This PowerPoint (link below) contains some awe-inspiring images that put our problems in perspective.  Enjoy!

Be light, Mary

Astronomy lesson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erqJF_ppqbk&sns=em

http://www.youtube.com/v/1eXS0o6r-Wk%26rel%3d0%26hl%3den_US%26feature%3dplayer_embedded%26version%3d3

It is not that you must be free from fear.  The moment you try to free yourself from fear, you create resistance against fear. Resistance in any form does not end fear.  What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it.  We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it, not how to resist it.

In order not to be run by fear and to do what he is suggesting – to look at your fear – it is important to ask, “Do I want to be free from fear?”  Initially there will probably be a response of, “Yes, I do.”  But that will be followed by a response such as, “It is scary to look at my fears.”  But when you look at your fear, you will see that it is just mind clouds and is nothing to be afraid of.  It is just fear!   I assure you, looking at fear is one of the safest things you will ever do.

Pema Chodron, an internationally known author and Buddhist nun, tells about a repetitive dream she had when she was younger.  In the dream, a monster was chasing her, and she always woke up in terror at the place where the monster was about to get her.  When she told a friend about the dream, her friend suggested that Pema turn around and look at the monster.  That so scared her that even in the dream she kept on running.  Then one night as she was again running away from the monster, a wall appeared in front of her blocking her escape.  With great trepidation, she turned to look at this monster (feeling like she was going to die) and the monster stopped and didn’t come any closer.  She then noticed that the monster had pink fingernails!  That was the moment she woke up and she never had that dream again!

This dream represents the power of turning and looking at fear itself rather than letting it run you from underneath your everyday awareness.  For a time it is scary, but slowly you realize most of your fear is the result of conditioning you received when you were young.  The more you look and listen, the more your heart opens to how scared your storyteller is and you begin to see that it has been scared for a very long time.  Your heart, however, is not afraid.  It is your heart that can bring your fears the attention they need in order to be healed.  That is why the monster had pink fingernails.  How could you be scared of a monster like that?

I was raised in an environment that fostered terror, and I became so caught in the world of fear that in my early twenties I tried to kill myself three times because the intensity of the fear that I lived in was unbearable.  My fear showed up as dread – the combination of feeling something really bad is going to happen and the belief that it is happening because I have done something very wrong.  I tried psychiatrists, psychologists, group therapy, counselors, medications, affirmations, hospitals, meditation, hypnotherapy, and anything else I could find in order to try to outrun my fears.  It was only when I was taught how to turn towards my fear, becoming compassionately curious about its story rather than trying to fix it or get rid of it, that the pressure was released.  Fear will always be a part of me, but whereas it used to be 110% of me, now it is only 5%, and when it does arise, I can listen to it rather than getting lost in its story, and in that listening it calms down through the healing energy of my heart.

So be curious about your particular stories of fear.  Today, is fear lurking in your mind?  If so, is it the fear of being rejected, or being seen as less than, or being forgetful, or being alone, or being late, or feeling unequal to the task, or that you aren’t smart enough or good looking enough?  Fear has a story about almost everything!   So when you notice that you are paying attention to a fear story, say to yourself, “That is just the scared one inside of me!”  We ALL have a scared one inside of us, and the more you can relate to it rather than falling into its story, the more you will come out of the cloud bank of fear and be truly alive!

In I Am, they interview many of the same people but their focus is on the power of the heart to heal our world.  If you see either one of them, let me know how they touch you.

Be light,
Mary

And I think,
this is how we are called -
to cup our hands and hold this peace,
even when the sirens begin,
even when the sorrow cries old and gnarled,
even when words grow fangs and rend.

Cupped hands, gently open,
supporting peace
like the golden hollow of a singing bowl,
like the towering rim of mountains cradling
this slumbering and mist-draped valley.

~Kim Sahara Beyer-Nelson

Does that bring fear up inside of you? Those sorts of beliefs do that. But what would it be like if you understood that any belief that brings up fear comes from a mind that believes itself to be separate from life – a mind that has forgotten how to trust life. How different would your experiences of life be if you could trust that life knows what it is doing?

How can we trust this time of turmoil?  The world is poised on the brink of financial chaos, the polar ices caps are melting, our oceans are polluted and there is always the fear of terrorists getting their hands on a nuclear weapon.

In order to move from fear to trust, come sit on the moon with me and look across at this beautiful blue-green jewel that is our home. Understand that it is a living being that has gone through many stages in its unfolding.  At every major shift of evolution there has been chaos as the old order is fading away and a new order is being born.  We are in that time of a major evolutionary shift and it is chaotic.  This shift is happening inside of human beings, growing beyond of the fear-based world to one of connection, trust in the intelligent creativity of life and a willingness to recognize that we are not alone.  We are all in this together, floating through vast oceans of space on an exquisitely beautiful little planet.

Elisabet Sahtouris, the evolutionary biologist, uses the story of the caterpillar to help us to see what is going on here.  Within its cocoon, the caterpillar turns to goo, and out of this goo comes the first cells of the butterfly, called imaginal cells. The interesting thing is that the goo kills them off.   The old resists the new!   When the imaginal cells rise to the occasion and the urge for the new becomes stronger than the urge of the old to kill it, the butterfly is born!

There is no accident that the first cells are called imaginal cells. They are the vision of what is asking to be born.  Each one of you reading this newsletter is an imaginal cell, a human being that is being moved out of fear and into trust.

To get a sense of this, look again at the Earth from our seat on the moon. See it completely dark. Then see a flicker of light here and there, representing beings who, over the past few thousand years, have woken up from the dream of separation and struggle and have fully embraced life. Now see more and more flickers of light appearing across the dark planet, especially over the last 60 years, and see these lights connecting with other lights until there is a web of light all over our planet.

