You Are Not Your Fear
One of my favorite teachers is Kyle Cease, and he says that you are not your fear. You are not your fear. The thing about being light, the truth of who we are, is love. There is nothing else. The expansion of light actually then diminishes dark. There is not enough darkness to put out the light of a single candle. If you go into a dark room and you turn the light on, the darkness is still there. It’s just been illuminated. When you illuminate one of your fears, the meaning that you’ve attached to something that is creating your suffering, it gets illuminated. If you’ve identified yourself with the fear, with the scarcity, with the lack, then if it is illuminated, you as the individual dies, and you don’t want death to your story. You don’t want to die with it.
Let Go of Your Identity
Maybe you’ve identified yourself as beautiful, physically beautiful. Maybe you’ve got a chiseled chin, and you have gorgeous blue eyes, and you have 6-pack abs or whatever, and you have made that your identity. All of a sudden, you get in a tragic accident and the perception is that your beauty died. It went away because maybe you have some scarring or something that has happened that has disfigured. Maybe you can’t work out so much and your 6-pack abs disappear or something. If you had identified yourself as that, then all of a sudden if that goes away, then all of a sudden you and your identify go away and you create an incredible amount of suffering because of that. It is one of the things that the intellect will absolutely, strongly resist in any way, shape, or form.
You are light
If you’ve identified yourself as rich, you have a lot of money in the bank, and that is the thought, that is the meaning that you’ve created for yourself – oh, I have X millions in the bank and I’m rich and I’m amazing, and that’s great. Maybe the stock market crashes or somehow that money disappears, if you’ve identified yourself with that particular thing, you die. The intellect will want to hold onto every single possible thing that you’ve identified yourself with that is fear based, that is outside of yourself, that will hang on for dear life. It will struggle to survive until you finally get to this place within yourself and you realize that the only thing that you are is love. That’s all that you are. You are light and illuminating the dark is all we want to do. We have this incredible desire to expand, to lighten up wherever we’re at. We want to be more light. We want to go into dark rooms and light them up because we get to experience more of ourselves through that contrast.
Reduce the suffering
That invitation to identify the thing that you’ve labeled yourself – I’m a great mother, I’m a great sister, and all of a sudden, your kids are pains in the butt and they’re behaving really badly, then automatically your internal response is – “oh my gosh, that needs to change, that needs to be different”. There is suffering there, not only for yourself, but also your children. What if you and your sibling get into an argument, and yet, you’ve identified yourself as a great sibling? All of sudden, you have suffering with that. Again, sometimes we have these stories in our heads that are so powerful. They are so much a part of our identity that that loss that we experience when something doesn’t go the way that we had planned is a grieving process. It’s being able to go through that grieving process, that loss, getting yourself back to love as fast as possible because then that will bring you out of suffering.
Just remembering that the only thing you are is love. You’re not your fear. You are just love.
~ Johanna gardner
