Feed Freedom #27 February 5, 2018

Feed Freedom    #27                              
We give lots of attention and much lip service to not succumbing to fear.   Usually this is around the big things, fears we hold in both our personal and public lives.  But I am thinking about the consequences of feeding the beast at all.  Fear grows on fear.  This means that saving our power to fight it off for only the big things might not be the wisest course of action.
In facing our small fears, even the ones we name anxiety or concern, we rob the beast of fuel to use at those bigger moments.  Perhaps we can begin to take notice of fear in all its guises and see it reframed in the process.  There are countless opportunities in any one day, both big and small.   For instance, in an asana class, we might be frightened to try a handstand or other inversion and have good reason for it, but if we dissect the visceral feeling we will come up with specific actions that can be concretely met.  The anxiety at being upside down might have to do with not believing we have the strength in our arms or upper body to meet the demand of the pose, we doubt our strength.  Instead of labeling it fear in our minds then, we can address this particular thing with the teacher, ‘how do I get strength in my arms?’  Work on things that will prove that strength to us, gain confidence and then try some version of the pose.  Little by little we find, as we meet each hurdle, that we are capable of over coming our doubt and meeting aversion in all its forms.  We naturally embrace life more fully.  Whether or not we ever actually do the handstand is not the point, how we name and meet it is.   

This is an important distinction.  It is not just semantics or somehow tricking your mind or playing some sort of intellectual game.  The mind’s job is to categorize, map, place in context, in naming more accurately we cut what is big down to a size we can manage, we take some of the heat out.   Meeting this, feeds a kinder, higher version of self, one that permits a more fully realized life to blossom.  Doubt and aversion are just other names for fear.  Want to blow your mind?  Look up synonyms for ‘fear’, and take in the many ways we feed the beast.  Perhaps obstacles themselves can be reframed, not as things to be shunned or merely hurtled, but moments where growth can take place, where we can feed and grow a better version of ourselves.  This is the teaching principle of planting a seed.  The seed needs the right conditions to sprout and time to grow; a seedling does not become a tree overnight.  It needs fertile soil made so by the tilling of the very ground of our being, 
This takes moment by moment attention.  We make associations, label things  and appropriate to self so quickly, it does not even register in present awareness but be sure, it does register in our body-mind.  This space needed to see and examine is what Paul Muller-Ortega calls the ’ledge of freedom’.  Freedom of space is given to act in a manner of our choosing, one that will bring about more freedom. Thus choosing out of our freedom to enact choice as opposed to react, to feed as it were, our 'angel of freedom’. 
This space is a natural consequence of time spent deep inside. It is the regularity of meditation that increases a place of freedom within us that we can then use as a stepping off place for expansion in our life.  In the dynamically silent space within, we melt, merge our limited sense of individual identity into the source that is whole and pulsing with creative possibility of every conceivable sort.  Resting here for just a short time, we come out not only refreshed, but changed.  Subtle at first but over time, rather quickly, we begin to notice the change in our thoughts and actions on the surface and this space permits us to feed the beast or angel of our choosing; to grow more and more into the person we wish to be in the world.  To be who you truly are feed courage, feed your angel of freedom.