Grievous Wisdom

“It used to be that age was held in some esteem, considerable esteem even, as the concentration of life experience. Life experience and its many lessons were once the fundament of personal and cultural wisdom. It stands to reason, then, that with this many old people around we should be awash in the authentic, time-tested, grey wisdom that should emanate from them. And there should be cultural initiatives that expose the general population to this wisdom. And this should deepen this culture’s sanity and capacity for sustainable decision making. And that should make us all ancestors worth claiming by a future time, now that we’ve come to our elder-prompted senses and begun to proceed as if unborn future generations deserve to drink the distillate of our wisdom and our sustainable example. At the very least, the distillate of aged wisdom should balance the burden and the books, and old people should have worth as they once might have done, and the culture should break even on the deal. You’d think that this is an inevitable result of an aging population in a civilized place. We should be smarter, deeper, wiser. Especially wiser.

Well, here’s what is becoming glaringly obvious: there is nothing inherently ennobling about aging. Nothing. There’s no sign that anything lends old people steadiness or wisdom or magic from on high or from down below, just because they get old. If we don’t train young people and middle aged people in elder hood we will have no elderhood. There is no such training.

It isn’t any longer a matter of inviting elders, those of them left, back into the fold. They aren’t out there , waiting on our invitation. They aren’t out there. Elders are a sentinel species for humanness, and like other forms of life in our corner of the world they’ve mysteriously gone missing. Young people are, often involuntarily, looking for them, and they can’t find them. How about this: old people are looking for them too. The retreat centres attest to it. If you’re looking for signs of the end times, that alone might do.

I am making the case for elderhood, not for easy agedness. I’m doing so mostly by wondering what happened. Because something happened. Something happened to ancestors and elders and honour. There’s work to be done, and there’s an old wisdom to be learned where there used to be the wisdom of old, and you can’t fix what you don’t understand. That’s where we’re headed: to grievous wisdom. Let us see if we can bear the sound, the particular sound, of no hand clapping.

This is a plea and a plot for elders in training.”

~ Stephen Jenkinson, Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble (avail. June 2018)
Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW, is an activist, teacher, farmer, and author of Money and the Soul's Desires. He has a master's degree in theology from Harvard.

Company of Elders

"I grew up in Spanish Harlem; in Queens, New York; and in small Tennessee towns like Humboldt and Brownsville, where my maternal grandfather pastored a small church. I wanted to hear the elders' stories. On my mother's side, I wanted to hear about my great-grandmother, part Cherokee and tough as nails; about my late grandmother Gustava Maclin Vance, a pharmacist and the first African American woman to own a drugstore in her small, rigidly segregated town. I wanted to know how they survived the sometimes terrible hardships they faced.

On my father's side, I would sometimes plague my New York family with constant questions about where we came from....How did we get the unusual name Poussaint? Why did our faces look so much like photos of strangers I'd seen in places like Mali and Martinique?

The elders in my family helped to fill in the blanks of who I was, by sharing stories of who and where I had come from. Those stories strengthened me in ways I am still discovering, by giving me a sense of the vast, rich African American foundation on which I stood.

What a wonderful gift! As a young girl, it made me want to hear about other people's stories, other cultures, other ways of thinking, acting, and responding to life's challenges. Each story was like the opening of a door to a new, unexpected vision of life. Each door gave answers to different questions, answers that meant there was no need to keep trying to reinvent the wheel; that a lot of the hard, fundamental work had already been done on some of society's (and my) contemporary problems. I did not have to start from the beginning. I could build on an existing foundation created by my elders.

I grew up wanting to share that gift with everyone. It seemed particularly important for some of the troubled young people I reported on, who kept making the same mistakes over and over again. They lived in a world where the different generations had little contact, where they and their young friends seemed to drift, often with no apparent moral compass. I continued to believe that if some of these kids could have consistent, open access to their elders' advice and life stories, it might make a difference, perhaps a small difference, but still something. This book and the National Visionary Leadership Project are the wonderful extensions of that lifelong belief.

When Camille Cosby and I joined forces to create NVLP, we agreed, first of all, that it had to be intergenerational. We needed to find ways to bring the elders and youth together on a consistent basis. We were driven by a real sense of urgency.

Some of the elders whose stories we wanted to capture on videotape were in their late eighties or early nineties. Some were younger, but battling health problems. They were the repositories of much of America's history in the twentieth century. Some of that history had never been shared beyond the confines of the black family, where the truth about their lives in a majority-white world could safely be told. Once those memories and stories were gone, that particular history could never be retrieved.

