To Love or to Fear
How would you make decisions if you believed that every choice you made was either made from love or fear? If those were the only two “places” or “emotions” or “categories” — and every single action you take comes from a place of love or a place of fear? Perhaps you already feel and think this way? Perhaps not?
Because of what has been happening for me in my small part of the world — as well as what is happening in the greater world — much of my prayer and meditation and ponderings as of late have centered around themes of fear and love.
How to stay in love? How to stay out of fear? How to keep my heart open? How to connect with others at the deepest level? How to show up for myself and for others? How to love and accept when I see someone acting from fear and hurting others? Fear and love. Love and fear.
I have been playing with and using this framework (that every decision is made from love or fear) the last couple of months and the more I remind myself of it and practice it, the clearer it has become for me that it is a truth (for me), not just a musing or a framework or an idea.
I have been asking myself as many times as I can remember every day one of these simple questions:
Are you acting from love or fear?
Or
Are you thinking from love or fear?
Or
Are you feeling from love or fear?
Or
Are you deciding from love or fear?
Whatever it is and whenever I remember, I pause, take a breath, and ask the question: Love or fear?
I have noticed (now that I am a couple of months into asking myself this question) that as I reflect, I see more and more of my actions are coming from love, not from fear.
Do I still struggle with fear? Yes, of course.
However, I am feeling more connected to my heart. I am feeling more lovingly connected to those around me, both those I do know and those I do not know personally. I am feeling lighter. I am feeling more hope than I have felt in quite some time. I am feeling more possibility, more expansion, more grace, more love.
Sufi poet and mystic, Rumi, shared that, “Love is not an emotion, it is your very existence.”
I suppose I can say that I am practicing at living that wisdom he shared so long ago.
I am working to embody this truth: Love is my essence.
I believe love is your essence, as well.
When I find myself in a place of struggle with being in love versus being in fear another question I have posed to myself is this: Do you really want to fight against who you are?
Because my essence is love and because I am practicing being true to that essence, it serves no one, (especially not myself) to fight against who I am.
I have spent far too much of this precious life fighting against who I am. I wonder if you have, too?
Would you like to practice this with me? Would you like to choose love over fear a little more often? Would you like to accept and honor that your essence is love?
Until one day, love is just the natural choice for you. Or that love becomes so much of who you are that love over fear doesn’t seem like a choice any longer?
Here’s to choosing love over fear. Here’s to choosing our true selves.