And I'll speak on courage as one of the inherent cornerstones to self-energy and a bedrock to so many wisdom traditions.
Courage is the strength of our intentionality to practice.
It's the great motivator.
And while so many of us regard courage as being a state devoid of fear,
I'll suggest that it's actually quite the opposite.
Courage is the ability to know and to hold our fears,
Not to banish them,
But to know and dare I say,
Befriend that which challenges us or pulls us from a sense of comfort.
And my mother always says in difficult times,
Just call upon your guides,
Ask the angels for protection.
And across so many wisdom traditions,
We humans do call upon the archetypes of our protectors to invoke or access some felt sense of safety or belonging or guardianship.
We call upon some external shield or strength or type of force.
So really what we're doing is invoking within us the qualities of our own heart-mind.
Our guides and angels are aspects of our own higher self,
Which as our protectors,
As our courageous valiant guardians of inner life are not interested in making sure that our life goes according to our plan and preferences and that we continuously feel safe and supported and comfortable.
That's not the job of our courageous inner parts and our angels and our guides,
Not to keep us comfortable.
So courage itself as a manifestation of our behavior is not comfortable.
It is literally meeting the edge of the fear body.
It's not to ensure comfort.
It's designed to ensure our growth.
So if we're really meeting ourselves on the edge of our evolution,
If we're really using this time together to train up the inner methods,
Then naturally we should expect to be confronted by fear because fear states are stirred up in us when we meet an edge,
Which is also where the greatest potentiality for awakening lies.
And it's not always what the ego wants to hear,
But it does place us on the precipice or really we get a glimpse of how wide we actually are when we're afraid and how much we can actually handle.
So the way to become fear less is not to get rid of fear,
But to actually walk through it.
That's what builds inner courage and we'll need that in the quality of our Buddha nature that we're stirring up.
So that from a psychological approach,
We're befriending our parts that are afraid rather than berating them.
What Brene Brown calls daring greatly.
So to understand our fear,
Its emergence,
Its initiation,
Its intention in our system,
That's when we see the kind of royal riches of what it has to offer.
That's where growth is most possible.
The other thing I want to say about fear is that it's contagious because it's an innate survival instinct.
So you see it in a flock of birds when one gets startled and the whole flock lifts and fleas or a herded antelope.
We see it socially.
Fear is foundational because it's something that can be used to manipulate the masses because we all have a strong fear response.
So it gets abused,
The fear body.
It's marketed and campaigned.
Because it's such an integral part of our personality structure,
It's easy to tease it out.
It's our survival mechanism.
So noting the feeling of fear is the first step.
We're finding and fleshing out the part that's feeling fearful and then befriending it.
And fear is the mood of the self contracting,
Tightening.
Remember,
Dukkha,
Lack of space.
We get defensive.
We close down and in.
It feels very tight,
Like we've forgotten our spacious,
Safe nature.
And on a basic level,
It's deeply connected to ignorance because we're afraid of what we don't know.
We're afraid of the dark.
So if the root of fear is ignorance,
Then the antidote is the experience of insight.
