I have no cause for anger or fear, for You surround me.
And in every need that I perceive, Grace suffices.
A Course in Miracles Workbook, Lesson 348
Surrendering into the ground of Grace sounds heavenly. Yet until you discover how to open through the force of fear, you are bounced back into resistance, unable to let go into deeper states of Grace. Even after luminous moments, you can find yourself worshiping at the altar of familiar patterns, even when you know they cause you to suffer. What does it take to move beyond fear? Ego relaxation invites you toward your fear, to understand what it feeds on and to see who it protects. Surprisingly, when you open through your fear, not only does it dissolve but the energy within it can propel you into a whole other galaxy of freedom.
In my early twenties, I was digging deep with the teachings of A Course in Miracles, a metaphysical psycho-spiritual text that offers precise spiritual exercises for each day of the year. Its stated purpose is to unwind the consciousness of fear and reestablish God-consciousness. Forty-eight days into this journey, I landed on the lesson titled “There Is Nothing to Fear.” While many of the daily lessons were complex, sprawling several pages to explain the practice and its logic, this lesson was three short, pragmatic paragraphs. It was so dystonic to my emotional reality at the time that I reverted to the previous forty-seven lessons, convinced that I must have missed something crucial.
At that time, I was fueled by so many everyday fears. Ploughing the contents of my mind, I found fear of abandonment, fear of failure, fear of weakness, fear of humiliation, fear of rejection, fear of intimacy, fear of being overwhelmed, fear of not getting what I wanted, fear of putting on weight, fear of aging, fear of death, and fear of the unknown. On top of that was the fear in the knowledge that all of these fears were sure to manifest! Even though my personality was not overtly anxious compared to many, in the earlier stages of the path, my mind was like a runaway train, recycling the past into the future. Even if you have an established practice that provides some spacious inner respite, it is not always easy to get off that runaway train and stop believing your fearful mind.
UNDERSTAND THE FORCE OF FEAR
Fear itself is not wrong. In its purity, it is a brilliant force of our survival instinct that will activate our body and mind into a state of high alert so we can respond in a split second to get out of harm’s way—whether that be to slam our foot on the brakes to avoid a head-on collision, sprint to catch our child from falling into a swimming pool, or remove ourselves from emotional violence.
To walk the way of Grace, you must learn to discriminate between an authentic threat to your well-being and a perceived threat that contracts your mind into a consciousness of fear, distorting your perception of reality and blocking entry into refined states of Grace. Commonly, we are caught up in fearful patterns of mind, without even being fully aware of it.
ADDRESS THE FEAR OF GOING WITHIN
Who doesn’t want entry into the bliss, beauty, and freedom that awakening promises? Yet gaining traction on the path invites the repressed feelings, forces, and impulses of your unconscious mind to be flushed up to the surface. This spiritual detoxification process is ultimately liberating, but it is not for sissies. The most common reason I hear for holding back from genuinely dropping deeper is fear of being overwhelmed by a Pandora’s box of memories and feelings that we might not be able to stuff back down. This holds most people back from looking within much at all.
Remembering that we all exist within a ground of Grace provides the inner strength not to be scared off by the gargoyle at the gate to the sanctuary. Although the world is always changing and is by its nature uncertain, there is a deeper pulse underneath everything that causes the sun to rise and set each day, plants to compassionately absorb your carbon dioxide and give back life-giving oxygen, and Mother Earth to graciously welcome you, providing a home, food, and incredible beauty. This mysterious, ever-present ground of Grace is here even when your beloved companion is dying, you have lost your job, or you have been derailed by the unexpected.
YOU ARE ALREADY IN THE GROUND OF GRACE
I am not asking you to imagine this or take my word for it. Just bring your awareness into your feet and feel the ground underneath you right now. Receive the life-giving oxygen arriving naturally with each breath you automatically know how to take. Somehow, you exist within something much greater than your mind. This is also what caused you to emerge out of your mother’s womb into this world, what causes your heart to beat, and what causes you to want to read the next line on this page. When you turn your awareness to recognize the immense power and love that is the unchanging ground of all being, you discover that there is more immediate support for you to just be here, where you are. This provides the strength you need to face your fear.
