If Love Is the Answer, Fear is the Teacher
The following is adapted from BEQOMING by Azrya and Benjamin Bequer.
We believe that, at their core, all feelings boil down to love or fear, and that both are powerful forces of nature. In our eyes, fear is merely the absence of love, but the absence of love is not to be underestimated. At the source level — the dimension of infinite oneness — it’s all love; death is no less sacred or valuable an experience than life is.
But in this physical dimension of time and space, danger and death are expressions of polarity. They manifest themselves as “real” — meaning while the soul is immortal, the human body is not. In fact, it has thousands of years of stored evidence in its genetic code that life on planet Earth is painful, scary, and — eventually — always deadly.
As Will Smith said: “Danger is very real, but fear is a choice.” Most would agree that fear has a time and place. That it’s an alarm system built into our biology, which has allowed us to survive unimaginable hardships throughout our brutal human history and still serves us today.
But does it really?
Fear Is Our Teacher
Is it possible to evolve beyond fear, just like we evolved beyond needing hair all over our bodies? Could we leave fear behind like a technology that has gone obsolete?
We’re not sure anyone can answer that question just yet, but we’ve certainly noticed our relationship to fear has dramatically changed as its power over us has diminished through the full embracing of it as a valued teacher. We love Robert Heller’s notion that “fear is just excitement without breath.”
No matter who you are, you will inevitably be confronted with “dangers” barreling toward you in the form of financial stresses, relationship conflicts, daily anxieties, etc. Every moment provides us with a choice point. Do we run and hide from these things, or do we stand and breathe them into the deepest caverns of our heart, thus alchemizing them through the power of our conscious choice?
Fear steers the ship, until we actively decide that we’re ready for Love to take over. Kind of like switching from Windows to Mac, there’s a learning curve. It’s a completely different operating system.
Love Is Our Answer
Learning to face fear helps us use it as a portal to greater love. We cannot bypass fear; it is an intrinsic and important part of being human. Fear is a teacher because it shows us precisely where we lack love within ourselves. Like a homing device, we can follow the feeling of fear — which is usually experienced as contraction, closing, or withholding — to the parts of ourselves that are most starved for love. When love returns, it is usually experienced as expansion, warmth, and well-being.
Sometimes the feeling of fear isn’t as strong or obvious and expresses itself as something more manageable, albeit pervasive, such as resistance or judgment. In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield talks extensively about this internal resistance, and how it is intent on sabotaging your creator consciousness at all costs. He gives profound advice on overcoming this resistance, but his relationship to resistance is also fairly antagonistic, which allows for traction but ultimately keeps us locked in a state of conflict with ourselves.
We believe that resistance can be overcome, not by going to war with it but rather by understanding why it’s here and loving it into submission.
Radical Acceptance
Judgment is always a sign that fear lurks beneath the surface, for it is a protection mechanism, a way to create a safe distance, even if just through the subtle workings of an inner narrative of division. Judging someone’s appearance, for example, is usually a quick way to find one’s own insecurities about how we look. We are constantly projecting judgment and shame on others in order to distract ourselves from our own deepest wounds.
As Matt Kahn said, “Judgment is released by loving the one who judges.”
As Azrya says, “We cannot heal that which we are busy judging.”
Embrace judgment and fear as the teachers they are. If you follow their invitation to look deeper within, they will allow you to discover secret gems amidst the soil of your subconscious. The vehicle with which to navigate yourself through to these teachers is the ability to marry your awareness with your breath. This doesn’t require fancy breathwork techniques. All it requires is the willingness to close your eyes, bring all of your focus to your inhales and your exhales, and let everything else fall away. Do that for 10 minutes every time you feel stressed, anxious, or afraid and watch your relationship to these energies transform.
For more insight on how to embrace fear and lead with love, you can find BEQOMING on Amazon.
Azrya and Benjamin Bequer are the co-founding stewards of BEQOMING, a platform that provides transformational tools, media and experiences to help people see beyond the veil of who they thought they were supposed to be and awaken their full-spectrum aliveness.