Some of the young people we wanted to reach, including those from solidly middle-class black backgrounds, were running headlong into various educational, social, and professional glass ceilings, unprepared for the remnants of racism that still plague our country. Some of them had no real sense of their heritage of struggle, and could not imagine life under segregation. They did not know what their elders had gone through to win the rights to the life they enjoyed, and for the most part felt little concern about protecting those hard-won victories - that is, until they themselves hit one of those glass ceilings. That lack of knowledge about their past made their futures vulnerable. Our aim in founding NVLP was to help by bringing the generations together for better, open communication about our shared history.

One thing that became abundantly clear as we interviewed these visionaries was that it's not possible to know an elder's entire story, but it's always fascinating to discover whatever we can. A Wealth of Wisdom gives glimpses of the visionaries' varied stories and experiences, a mix of the serious and the lighthearted.

We hope that young people, in particular, will see these elders as complex, complete individuals they can relate to - not icons, but vibrant individuals who laugh and cry, who've made mistakes, fallen down, but managed to get up and keep going, often with remarkable good humor.

We want young people to know these elders as children, much like themselves, being a feisty tomboy like Coretta Scott King or trying to imitate the dance moves of a cool older brother, like Geoffrey Holder.

We want them to know these figures as young adults on the front lines of the civil rights struggle, some of them facing constant violence, like Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who describes in this book the sound of the KKK bomb exploding at his family's home on Christmas Eve.

We want them to learn about long-term relationships, such as that of Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis as they talk frankly about the decades they spent trying to build a strong family, and the financial price they paid for refusing acting roles they could not be proud of.

Finally, we want everyone to see that in fact age is a very relative thing. These elders are shifting gears, not stopping. Katherine Dunham, at ninety-plus, a true grand dame of dance, still directs the occasional class. Carmen de Lavallade was recently photographed in fluid motion for a national fashion ad campaign. Now in his late eighties, Dr. John Hope Franklin is finishing a new book, and sharing vivid stories from a recent trip to the ancient city of Timbuktu, in Mali. And Dr. Dorothy Height, in her nineties, is still running the National Council of Negro Women, and traveling the country on a book tour for her new autobiography. And they are not alone.

These elders astound, exhaust, and inspire me. Hopefully, they will do the same for you."

~ Renee Poussaint, A Wealth of Wisdom: Legendary African American Elders Speak

River of Wisdom

“You didn't come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean.
You are not a stranger here.” ~ Alan Watts

“My farm is a sixty-acre strip of stony land washed to where it is by a glacial run, huddled under those kinds of midnight skies. Lately it is some beaver swamp, some pasture, a roofless cedar log barn, and a secret little stream trickling down off the mountain that makes the spring forest around it hold green light all day long. We call it a farm mainly to keep our hopes up. We do farm the place, and that is a detailed chorus of pleading, cajoling, and bargaining with everything done to the land before we got here. We have vague but promising signs that the land may have forgiven a bit the old trespasses of clear-cut, pesticides, and overplanting.

Only two families have lived on it since the place was taken from the surrounding forests and the Algonquin people in the mid-nineteenth century, but those farmers left their signs: a rusting harrow in a tumbled-down log outbuilding, an evening star cut out of the barn’s western eves that let dusty light in at day’s end when the roof was still on, crumbling split-rail cedar fences and played-out soil. This place, as anybody who works land around here knows, should never have been cleared and farmed. It can feed the remaining trees and bush and the animals who live here, but it can’t feed much else, not without help. It’s sand, mostly. Our way of helping is to dig into the ground the spirit and the body of everything that withers and dies here. So far, the deals we’ve struck with the place are holding.

Partly because of my traveling and teaching schedule, which supports our farm habit, and partly because we don’t plough with a tractor, this is still mostly a dirt farm. That is what I used to tell the customs people when they wanted to know my occupation: dirt farmer. Once I was asked if I was bringing into the U.S. any monetary instruments totaling $10,000 or more. I reminded the customs officer that she knew I was a farmer. “Oh, right,” she said. “Sorry.” Ours is a fair way of life, more than fair. But it isn’t much of a living. A dirt farm it is likely to remain, and we turn out a bumper crop year after year without the heavy, crippling labor that used to be done here in years past. For now we plant clover, bury cardboard to encourage the worms, and hope that small green patches of people food will bear the early frost or show up in time to feed the scholars at our school. Patience and a manageable mortgage are mandatory for this kind of thing.

