should place guilt in its proper perspective and realize that we are not the same people we were when that happened, that story is not true, we have learned much since then, and our consciousness has expanded. Recognize the distance between now & then. The Divine doesn’t judge us. On the level of the Divine and Soul, there is only love and acceptance.

When a desire with attachment is thwarted or denied, it turns to anger. Anger arises from dissatisfaction, from not getting what you want or getting what you don’t want, from the expectation unfulfilled. You become more and more attached to your expected outcome and when it doesn’t arrive you get angry. You seek wholeness, completion, and happiness in the fulfillment of desire with attachment and are constantly in dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction is the main form of suffering. Dissatisfaction and anger arise from feeling limited, betrayed, from not speaking up, from being pushed around, by not being seen or heard, by being passive and feeling futility. It starts as resentment. Resentment turns into frustration. Frustration turns into anger and becomes rage when not addressed. 

Anger can take on many faces. Some you see as anger and some are more subtle. You think; That person rubs me the wrong way, You roll your eyes, make a sharp remark, you think he’s a thorn in my side, you have a tantrum, feel bitterness, suspicion, hatred, envy, resentment, criticism, annoyance, animosity, sullenness, gruffness, rage, grudges, and you have arguments.

However much you think we are provoked, your anger is always your own creation.

In autumn here in Massachusetts, I often preempt the landscapers hired by our landlord and rake the leaves in our yard myself. In doing so, I not only avoid the gas fumes and deafening noise of their leaf-blowers, I also step into a kind of spiritual practice. Raking leaves, in the quiet of a crisp fall day, is sweetness for the soul. The slow movements back and forth are deeply meditative. My body moves gently and unhurriedly with the natural rhythm of the seasons. I listen to the sounds of blue jays and chickadees calling and pause silently to watch when a butterfly or bumblebee alights on the periwinkle ageratum flowers. Gratitude fills my heart. I feel intensely the beauty of nature all around me. The sun on my face and hands, the slightly cool breeze, the smell of fallen leaves and the earth itself. At times like these, I am fully present, fully connected to the spirit within me and everywhere around me.

Worry is born from a lack of trust. You have tried to control life, especially when you feel insecure and vulnerable. When you feel your life is unstable you begin to project into the future and worry. You lose trust when you lose stability, when you lose connection to a strong foundation inside. You imagine all the negative possibilities; poverty, homelessness, being alone. You stoke fear-based energies. These arise when you feel disconnected internally and fear arises.

 

You have such a strong attachment to certain outcomes. When these outcomes appear to be crumbling in front of you, fear strengthens, unworthiness increases and you worry as you see control slipping away, as you see possibilities narrow.

 

You also identify as your accomplishments, your possessions, your thoughts and your fears. Your self-worth is attached to outcomes and circumstances. So when your attachments and identifications come under assault, when they crumble, you move into worry. You are not your mind, your body, your possessions or your stories. You are limitless love, peace and abundance. When you can move into this authentic identification, you open up to the possibility of peace.

The Holidays are coming! It is getting cooler outside, and we begin the time of year where we share gifts with those that we love … whether the gift be a present, or our presence, the Holidays are a time that we truly focus on love and joy. The Spirit world also likes to join in on the celebration by giving us gifts. They bring us so many gifts throughout the year that oftentimes we mistake them as coincidence, or we simply ignore them. For example, have you ever wondered if there is any spiritual symbolic significance to always finding ‘dimes’ or ‘pennies’ everywhere?

Finding change around … any kind of change, quarters, dimes, whatever … is a sign from the Spirit world. It is their way of letting us know that they are around. Just a simple “hello” or “I am with you”. Once you come to realize this, you will feel and know their presence more often in your daily lives. Many people have shared with me their stories about finding particular coins over and over again after the transition of a loved one or during a very challenging time in their lives. After recognizing the gift they had received, they felt blessed to know their loved ones were around. Some people have even found piles of change in strange places. Again, a beautiful reminder, a “present” from the Spirit world!

I view spiritual practice as the freeing of awareness from identification with anything. That’s a spiritual practice. How that is done is through a wide variety of means. It can be done, for example, in the heart through a devotional practice. In other words, I can bring my mind through to love using some icon, or some being, or some person, and loving it so thoroughly that it frees the mind from all the rest of the stuff. Then I can go into that love so deeply, that I go into the formless love. I go through form into formlessness, and I come to that place of free awareness through love.

For example, I use mala prayer beads. This is a technique for reminding me that you and I are only relatively real. I’m keeping another plane of reality going simultaneously to remind me of the formlessness inherent in the form. In other words, I’m doing a practice while I’m talking to you.

Now the whole idea of a meditative practice is the process of very simply extricating awareness from the identification with thought and sensation.

Most people would agree, even without a degree in psychology, that many if not most problems are created by the mind. It’s impossible to be human without the functioning of the higher brain (the cerebral cortex), which is proportionately larger in Homo sapiens, and evolved with unusual swiftness into the state where it can process mathematics, philosophy, art and science. But we are trapped by the mind at the same time, as witness centuries of war on a vast scale down to daily episodes of domestic abuse in the home, or take a clinical view at the countless people suffering from depression, anxiety, and other forms of mental distress.

 

Medicine aims to relieve people of mental distress, with the goal of addressing a mood disorder like depression, for example, and returning the mind to a normal state. But this only highlights our confusion over what “normal” means, because there are plenty of ills created by people who would pass the test for normality. In our own minds was born the atom bomb, toxic chemicals, ecological depredation, authoritarian regimes, religious and racial prejudice, and so on. Normal still leaves the human mind ignorant of how to escape itself, which could be the true mark of Homo sapiens as a unique species.