Fear is an identification, with all the negativity around and inside of us. We choose to attach ourselves with the possibility of bad happening to us. We put our sticky self in the centre, and invite the worst in our imagination, to come and land on us to smother us! Freedom from fear, seems almost impossible.

Imagine for a moment that nothing bad will ever happen: there is no need of any kind of fear, can we finally give ourselves permission to be happy? “No…it is difficult to believe.”

We can’t muster that conviction even hypothetically, fear is such a strong habit! We are so used to living in fear, that we can’t believe anything bad will not happen to us. We are bombarded with bad news all the time. World is full of problems, heart breaks, tragedies, suffering. Nobody can escape fear, we assume it is a part of being alive.

What are we so afraid of ? Embarrassment, failure, disappointment, loneliness, abandonment, struggles, helplessness, diseases, accidents, pain, vulnerability, death- list can go on.

We cannot eliminate the causes of our fears one by one, that is impossible. For any possibility of freedom from fear, we need to find the root cause of all fear and try to remove that.

Issues of body happen as part of having a body and we cannot avoid them. Fearing them, dreading everyday does not help us. Following a healthy lifestyle, not taking unnecessary risks with our safety, we will go as long as we can, since we cannot outrun death anyway. Fear for our physical safety is an evolutionary mechanism to help with our biological survival, and is not only not harmful, but is quite necessary.

But most of our fear is psychological, which often leads to a lot of anxiety, worry and suffering . This is the kind of fear that blocks our natural inner happiness to shine through! This is the fear we need to investigate and eliminate from its roots.

Psychological fear is caused by unregulated, often uninvited or unnoticed thoughts. It comes through projected imaginary future scenarios, which sneak upon us unnoticed. It is evoked and built upon the past experiences and memories of any unpleasantness we have encountered in our lives. But the future and past are not real! None of this fear is helpful for our actual life in the now.

Through this screen of fear, we miss meeting the real life, which otherwise could have been joyful. But we do not see the actual before us. We go on avoiding it, due to the shades of imagined misfortunes.

We feel powerless in the crippling grip of fear. We try to prepare safety nets, come up with elaborate back-up plans, we look for clues to have reliable predictions, to have every detail sorted out for the future. We are too afraid of getting caught off-guard or being hurt.

We do not leave any space, for life to work its magic and surprise us! Life is beautiful, mysterious, unpredictable and often manages to bring us to strange turns. It showers us with gifts that we could never have imagined possible or hoped for!

We cannot know what life has in store for us ahead of time. Let alone the future, we do not even have a capacity to clearly see the past, we only retain our personal self-centred distorted versions of it.

Looking back now, if we could take an account of all the moments, days and years that we have spent worrying, fearing, dreading, imagining what could happen, what might happen- instead of just allowing life to calmly unfold- would our lives have turned out different?

Out of a million possibilities of things that could go wrong in a life at any moment, only a few will actually ever happen. Based on probabilities of what might realistically happen, it may be easy enough to predict those few possibilities and then prepare to deal with them.

Instead, we spent way too much time of our lives repeatedly worrying about things, most of which may never happen at all!

What is the relationship between experiencing worry or fear and then successfully avoiding the suffering from that feared event? Does being afraid of something help us prepare and cope better, or does it only drain all our energy and joy? We do not face anything better, when afraid of it. Instead, it makes us feel dark, cold and heavy.

Is something eventually happening a valid reason for many days, weeks, months, or years being anxious about it, losing sleep over it? Does that stress somehow make it easy to deal with the actual crisis if and when it really comes? Does it somehow soften the blow, the anxiety numbing us down to handle the actual eventual tragedy? Or, does the fear actually do nothing at all to help us into facing a real crisis, while we drag along panting under its heavy burden in vain?

This is how we choose to spent our days and nights, when we could just welcome the life as it comes, and live through the moments carefree as they arrived! Can we un-train our mind of all its compulsive fearful habits and re-train it, to just live in joy and openness, welcoming whatever life brings? Can we un-stick ourselves from the fear of uncertainty, unpredictability and just embrace the natural movement of life?

Can we be carefree and effortless, ready to embrace with full innocence and absolute trust in our presence, our readiness, our potential for whatever awaits us, at every turn?  If we could do that, we may finally discover how life is really meant to be lived.

Freedom from fear is essential for living a fulfilled life.

In a crisis, we often find our real source of strength from within. We try hard to find solution and the support we need, because it is required and we do whatever is needed, in that moment. The response then, does not come out of fear, but a practical necessity, a demand of the situation.

Indulging in fear is the luxury of a crisis-free mind. In a real crisis, there is no room for fear, there is no space for dreading what comes next, there is only an immediate urgent readiness to meet whatever shows up at that instant. There is a response from the total being, to the demands of the moment.

All problems in life are for the body-mind-ego, which are obviously weak, limited and insecure. If it was possible not to identify ourselves with these, but to see that we are something else- awareness, consciousness, oneness, life, totality- which is bigger, larger than our limited ‘body mind ego’ construct, could we then be free of psychological fear?

If we could absolutely believe in the expansion of our self completely, if we could live this understanding with as much conviction as we now have, in our isolation and separation, can we ultimately be free from suffering?

Can we surrender fear to a trust in the natural flow of life, to the mystery, the beauty, the interconnectedness, the totality, the extraordinary majesty and awesome splendour of the oneness of the whole?

This oneness is our reality. It is the essence of all that is. But, unless it is an experiential truth for us, it remains of no value.

We are afraid, because we believe we are this isolated helpless little person, a tiny little wave in the ocean. But what if we were the whole ocean? Because there is nothing else, every wave is the ocean! We are the whole. So, what do we have to fear?

There can be no fear if we are not isolated from the whole. If we can recognize ourselves as one with the whole, if we are the one life, we are the is-ness, the being-ness of all that there is, what is there to fear? There is no other!

As oneness, we are absolutely and always safe. There is nothing to be afraid of. We can trust whatever life brings, trust the flow of totality. We are the eternal life living through all that is. We are the isness, the wholeness of what is. What can we fear?

The freedom from fear can only come, from a fundamental shift in our perspective of who we really are.

A complete transformation in our self-identification, to see that we are not a helpless separate isolated person, but an integral part of all that is. We do not need to be afraid and defend ourselves from everything and everyone, there is nothing out there to get us, universe is not our enemy.

We fear as the small droplets in one enormous current of totality, but this whole current is who we really are. Totality knows no fear!