The name of the river I live beside when translated into English comes out something like “the place of full life,” which does it some justice. We’ve come to call it the River of Abundance and Time, which is a better rendering. Across the road from our skinny farm is a granite and oak ridge a day’s walk long that neighbors call The Mountain. The Mountain is not a mountain by almost any standard but a prairie one, but it rises sudden and unannounced from the land around it, steep and still bearing the marks of the upward tectonic forces that made it, and so locally it is highly regarded as a proper mountain. My friend and I climbed The Mountain one morning. Not being much of a mountain it wasn’t much of a climb, so we had energy enough to sit for a while and take in the great arc of the River of Abundance and Time as it rolled in its true course out of the purple western hills, through two grand lakes and on to the Mattawa in the east. We could see for forty kilometers, anyway, in every direction.

It was a beautiful sight. I admired aloud the valley before us that the great melt of water had carved ten thousand years before, the old torrent of which the current River of Abundance and Time is for now a subdued memory. After a minute my friend said, “Valley? What valley is that? Where’s the other side?” He was right, of course. It isn’t a valley at all and has probably never been. I’d just assumed there was another mountain explaining the river running between them. But it isn’t so. The river is where it is without any obstacle, without another side. Or you could say, the other side of the river—what makes it a river and not a lake—seems to be gone. But a long time ago some other, subtler thing made a home for the River of Abundance and Time, and still keeps it right where it is. This book about the wisdom of dying is, partly, about that subtler presence on the other side that binds all things to their course.

The river was dammed farther up about a half century ago to control the melting runoff, so now it flows slow and steady most of the year like most old-timers do, no longer too rambunctious, hardly able to act as in days gone by on the mad flush of spring. A half-hour’s paddle downstream from our place the river pours into to a large lake which is a favored cavorting spot for people from the city. Judging by the summer traffic, they are untroubled by the price of gasoline—or the end of gasoline—and all that goes with it. Holiday weekends are raucous times on the river, and you can be tested by the mayhem. On one of them I stayed home, making me the local exception, and lived through a prolonged reminder of why being here on those weekends isn’t wise. The buzz and the roar of two-stroke power plowing the river in front of the house to a muddy froth was constant, and it sent endless waves of erosion up and down the shoreline. This is how one of the local people accounted for it all: It’s a free country. Somewhere in the helpless, molar-grinding consternation of that weekend, a couple of thoughts struggled up toward me through my anger like lake trout through dark water:

What if those people could stand on the shore watching their wake wash a bit of the shore away? And what if each of us could stay put long enough to see the rippling trail of everything we did rolling out behind us? What if we stopped long enough to see the long train of unintended consequence fan out from every innocently intended thing we did?

A taste for the consequence, for what endures: Maybe then there’d be a chance for things to be different.”

~ Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

Street Smart

Street Smart defintion: shrewdly able to thrive in any difficult environment, such as a ghetto neighbourhood.

"Being Street Smart means showing compassion and vulnerability while at the same time being practical, realistic and responsible. It means being genuine. It means clearly asking for timely and appropriate help, without falling into the trap of being a victim of one’s own situation.  Street Smart people take personal responsibility and seek to act in ways that cultivate a better world—both now and in the future. Street Smartness is a form of intelligence. It is a combination of several types of intelligence existing in balance: intellectual, cultural, emotional, interpersonal (people-smart), intra-personal (self-smart), transformational, intuitive, body-conscious-smart and environmental. Leaders who cultivate Street Smart capabilities tap into greater awareness, becoming highly attuned to their own inner and outer worlds and the surroundings they move through; they use that awareness and power to function effectively and in timely ways with consideration and respect.

Street Smart Awareness leads to decisions and behaviours that take into account many variables at once: it is an agile awareness of oneself, others and the long-term consequences of immediate actions. In today’s world these qualities are needed more than ever—and they are also, happily, beginning to be publicly acknowledged...

“Inquiry” sounds as if it might be all about asking questions. And in a way it is—except that questions generally imply specific answers. Inquiry is rather a process of open questioning which can elicit an entire range of possible responses and reveal the possibility of new kinds of thinking and perceiving.  This in turn opens us up to feedback, and thereby to fresh thoughts and perspectives. It is a step into greater expansiveness in thinking, sensing, seeing, knowing and moving. Inquiry is a quality of noticing characterized by listening, observing and sensing what is going on both in the outside world and within ourselves.

