Attachment is build upon the feeling of interdependency. We need the other because we want to be needed. When somebody needs us, we feel empowered, significant and irreplaceable. This seemingly divine experience doesn’t come without a trade-off though. Being able to maintain the autonomy has to be offered in return for the eternal gift of self-importance. Humans have a need for autonomy, it is an evolutionary determined skill to facilitate survival. In order to restrict the natural desire to move, strong structures have to be build to keep the lively spirit in place. One of the most reliable mechanisms to prevent autonomy is fear.
Sunday morning, Easter, wonderful moment to start explorations of fear. In the upcoming days I will mull over this complex phenomenon that rules our being. This exploration will be sealed with a meditation on death during a gathering session next Sunday. I invite you to join an experiment and see if in one week we can alter one of our fears and convert it to the take a light side. Take a piece of paper and write one of your fears, up to you what you like to pull out of your precious collection. Keep this note and we revisit it in one week. For now let me kick off the fear week with an exploration of my personal relationship with it.
Today I was participating in a group practice called authentic relating. A wonderful technique to practice radical honesty and experience the immense potentiality and power of collective presence. One of the exercises was held in groups of two and we were supposed to share our hopes followed by our fears with each other. My hopes were in sync with my fears. I feared that i will pursue and follow my hopes. As I was sharing my thought I realised how I am pulling myself apart, stretching between the uncompromising clarity of a desirable future and the complex emotion called fear. Fear is a creature of many faces. It includes rationality, instinctive impulsivity, moral judgement, physiological response. It affects nearly all functions in our body manifesting in our behaviours and being transcended to the future generations. A fascinating response to the world that drives us through life, paradoxically protecting us from dangers while holding us back from happiness.
Fearless is an adjective that is often used to describe me. Apparently people interpret some of my undertakings as a manifestation of fearlessness. I never could clearly see for myself what was it that others saw as fearless. As the time passed from observations I constructed some sort of definition and even started to live it. I felt fearless in what I do assimilating the quality assigned to my actions by others. Only recently as I started consciously looking for my own definition I realised that the external label of being fearless has nothing to do with my actual experience. Even more so this confusion of the projected quality made me naive towards the depth of my own fears. Fears and hopes are bound together, without confronting the fear no hope can be realised. Hopes emerge in the territory of the unknown, beyond the reality of today. Everything in that realm requires risk-taking thus fear facing.
I was blind to my own fears, submissively taking on a role of fearless. I limited my chances to explore the unknown. My unknown not the unknown that others thought I was exploring. I am not saying it is always the case. Several times in my life I could experience the horrific but powerfully creative force from within that was driving my actions. The sense of which I also experience at the moment. Overwhelming, undefinable, scary and unstoppable drive moving me towards the unknown. I hope I will lose everything along the way and find my true fearlessness.