From Fear to Love

From fear to love

A change of paradigm
A shift of consciousness
A golden vision for learning
A change of paradigm
To focus on love
A golden vision for learning
To awaken
To focus on love
The time is now
To awaken
The place is here
Something important is happening and you are part of it!
Experience what happens when Fear meets Love....

As Albert Einstein said, we are either full of fear or full of love. Love and fear: the two main forces that make the world go round. Two paradigms and one choice.

Fear is not always negative. As has been said, a hero is someone who has lived through pain and fear and has been transformed by them. But fear can be an obstacle to love when it limits us, when it holds us back from acting creatively or courageously. This article focuses on "inappropriate fear," that pathological fear that is a mind-killer; the fear that stops us from giving our best, feeling our most and achieving our goals. The fear that shuts down our capacity for being connected to our heart. Our intention is not to stop feeling the fear, but to avoid being stopped by it. The good news is that we have a choice, that we can decide whether to plant seeds of fear or seeds of love.

Seeds of Fear = Fruits of Death
On perceiving the fruits that stem from each paradigm we can consciously choose, we can create the reality we want to live. In a culture of fear, we are sure to find these fruits:

• perfectionism
• competitiveness
• violence
• rigidity, blame, guilt
• jealousy and envy
• pessimism, and ultimately
• disconnection = death

Every time we aim for perfection we are putting ourselves, our children, our students in a state of guaranteed unhappiness, because perfection is only for God... The self-esteem answer, which stems from the paradigm of love, is to aim for progress not perfection. Similarly, when we compete against others we are necessarily creating tension between winners and losers. In the end, we all lose because tension spurs conflict. From the paradigm of love, the key is to compete with ourselves in order to improve our performance.

When standing in fear, it is almost impossible to express our wants and needs, and we can turn violent. Most of the time when we are afraid, we need to cover our mistakes, and we become intolerable and rigid. We can experience a momentary relief from judgment of our own actions by finding fault in others, demonstrating their wrongness and our rightness. When we stand in the paradigm of love, we choose to be happy rather than right! A word of caution here: forgiving does not mean allowing abuse. A healthy personality is shown by being able to set boundaries.

In order to forgive it is necessary to understand. How can we understand jealousy and envy? If we peel away these feelings we will find that the soft core that was originally filled with harmony and love is surrounded by layers of self-doubt and insecurity that undermine our love for ourselves and create a lack of belief in our own worth. We may be able to see the light in others -- and we may want to have it, even steal it -- because we cannot see the light in ourselves. Yet that light is still inside each of us.

As Marianne Williamson said, "it is not in some of us, it is in all of us," but it may be necessary that we do some work on ourselves to find it. It means to have the courage to look at ourselves in the mirror, to recognize our masks, befriend them and let them go. To find our light again we need to embrace our shadow first. It takes a lot of courage to do it because the shadow is the unconscious side of ourselves that we do not want to see... Indeed, it is an act of courage to stop being a caterpillar and become a butterfly! As Maslow put it:

"One can choose to go back toward safety or forward to growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again"

One of the strongest barriers to growth is pessimism as it is the expression of negative anticipation of our future, the feeling that things will go wrong, that we will not succeed, and if we do it will only be by chance... When we deny who we are, when we cover up our mistakes, when we forget our feelings, and do the same to others, we are somehow, dead.

Seeds of Love = Fruits of Life
"Love begins with yourself. The moment you can accept what you are, you awaken your capacity to receive love" Amrit Desai

According to Gerald Jampolsky love is the total absence of fear. Love is letting go of fear. It is a natural state of expansion, without comparison or measurement. When we plant seeds of love, we obtain fruits of life:

• progress
• co-operation
• inner peace
• flexibility
• appreciation
• optimism and ultimately...
• Connectedness = life!

From the paradigm of love, we need to ask ourselves, "What do we really like and want to do? Why aren’t we doing it?" Most of the time... because we scare ourselves by imagining negative outcomes. Many fears are simply created by our minds. Examples of "mind-killers" are: negative images, pessimism, criticism and gossip, limiting beliefs, in essence: toxic attitudes. Thus the importance of paying attention to our attitudes and... limit our contact with people who show toxic attitudes! As Frank Smith said "we learn from the company we keep."

I believe we become the company we keep. Such is the power of the people who surround us. We learn from them, we gain knowledge through shared experiences, time after time consciously or mostly unconsciously we absorb wants and needs; thoughts and beliefs; actions and reactions.

In a nutshell, to stand in the paradigm of love it is necessary that you make a conscious choice to let go of fear, especially when things go wrong, when the plan has failed...It is then when you need to embrace all your parts -- both your light and your shadow -- with the same attitude. It is then when you particularly need to surround yourself with inspiring people, inspiring thoughts, inspiring attitudes. It is when nothing works that you can choose to be your best self, not your unattainable one. It is then that you can compete with yourself to improve your performance, rejoicing in your progress, even if very small. Keeping in mind what Carl Rogers expressed: "What I am is good enough if I would only be it openly."

Above all, express joy and gratitude as much as you can, when you do this, something magical happens, because when fear meets love ... it melts!