“In-action” means that the inquiry process joins up the internal and the external. The internal inquiry is triggered by external events and the way we see the external events is triggered by what is going on inside us. Without inquiry, what we see is very often only what we expect to see, and this meeting of our expectation further reinforces our confidence that we know what is going on. Our world-view is confirmed because we look through the lens of our world-view. Inquiry-in-Action instead challenges precisely what we are expecting to see…

We aim to perfect the art of inquiring in the here-and-now, not in the aftermath of events but in their midst. This often leads us to startling new insights that translate immediately into timely actions. The third involves evaluating and appreciating the impact of our actions. We must ask: Was this the impact we intended? Is our action having any unintended consequences? What does this mean about both our past action and our future possibilities? Such evaluation goes well beyond asking what was right or wrong—rather, it loops back into our inquiry, alerting us to unwarranted assumptions we might have made and to new information we might not yet have considered…

Many of us may have experienced these awkward moments, when we realize that we desperately need to head in a new direction. Sometimes we don’t have the courage to recast our plans on the spot, while at other times we step out of our comfort zone and just do it. This is sometimes called double-loop feedback, and can be very effective. There is an even more sophisticated level of feedback (triple-loop feedback) possible in the moment. This is when we are able to tap into another level of consciousness; when we stop right where we are, let go of our assumptions, our pre-formed judgments, and our ego-driven intentions, and instead tap into ourselves in a deep, humane and compassionate way, becoming completely aware of ourselves and our surroundings and acting directly out of that awareness.

These moments are rare, and yet most of us have probably experienced them—moments in which a speaker alters her or his consciousness right in front of us, causing the whole room to hold its breath in awe at the authenticity of the moment. Such experiences can have a lasting, transformational impact on everyone present. Another aspect of timeliness is the amazing convergence of past and future in the present. This can lead to a very powerful Inquiry-in-Action…

I may not hope for the best in a difficult relationship simply because I have never experienced it as any good—and this renders me incapable of imagining that it might be better in the future. This thought in turn might lead me to accept it as it is, to do nothing about it because I don’t think it can change. But who says it can’t? My past experience and future expectations may be saying, “nothing will change”, while right now in this moment there may be clues suggesting different possibilities, if only I allow myself to notice them…

“Listening is such a simple act. It requires us to be present, and that takes practice, but we don’t have to do anything else. We don’t have to advise, or coach, or sound wise. We just have to be willing to sit there and listen.” —Margaret J. Wheatley

This rich seam of groundbreaking ideas is finding increasing acceptance in the academic world and in the world of business consulting. It is referred to and applied in many different forms in a large number of organizations and communities. Its continuing development is reaching out to an ever-expanding audience. It is especially useful in complex environments, and is valued by enlightened leaders who have experienced the limited effectiveness of conventional approaches. The spread of these ideas has been a gradual and gratifying process.”

~ Jane Allen, Street Smart Awareness and Inquiry-in-Action

Photo ~ Detroit ghetto. Once a thriving manufacturing powerhouse, the Rust Belt is now a vast area of urban decay and economic depression stretching across eight states in the northeastern United States.

Ordinary Miracles

Everything can be taken... but the freedom to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances. ~ Viktor Frankl

"Change can come on tiptoe
Love is where it starts
It resides, often hides
Deep within our hearts
And just as
Pebbles make a mountain,
Raindrops make a sea,
One day at a time
Change begins with you and me,
Ordinary miracles
Happen all around,
Just by giving and receiving
Comes belonging and believing,
Every sun that rises
Never rose before,
Each new day leads the way
Through a different door,
And we can all be quiet heroes
Living quiet days,
Walking through the world
Changing it in quiet ways,
Ordinary miracles
Like candles in the dark,
Each and every one of us
Lights a spark,

And the walls can tumble
And the mountains can move,
The winds and the tide can turn,

Yes, ordinary miracles
One for every star,
No lightning bolt or clap or thunder
Only joy and quiet wonder,
Endless possibilities
Right before our eyes,
Oh, see the way a miracle multiplies,

Now hope can spring eternally
Plant it and it grows,
Love is all that's necessary
Lovin', its extraordinary
Why,
Makes ordinary miracles every blessed day."