I once received an email from a brave woman who admitted, “I am terrified of the depth of myself.” Our ego presumes there is something lurking in the basement of our being that is irreparably flawed, ugly, unacceptable, and defective. Everyone I have sat with across culture, gender, and age admits to hidden fears of feeling deficient in some way, even though they might never show this in any obvious way to the world. This is the primary reason most of us resist diving more substantially within—we are afraid that our carefully preserved self-image might crack. Yet spiritually, this is exactly what needs to happen. It is how we discover that we are far deeper, wiser, and more loving than we dreamed. Ultimately, true bravery is not being afraid of yourself.
Fearful patterns of mind are part of the human condition. They originate from feeling separate from our true nature, which is total love, peace, power, strength, and joy. The degree to which we identify with being a separate someone determines the intensity of our fear. Separation might sound abstract, but it is no joke. When we experience “I’m separate . . . ,” whether we feel that as separation from God; from our mother, who seems to be the source of everything at first; from nature; from one another; or from love, strength, peace, or support, our body contracts and our heart shrinks. Then our mind gets busy, spinning strategies of defense that cost us contact with the peaceful present. We presume we must have done something wrong to be in this condition. A vague sense of shame descends, but for what exactly, we are not quite sure.
Our personality develops around our childhood experiences of separation and the work-arounds we discovered to make that more manageable. Over time, this becomes the primary track of our personality. Layer by layer, the mud of conditioning covers the luminous jewel of our being. We end up living on the surface of ourselves, ignorant of our vast and beautiful depths. We polish up the outer surface of the mud, not realizing that we are just living out of a self-image that is really just a shell. It will inevitably get cracked by the turning of life’s wheel—whether that be from illness, loss of a cherished love affair, a dent to our pride, or ultimately the aging process, which demands we get with the program of graceful surrender.
PRACTICE EGO RELAXATION IN AND THROUGH YOUR FEAR
To simply affirm “there is nothing to fear” does not tackle the issue. That is like telling a child frightened of monsters under the bed to stop being afraid when the lights are turned out. No amount of reassurance resolves fear. Just as a child needs loving support to look directly into the lurking monster’s abode to see whether or not it really exists, you must address fear directly and explore the disconnection that it emerges from. Ultimately, inquire, “Who it is that is so afraid?”
It is not enough to get this intellectually, by trying to rationalize your fear away. Liberating Grace emerges when you meet the layers of feeling, memory, belief, assumption, and projection and practice ego relaxation—just being here, doing nothing, and contacting whatever you find with unconditional love.
Whenever you meet fear honestly and directly, not as a story but as pure phenomenon, you begin to see deeper into the foundations of the fear. This usually births compassion and insight to support the next level of your liberation. Often, the fear itself simply dissolves.
If you do not penetrate into and through your fear, you can too easily live daily life trying not to feel deficient, trying to prove you are lovable, valuable, or good enough. This trying is the single greatest block to the experience of Grace. It turns your life into an endless self-improvement project centered in denial of a simple human fact: your ego actually is limited. All egos are fundamentally insecure because their nucleus is hollow, based in a sense of separation.
When you recognize that this is not something to be afraid of, you will discover that what you thought was a big problem is the gate to a game-changing realization: You are more than this. You are the one who is looking at the layers of fear. You are the loving awareness that is contacting memories, feelings, beliefs, assumptions, projections, and layers of conditioning. As Saint Francis of Assisi is reported to have said, “The one you are looking for is the one who is looking.”
Inquiring into your fear then leads you into a fresh exploration of the basement of your being. You can discover that your foundation is not something ugly and deficient but Grace itself: infinite space, love without limit, joy without reason, and peace that surpasses all understanding. This Grace, which belongs to all of us, is not affected by our history and our personality, our mistakes and troubles, and it does not come or go. This is why there is nothing to fear.
One warm spring day I was sitting with James, an advanced meditator who asked for my support to work through the terror that was arising as his inner experience was expanding to a new level. I asked him, “How do you avoid dropping fully into your practice?”
He shared all kinds of distracting habits you may recognize, such as watching too much TV late into the night, which sabotaged his getting up in the morning, as well as getting distracted by unnecessary emails and web surfing that swallowed up his quiet time. He also found that he was overscheduling himself socially and engaging in emotional dramas that sucked his attention and caused his behavior to revert to stressful ways of being. After reviewing each habit that kept him locked into patterns of avoidance, I asked, “What does this provide that you think you need?” Very quickly James encountered the fundamental fear that preserves all of our ego habits: discovering we do not exist in the way we thought.
OUR CORE FEAR: “I” MIGHT DISAPPEAR
Describing this primary fear, James said, “I see that my familiar ego game is very close to being up. Who I have spent a lifetime thinking was ‘me’ is really just a fictional character made up of layers of memories, perceptions, conclusions, and self-images. Right now all of this is transparent, like a ghost that does not fundamentally exist.”
