Love and Fear
What is love?
Many people have all sorts of different answers for what love is - that it’s a feeling of deep infatuation, the willingness to show up for someone despite hardship, or an affection for someone or something.
It’s hard to put what love exactly is into words, because love is so subjective to our individual experiences. Despite it not having any physical form as an energy, we all experience love in our lives. When we see love as an energy in action, we feel it and we know it to be true.
Love is all that is, all that was, and all that will be.
Love is the vast, infinite emptiness that envelops, embraces, and holds space for everything to exist. Love sees without judgment, and embraces and accepts unconditionally, as it is, without question. Just like how Earth does not selectively apply gravity, it pulls everything to its core, regardless of how “worthy” or “good” someone or something is.
Love is the empty canvas that embraces all the lines and smears of paint.
Fear is also a part of what love embraces, but it ironically, appears to be not of love. However, at core, fear is also love.
Fear is what we reject outside of ourselves, because it seems unacceptable and too painful to claim as our own. When we reject the hateful, judgmental, selfish, greedy, lustful, socially unacceptable parts of ourselves, we create a deep, painful chasm of division within ourselves.
Fear exists to show us the opposite of love, to help guide us to understand what love truly is. Fear is a part of all that is, as a part of love.
When you travel deeper and deeper within a fear, you find pain. Pain that was born from a lack of love - pain that arises from separation, abandonment, unworthiness, and rejection.
The greatest fear of humankind, is a fear of separation from the whole. This fear of separation arises from the belief that you are separate, you are all alone, that you are abandoned to fend for yourself. This brings upon the feelings of helplessness, intense doom, and the deepest, most irreconcilable pain. This fear is a stark contrast the core truth, that you are also one whole with this love that creates the entire universe. That you are not separate, you are connected as all of consciousness is connected, and that feeling and believing that you are abandoned is an illusion.
The practice of embracing your fears and pain isn’t about embracing what’s in the external reality - the person that is hurting you, the situation that brings upon inner turmoil. It’s about embracing what is within - the fear of abandonment, separation, that causes people to grasp onto nails, rather than facing those fears and feelings themselves.
These fears and feelings exist not to further throw you deeper in pain, but for you to see that it is a tool. When the most disgusting, hateful, judgmental part of you is embraced and understood for its core pain and desire to love and be loved, it gives you the most visceral experience of unconditional love. This kind of experience cannot be felt with just words or abstraction. It is earned, by truly witnessing and allowing this part of you to exist as it is.
That even if the world abandons you, you will not abandon yourself. When you feel disgusting and shameful, you stay there with yourself, together in feeling your pain.
You chose to forget that you were part of the whole, so that you can fully realize this truth for yourself. You chose to rediscover love, because knowing it and being it, wasn't enough for you to fully feel it. You chose to be that which you are not, so that you can remember who you truly are.
You became the ego - a narrow-minded, physically dense, weak, vulnerable, messy emotional being, so that when the illusion lifts, you realize that you are an aspect, a reflection of God - an all-encompassing, eternal, unconditionally loving being.
However, unconditional love cannot be realized, unless you have experienced conditional love. Love cannot be realized, unless you have experienced fear. God cannot be viscerally felt, unless you fully experience ego.
Because, if all you are among is light, how will you know darkness? How can you fully feel that you are one whole, when you’ve never been separate?
When you are surrounded by darkness, you are thrusted into the unknown, to search desperately for meaning. To look for the light, anywhere possible. And ironically, you realize that it has always been within you, because that’s the only place you will truly find it.
Pain and suffering do not exist to just make you miserable - it pushes you to rediscover what you have chosen to forget about yourself. It makes you reclaim the power you have forsaken, and given up as a result of “circumstances.” It makes you choose to love yourself, rather than chasing and seeking external validation. Because you realize how backwards it is. You realize that you create your reality from the truth you live from, not the other way around, of you reacting to your reality.
When you no longer resist the pain, but see its purpose in the divine orchestration you are a part of, you realize that fear exists to show you love.
When you embrace this pain, and see this inner pain with love, you see that it returns to this vast, infinite, empty bosom of love.
You see that when you place yourself in the shoes of love, love transforms your pain and fear, back into love. Precisely because you didn’t try to change it, distort it, or force it, but you met it with the same unconditional acceptance that is at the core of it all. That in the unconditionally loving eyes of love, the distortion of pain and fear has no choice but to melt back into its original form.
You see that fear is ultimately just guiding you to realize and embody this love.
You see that love was never outside of you, but within you. There was nothing you had to do to be worthy of this love, because you already are love, the same love that makes up this universe.
That when you slow down, and truly feel into your being and your truth in this very present moment, you realize that in this space of infinite love, everything returns to love. That love isn’t something outside of you, but it is the energy that permeates through this entire existence, even if it may not look like it on the surface.
That when you become love and you choose to love yourself, you are emotionally liberated from having to hold onto falsehood that keeps you separate from yourself.