~ MARVIN HAMLISCH, ALAN BERGMAN, MARILYN BERGMAN, 'Ordinary Miracles'
During her 1994 concert tour, Barbra (Streisand) introduced this song with the following statement: “I believe that the most powerful source of energy is the human heart. It’s capable of deep compassion and caring. And when someone acts out of that — compassion and caring — something in the world changes. A Volunteer in a homeless shelter or an Aids Hospice, a reader to the blind. They may not make the history books or even the 6 o’clock news but in their quiet way they help repair the broken pieces of the world…”

Being a Goddess

“If you’ve been in a bookstore lately or even on the Internet, you’ve probably heard about embracing the divine feminine... This is a much-needed cultural, social, and spiritual revolution. However, it begs the following question—how do we define the feminine, especially the divine kind? And who gets to define it?

Myths and stories have saturated our minds with the supposed magical qualities of the goddess—an epitome of beauty with sensual curves and a lovely visage framed by a cascade of perfect hair; a lover par excellence and an exemplary mother, she is at once a tender flower and a fierce warrior against injustice. The goddess isn’t merely ethereal in appearance; she also wields extraordinary powers over nature. Importantly, she is worthy of worship.

We have no standards for the goddess other than those created in patriarchy...

Can the goddess be plain, destructive, conniving, entrapped in the confines of time and space? On the other hand, the goddess has the potential to become a vehicle for spiritual bypassing, where our own unexamined sense of lack or low self-worth is replaced by her imagined qualities, creating false or contrived personas for acting and living in the world. Instead of digging deep into our insecurities and seeing their baselessness, we learn to cover them up with an exaggerated sense of self-worth. In addition to not resolving any of our deep-rooted issues, spiritual bypassing comes with the fear of losing this goddess mantle and returning to our dreaded ordinariness. The pain and insecurity we wish to push away or forget lurk just behind the goddess persona, ready to burst through with the slightest provocation.

The goddess brimming over with beauty, power, goodness, and light thus continues to remain a fantasy, an impossible goal to achieve. At some point, we may be tempted to ask—can the goddess be plain, destructive, conniving, and entrapped in the confines of time and space? Few, if any, myths describe the goddess as being an embodiment of our darkness as much as the beauty and strength that we seek. If the goddess is much like us, what would we learn from her? What if the shadows and the light she embodies are universal, whether we are male or female? What if we tread the goddess path to discover that who we are is beyond the confines of the binary? How would we inhabit our bodies and minds while still breaking through the conventional norms of gender, race, age, beauty, grace, power, and peace?

This is where the Dasha Mahavidyas come in. Translating to “the ten wisdom goddesses,” the Mahavidyas are a peculiar group of goddesses that defy all conventional norms and definitions of what it means to be feminine.

In Sanskrit, Shakti is the creator, sustainer, and destroyer of the universe. The word literally means “power.” Shakti is the creator, sustainer, and destroyer of the universe. Importantly, she is the creator, sustainer, and destroyer of our persona—the one that keeps us so effectively trapped in familiar ways of thinking and acting that we forget our divinity. The persona that we take to be who we are is a cover-up for who we really are, which is eternal bliss consciousness. Shakti is not just the great concealer of our divine nature; she is also its great revealer. Shakti’s ten great forms that represent various forces of creation are known as the Mahavidyas. What sets the Mahavidyas apart from other goddesses is their singular fierceness. Their disheveled and naked bodies, lolling tongues, garlands made of skulls or human heads, and violent imagery cut through any binding concepts we may have of the divine feminine. Hidden in their iconography are the secrets of both the concealment and discovery of our divinity.

The only way to open to the light is by embracing our shadows. By embodying the opposites of shadow and light, the Mahavidyas show us that one cannot be had without the other, be it in the world or within ourselves. The only way to fully open to the light is by owning and embracing our shadows. In their insistence on reconciling opposites, the Mahavidyas leave no room for spiritual bypassing. Through their “in-your-face” iconographies, they transcend all superficial definitions of the word “goddess,” defying patriarchal norms of beauty, power, strength, and forbearance.

Take Kali, for instance. Few goddesses have stirred up the collective subconscious of goddess worshipers as she has. Fierce and wild, Kali is worshiped as the embodiment of all that is rebellious in us. She is known to strip us of our false personas if rightly invoked. There are plenty of stories floating around about the compassion and grace that accompany her merciless beheading of any pretenses that make up our identities. As a Mahavidya, Kali symbolizes time, the great cosmic force. She is often depicted as a wild-haired woman with bloodshot eyes and fangs, a bloodied sword in one hand, and a freshly severed head in the other. Strewn around her are corpses, presumably her victims.

