Today's quotation:

Fear is a question:  What are you afraid of, and why?  Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.

Marilyn Ferguson

Today's Meditation:

We don't usually like to explore our fears, do we?  After all, our fears are quite frightening, and they keep us thinking about things that we aren't good at, things that we do poorly, or things that turn us into nervous wrecks.  Our fears also control us in many ways, and it can be intimidating to confront things in our lives that do that, just as it can be extremely difficult to confront an intimidating person or situation.

But Marilyn makes a very good point when she compares our fears to illnesses.  Our sickness can have a lot to teach us about how we're living our lives.  They can make us aware of having too much stress, too little relaxation, too few vitamins, too much conflict, too little exercise.  They can help us in our lives only if we take the time and make the effort not just to pay attention to them, but also to take action based on what we learn from them.

Likewise, our fears can be one of the most positive parts of any change that we desire to make in our lives.  Our fears can show us just where change will be the most positive, just where we might search for a course or a program that will teach us methods for dealing with certain areas of discomfort.  So the next time you feel fear welling up in you and starting to control your actions, pay attention to the questions, as Rilke once said:  What are the questions that fear is pointing out to you?

And once you know what those questions are, only then can you put yourself on the road to answering them, and hopefully putting your fears to rest, where they belong and deserve to be.  After all, teaching can be difficult, and our fears have tried for a long time to teach us what we need and want to learn; we just haven't been paying attention.  Yet.

For further thought:

It is not that you must be free from fear.  The moment you try to free yourself from fear, you create a resistance against fear.  Resistance, in any form, does not end fear.  What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it.  We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it, not how to resist it through courage and so on.

J. Krishnamurti

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