Love in your mind produces love in your life. This is the meaning of heaven. Fear in your mind produces fear in your life. This is the meaning of hell. ~Marianne Williamson
I am sitting in front of one of my mentors and we are enthralled in a deep conversation about life. My eyes are teary and my energy is low. I was tired of fighting with my brain, arguing with my gut and ignoring my heart. I was overwhelmed by many events happening in my life and I needed to process my emotions and learn how to listen to my heart. I needed to lower the volume of the peanut gallery in my head. Too many days of listening to “Yes”, “no”, “maybe”, “what if”, “you can’t do that“, “you are not ready”, “be grateful”, “there is something wrong”, “why aren’t you doing this”… OMG. I was exhausted.
That summer afternoon, my gaze was on the floor and my head was on my lap. “Something is missing,” I said. “My life has all the check marks for ‘success’, yet something is missing,” I continued. “I did everything I was supposed to do”! As I rested my arms on my neck, my beautiful friend and mentor lovingly grabbed my hand and said to me “there are only two forces in this world my dear – love and fear”.
“What about anger, guilt and frustration?” I said in my shaky voice.
“Fear expressed in different ways; we learn fear, but our essence is love,” she continued.
“You have been living in fearville and you forgot that your essence is love; you are love”. “You have disconnected from love”.
I sat there quietly reflecting on this novel concept at the time. We talked a bit more about how I needed to observe criticism, judgment, guilt, obligation, fear and any other experiences that created more fear. When our time was up, she hugged me and encouraged me to start observing my thoughts, behaviors and actions and put them in a category of love or fear. “Listen to your heart, it knows the way,” were her last words as I got up from the chair. I waived goodbye, and I left with a nervous feeling that my life was about to get a makeover of epic proportions.
That was my aha moment. The moment that woke me up and made me question everything. This was the catalyst for my journey of awakening. I wanted a more loving perspective in my life, so I went on a journey of reinterpreting events, thoughts and actions with a loving filter.
I am part of a culture that encourages lots of doing. There is no time to just be. We focus on doing and more doing and the result is that we are living outside of ourselves. Electronics have become our best friend and we barely have time to simply breathe. We are conditioned by norms, “traditions”, familial expectations, religion, government, authority and our rules and actions are based on tons of “shoulds” and “musts”.
Most of us have lost touch with our essence. We are an accumulation of our environment – an amalgamate of everything that lives outside of us. We attach and identify only with our roles, we race to meet our goals, and we fail to honor our essence, our souls. We have lost touch with our higher power (God, the universe, your higher self, our heart, whatever it is you identify with, name it).
My first assignment in my journey of returning to love was to identify what areas of my life, big and small, obvious and subtle, were separating me from love. This included observing my self-talk. Self-talk is the foundation for everything. That was almost five years ago. I have been on a mission since then to live from my heart and bring love wherever I am observing fear in action. Some days I do not get there. Other days I am full of light in every way, but my commitment is stronger than ever. My perspective has changed tremendously and I truly have reached a place where I can honor other perspectives while maintaining the integrity of my own. This is a life time commitment that I intend to honor.
What is love anyway? It’s not just a feeling; it’s a state of being. It’s a perspective that we embody when we chose to. It’s a choice to see everything and everyone as a divine creation, including yourself.
We are in love land, when we are living in joy, gratitude, forgiveness, acceptance, patience and trust. We are living in love when we are honoring ourselves deeply and completely, while we honor our fellow soul siblings.
Here is the beauty of this earthly life – we get to choose how we want to live. We have been gifted with this magical thing called free will. You have the choice to design your life which includes shifting your perspective as you gain awareness.
What is fear? It’s the absence of love. It is separation from love. When are we choosing fear? When we judge, lash out, blame, get defensive, lie, shame, guilt, oppress and when we fail to accept what is, including when we fail to accept ourselves fully. When we fail to see that the other person is really you. When we fail to see ourselves as equals to our soul siblings around the planet.
The first choice we can make in returning to love is choosing to see that everyone is a child of the universe, and that those seemingly “bad” acts of others are conditioned responses, expressions of what they have all learned throughout this journey. Those seemingly hurtful acts are detours into fear. The more hurtful a person is, the farther they have deviated from love. The farther they have disconnected from their true essence.
Think about every baby born into this world like a blank canvas completely connected to the essence of love. These innocent souls do not yet know fear. They are pure expressions of love. Fear is what we learn as we grow up and absorb everything around us. Fear is what we learn in school, from our parents (they too learned it from theirs). Fear is what we learn when we disconnect from our true essence. We learn how to be insecure. We establish rules and systems based on what we picked up. We think we need to be a certain way to get approval. We judge others. We fail to set boundaries to teach people how we want to be treated. We form a self image that is separate from our soul’s image. We assume roles. We seek approval. We fail to take care of ourselves.
The biggest travesty is that we separate from each other as we stand in our corners with our hands up in pure defensiveness. We fail to have patience. We barely want to understand someone else’s perspective and we simply want to be right instead of being peaceful.
Any act or thought that separates us from love is fear. It isn’t real because it is not who we are. Granted, we are also human and we will sometimes visit fearville but the intention as we awaken is to recognize when we are detouring into fear land and when we can step up our love game.
Uttering a single word of gossip
Berating yourself for not doing more
Seeking revenge and not being willing to forgive
Failing to love yourself
Failing to check in with your heart
Seeing yourself as separate or better than
All of these feelings and actions are imprinted with fear.
Our lives purpose can be summarized in one question: How can we be more loving now? with whom? with what?
It starts with ourselves. That is as simple as it gets. Cleaning up your side of the street is essential. Literally minding your own business is key. If you are worried about what everyone around you is doing, and if you catch yourself constantly judging and putting people in categories, then you are in fear mode.
How we talk to ourselves is critical. We must set the intention of changing our language to more loving language. We may want to consider being more gentle with ourselves, honoring all that we are, forgiving ourselves and releasing anger and hurt. The more love we give ourselves, the more love we will give to the world Click To Tweet
This is a life long journey and there are days that you may live on fearville but just know that you can easily turn the corner and choose love.
Be patient. Be forgiving, and make a commitment to start small and to start with your thoughts and your actions towards yourself. As your perspective changes, so too will your actions.
May your life be filled with many miraculous shifts.
Christine
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