Every time we judge ourselves on contrived concepts of propriety, we fall prey to Kali’s shadow. In our psyche, Kali represents the shadow of aggression as well as the light of nonviolence. Being entrapped in our past stories of hurts and slights, with the hope of getting even in the future, forms the very basis of violence. As time, Kali creates the illusion of a continuity between the past and the future, where we feel like we are on a linear timeline. Her dance among the corpses is telling—she beheads every moment, so that the next may be born. Standing on the corpses, she reminds us of the dead stories we carry around about ourselves. Even though the events behind the stories are long gone, we carry their wounds, which become the basis for how we behave in the present...

The Mahavidyas are unique in that they show us the only way out is through. Kali simply doesn’t allow us to fake nonviolence or to neatly push away even our microaggressions. She forces us to clean up our acts by making us acutely aware of our own darkness. Every time we point a finger at someone, she bubbles up in our inner vision, her deafening laughter ringing in our inner ears. She mercilessly beheads our every attempt to ignore or bypass our issues, forcing us to wake up from the tyranny of time... We see that patriarchy is just as much a product of her shadow—Kali’s dance is evident in all manner of violence, whether it is a politician or lawmaker spewing hatred and divisiveness, or our own petty jealousies and temper tantrums...

Be it Kali’s fierceness, Bhuvaneshwari’s deceptive beauty, or Dhumavati’s uncouthness, each Mahavidya forces us to question our ingrained concepts about what it means to be a goddess. By breaking the chains of cultural and social norms that limit and define our identity, they open us to ever-deepening levels of inner freedom. The very darkness that we had tried to push away opens us to the light in ways we couldn’t have previously imagined.

It is about being rooted in authenticity. The Mahavidyas’ radical lesson is this—embracing the divine feminine doesn’t look a particular way. It isn’t a false ego boost for those suffering from low self-worth. It isn’t about violent or hysterical rebellion against patriarchy. It’s certainly not about dressing, speaking, or behaving in patriarchally determined feminine patterns. It is about being rooted in authenticity.

What remains when all the concepts and beliefs we have been taught about ourselves are washed away? We come to see that who we are has no name, form, or gender. This light of understanding shines through us—through our unique shapes, forms, and life circumstances—and dances as unpredictably as Kali in the cemetery. Embracing the divine feminine is about being true only to that light of understanding, and refusing to be influenced by anyone or anything else.”

~ Kavitha M. Chinnaiyan, MD, is an integrative cardiologist who blends her medical expertise with her knowledge of yoga, tantra, and the Direct Path to help patients discover the end of suffering. She is author of Shakti Rising: Embracing Shadow and Light on the Goddess Path to Wholeness, published by New Harbinger Publications

Love Has No Opposite

"Some will tell you that fear is the opposite of love. And in this teaching the war begins.

But love has no opposite. It is whole and without division. Love is the field in which all form comes and goes, including the temporary, wavelike appearance of fear. It is the vast, tender space in which all thoughts, feelings, and sensations arise, play for a short while, and then dissolve.

Just like passing clouds could never taint the purity of the sky, the temporary dance of fear could never stain the majesty of what you are.

Unlike the density of the conceptual, love has no bias for the appearance of courage over fear, multiplicity over oneness, or clarity over confusion. All experience is welcome as valid and as a portal into presence. Everything is path, including the raw, immediate, somatic experience of fear, if it is not abandoned, rejected, and made into an enemy via spiritual theory.

In this embrace, a great mystery can be revealed: there is no suffering inherent in the direct experience of fear, but only in the movement away from it, in its invalidation, and in the conclusion that it is an error which must urgently be remedied.

Fear is a temporary visitor in the nervous system, longing to be known, integrated, and metabolized in the wholeness that you are. It is not an enemy to enter into imaginary spiritual battles with. Call off the war and set aside the pain of a spirituality of aggression.

By pathologizing fear – and concluding that its presence is evidence that something has gone wrong and that you have failed – you attack your vulnerability and keep alive the pathways of self-abandonment.

Love is not opposed to fear, but wishes to embrace it, hold it near, and provide sanctuary for its essence to unfold. Love would never turn from any of its children, including the temporary, wavelike child of fear.

When fully met and safe passage is provided, fear is able to reveal itself, like all other form, as none other than love in disguise. Fear is not the opposite of love, for love has no opposite."

-- Matt Licata is a psychotherapist, spiritual counselor, and teacher offering private sessions, customized mentorship, and live events to clients worldwide. Integrating Western, developmental therapy with contemplative, mindfulness-based approaches.