While James intellectually knew the concept of “no self,” actually experiencing his familiar identity disappearing into the void was another matter entirely. To stay present to this new way of being and open beyond the known felt terrifying. “Now what?” he asked.
WHO ARE YOU BEYOND “ME”?
I encouraged James to just be still and allow the feelings of disorientation, to “sense” into the space at the “end of himself.” This can feel like floating or like looking through a porthole into the infinite space of the galaxy. Tears poured down his cheeks as he recognized that his fear existed only because he was identified with the “self” looking through the porthole . . . the vastness in which the whole galaxy appears looks from this vantage point like some annihilating “other.” I invited him to see if he could soften and open into this new space as his own being—both the one looking and the one being looked upon. The sense of a separate “me” and a separate vast “galaxy” disappeared, and there was simply infinite space, being, and peace. This more than resolved his fear. It fulfilled his deepest prayer.
One of the reasons I emphasize ego relaxation rather than ego annihilation is to help us not be so afraid to let surrender happen. Dancing close to the void always feels scary to our ego, but once we actually let go, it is quite the opposite. We discover that the one trying to keep fear at bay is not actually our true nature—but the “someone” of our history, clinging to what we know, even though we might be complaining loudly about our patterns and actively trying to change them. At the deepest level, our ego clings to what feels familiar in order to protect against the fundamental terror of dissolving.
The more you can let go, the more you will understand that it is only your self-images that can dissolve, and this is always very good news. This kind of “death” resurrects who you truly are because it opens space inside from which Grace can come alive. Grace always brings forth what you most need. Each time you practice ego relaxation into and through fear, your essential qualities, such as boundless love, joy, strength, clarity, and peace, start to come back online. It will vary in flavor each time you let go. As Hafiz said, “Now that all your worry has proved such an unlucrative business, why not find a better job?”1
Even though you find yourself sabotaging what it is you say you most want, do not just marinate in your fear. Wherever you are right now—whether you find yourself anxious about life unfolding in the direction you hope or whether fear feels like a familiar way of being—explore it directly.
INQUIRY Dissolving the Roots of Fear
This sequence of inquiry questions provides powerful support to help you harness fear as a gateway to a deeper ground of Grace. If possible, do this with a friend you trust.
Otherwise, journal into the following questions.
What do you fear?
Explore one fear at a time. Notice the details, such as how this fear feels in your body, in your heart, and simply as thoughts in the mind. Just let the phenomenon of each fear be contacted with compassionate allowing. If overwhelm arises, use these somatic cues: wiggle your toes, sense your feet on the ground, breathe into the belly, and remember that you cannot die from or be harmed by contacting whatever you find. Meet everything as layers of your mind and remember: there is nothing that you need to fix, get, or do about it. Once you have contacted a specific fear, then inquire into the identity of it.
Who does this fear belong to?
You might discover that your fear is a view you picked up from your mother, your father, your culture, your religion, or your schooling. It might not even be yours but something you absorbed along the way. You might notice that your fear belongs to a five-year-old inside who has concluded “I am all alone” as a result of a moment of overwhelm when the support you needed did not seem to be available. Ultimately, fear only persists in relation to a story of a separate someone. Keep cycling through these first two questions for ten minutes, naming fears and seeing who they belong to. Notice the energetic sensations in your body and the feelings, memories, and insights that come. When you have gone as deep as you can, spend another ten minutes exploring the next question.
What’s alive in the space beyond you and the fear?
Just keep opening, softening, and allowing your experience to unfold. You might find that your fear starts to evaporate or at the very least loses its negative charge. At some point, you will discover a shimmering presence alive in the space beyond what you thought you were and the thoughts of fear. Trust what unfolds in your own experience and cherish what is revealed. Whatever emerges, lean into it and see if you can surf into a spacious inner terrain that is not bound by thought or history. ~
Learning to face the force of fear and open into, through, and beyond it is incredibly empowering. Grace emerges, perhaps bringing some new insight that helps you navigate the best way forward at work, in your relationships, or on the meditation cushion. Perhaps you just feel calmer, more present, and at peace. The more you find your stride in meeting rather than trying to transcend your fear, the more you can discover that fear has no actual foundation, and Grace has no limit. Now you see that truly, there is nothing to fear. You can relax more substantially into an unshakable presence within and continue on the journey.