Freedom from Fear: Dedicated to the Memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.

There is noth­ing to fear, but fear itself. Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Of all the prob­lems we have in life, fear is the one thing that unites them all. We fear not being able to pay our bills, we fear los­ing a lov­ing rela­tion­ship, we fear lone­li­ness, we fear sick­ness, we fear get­ting old, we fear fail­ing in life.

In other words, we fear and we fear most of the time! Fear is like a nearly ever-present back­ground hum that is always ready to pounce on us when­ever the moment is ripe.

We love peo­ple like Mar­tin Luther King because he inspired us. He told us that we don’t ever need to be pris­on­ers of our fears. He showed us the way to live our lives on our strengths rather than cow­er­ing in the shad­ows of our terrors.

Is there a way to really deal with all fears once and for all?

There is and it is the truth of our own innate power that under­lies all fear. The great teach­ers of power, such as the Bud­dha, Gandhi, Crazy Horse, Joan of Arc, Rosa Parks, and Mar­tin Luther King have showed us the way.

What do their sto­ries have in com­mon? Is there a com­mon thread that can show us the way through fear?

We know that every­one, with­out excep­tion, is haunted by fear. It is, in fact, their expe­ri­ence with fear that pro­vided them with the moti­va­tion to explore it, learn from it, and finally to truly see through it. When we see through the dark veils of fear some­thing utterly new and vital is revealed and that is the power of our pri­mal selves.

What do we do when fear fills our life?

We panic, we resist, we med­icate, we flee to any dis­trac­tion that will take us away from the raw expe­ri­ence of it.

This is not the way. It is, in fact, pre­cisely how we sus­tain the power of fear in our lives. It is the way that we will always remain slaves to our fears.

What was their secret? What can we learn from these great teach­ers of the past?

If we are to see through fear, if we are to ever dis­cover the power that lies wait­ing for us, we must accept fear’s invitation.

What does that mean?

It means that we acknowl­edge the power of fear, that we cease avoid­ing it, that we com­mit our­selves to find­ing out what the storm of fear is really about. This means to open our­selves to fear in a way that is truly fear­less. Crazy Horse said, as he charged into bat­tle, “It is a good day to die”. This is the atti­tude we can emu­late when fear fills our own life. We let it be exactly as it must and we observe the hot emo­tions rise up and do their best to intim­i­date and destroy the observer.

These are the ter­rors of the soul. 995 out of a thou­sand will flee, but start­ing today be among the 5 out of a thou­sand who weath­ers the storm, who explores it, who observes it, who lasts it out.

For who weath­ers the storm with­out flee­ing from it? Could it be any­one less than the pri­mal power that is you? Is that not the power of total truth and lib­er­a­tion. Could it be any­thing else but the power that can weather any storm?

Every moment presents us with an oppor­tu­nity to dis­cover who we are under all the lay­ers of fear, for noth­ing is more gen­er­ous than fear. Nearly always it is present. So every minute is an invi­ta­tion. The trick is this: Fear tells us what we need to be, how we must change … truth tells us that who we must be we are already!

Is this not your fully awak­ened, authen­tic self? When you finally see that you don’t ever need to be a slave to your fears, then you are free and you and your world are reborn.

Find out for yourself.

Did you find this infor­ma­tion help­ful? If you did, con­sider donat­ing.

The Free­dom from Fear: Ded­i­cated to the Mem­ory of Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. by , unless oth­er­wise expressly stated, is licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.