This is what is happening.  More and more of us are waking up from the dream of separation and into the awareness of the heart. So we can see this as a time of overwhelming problems, or we can see this as a time of possibility.  We can buy into the old world of fear, or we can open into the new world of connection and trust which is emerging.  This is at the heart of everything I offer to the world. In fact, the title of my new book (coming out next summer) is What’s in the Way IS the Way.  And its subtitle (at this point) is The Alchemy of Trust.

I leave you with one of my favorite poems which reminds us that we have a choice as to whether we see this as a time of problems or possibility.

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,
war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

–Wendell Berry, 1968

Secrets are hidden in darkness
And difficult nights.
You awaken to a pang of aloneness,
A howl of separation.

This is the call of the Dark One,
The roar of life seeking its source.
The union you long for is within reach.

Throw off all hesitation.
Become one with the fear.
Plunge into the uncanny blackness,
Eyes wide open,
As if there were no other choice.

Vibrating with fierce tenderness,
Breathe intimately
With the Lord of infinite space.

Sutra 64

Most of us sleepwalk through our lives.  Even when we slumber in a mind that thinks it is separate from life, the adventure of our lives is calling to us.  Breath by breath, step by step, it is inviting us to intimately and immediately connect with life the moment it appears out of Mystery.

This process is spoken about in practically every myth that has ever been written.  Intimate connection with life is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the sleeping princess who awakens with a kiss, the Golden Fleece.  This sense of connection we are yearning for is to be found here in this living moment.  And yet we look everywhere else except here for our peace, for our joy and for our sense of belonging.

I invite you right now to place your finger on the side of your neck and find the spot where you can feel your heartbeat.  Rest your finger there for a few moments, feeling how steady and rhythmic the pulse is.

As we feel the pulse of life in our own bodies, we are in this moment awake for life and it invites us to experience trust, reverence and awe in this creative dance that is our lives.

This meadow represents the experience of okayness that is at the heart of life. You knew this okayness when you were very young.  You may have no memories of this kind of peace, but there was a time when there were no thoughts in your head.  You weren’t searching for a better state.  Past and future had no meaning for you, so this moment was all there was.  You were open to it – all of it – and life was okay exactly as it was.  Even if there was pain and discomfort, you fully experienced it.  You didn’t resist it.  Life flowed through you and inside of you was a deep sense of not needing life to be different than what it is.

Now imagine yourself as a young child living in the meadow, fascinated about the newness of every moment, open to everything.  Clouds come and go – as with laughter and tears – but everything flows.  As you grew, thoughts began to fill up your head as you started to tell yourself stories about yourself and about life.  Now imagine the clouds that formerly moved through the meadow sky beginning instead to circle around your head.  At first they are just wispy clouds that don’t fully block your experience of the meadow.  But overtime, usually by adolescence, the clouds completely surround your head, so much so that you can no longer see the meadow.  All you see are the clouds of your mind.

This is where most people live, caught in the cloud bank of their minds, lost in ideas about life rather than the direct experience of it.  As Alan Watts, the well-known Zen philosopher once said, “No matter how many times you say the word water, it will never be wet!”   It may be difficult for you to see that you are lost in a cloud bank because it has been so long since you have experienced the meadow of your being, but know that irritation, resistance, clinging, compulsions, fear, anger, sadness, and loneliness are not a part of your natural self. They are just states of mind to which you have been conditioned, and they can be released as you learn to see what your mind is doing rather than believing you are your thoughts.

The clouds that fill your mind are made up of all of the stories you tell yourself about who and what you are and about life.  You know what I mean – the storyteller in your head that talks all day.  If you had a little door on your forehead that you could open up and watch what the storyteller is saying, you would see it voices an opinion about everything, continuously telling you what it likes and doesn’t like.  It tells you what you should do and shouldn’t do and oftentimes changes from one to the other in a matter of seconds!  It can judge unmercifully, not only other people but also yourself.  And it is afraid – afraid of its own fear and deeply afraid of being alone.

Because the storyteller is constantly trying to “do it right” it manipulates, tries, expects, wants, rages and resists. It generates all sorts of feelings – fear, sadness, self-judgment, anger, doubt, confusion, irritation and despair, to name a few.  The storyteller comes from being disconnect from life.  It comes from believing you are separate from the meadow and thus have to do life rather than be life.  I am not putting down thought.  It is an exquisite tool for maneuvering through our lives, but our thoughts are not reality.  They are not the meadow.  They are just ideas about the meadow.

Now imagine an alien arriving from another planet whose space ship lands beside this meadow.  What he sees is you fighting with your clouds, trying to make them be different or to have them just go away.  As he watches you struggle, he notices that as the clouds become thicker, you have times where you become frozen, lost in despair.  This confuses this alien because he can clearly see that you are struggling with nothing more substantial than clouds.  On top of that, he can see that you have never left the meadow of peace you are so desperately trying to find; you just don’t recognize it!

This is your predicament.  The peace and joy you long for it always right here, right now.  But you have been deeply conditioned into an endless game of struggle – the game that says if you just get yourself and your life to be the way you think they should be, then the peace you long for will be here.  But that will never bring you the lasting peace that is your natural state. You can win the lottery, think happy thoughts until the cows come home, meditate for hours every day in order to find the states of mind you like, do enough plastic surgery to make your body be what you think is perfect, and still, in the long run, none of that is enough.  Because it is not the meadow. It will only bring you moments of peace, leaving you again in the clouds of chronic struggle.

There is a way out of the cloud bank of your mind, back into the joy of being fully alive.  In my next newsletter, we will continue our journey from the cloud banks of our mind back into the joy of being fully awake to the meadow of life.

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