Fear and Centering

OUR DEEPEST FEAR
By Marianne Williamson
(from A Return To Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles)

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine, as children do.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.



What most things boil down to is fear, fear to trust ourselves, fear to trust others. Fear squeezes us shut, dries us up. It pushes love right out of the bed onto the floor. I can see how my decisions have led me to this place, how I am responsible for my actions. It’s easy sometimes to slip into wanting to find someone or something else to blame, including looking back in hindsight and saying, “you should have found a different doctor. You should have just sucked it up and found any job over the summer. You should have told people then what the situation was.” All of this is true, as is all the decisions I made then. I did what I could do when I could do it. Fear pulls me into looking at all of this over and over, second and third and fourth guessing myself, and then punishing myself for being human and making mistakes.

What I have to do now is stay centered and in the present. I’m working toward my future goal – to somehow finish school – and doing all I can to make it happen. I apply for any and all jobs that fit my abilities and skills. Along the way, though, I find myself becoming much more here in the present than I have ever been able to in my life. Maybe it’s taken the extreme reality of truly facing the prospect of homelessness and hunger to make me stop jumping between the past and the future. I’ve always gone back and forth between looking back and analyzing what I’ve done and beating myself up over it, and dreaming my way toward some glorious future happiness. I have spent very little time in the actual present, in the here and now. This situation has given me the gift of being able to do that more and more. I’m not sure if it’s because it sometimes feels like grieving, like all the everyday things I took for granted might not be here, or if it’s just because to move through this, I treat ordinary everyday things more like a meditation.

When I walk to work, instead of being so focused on the result, on thinking about what I will do when I get there, I simply walk and notice things; the way the wall in front of the child care center is built of slabs of rock balanced together in a sort of shingley fashion; the way the trees arch over the street and cast dappled shadows across the pavement; the old section of road that’s still paved with the heavy cement paving blocks; the door on the second floor of a stone house, with its own set of stairs going up – the doorframe above is curved and goes to a point, reminding me of castles and medieval things; the scattering of acorns across the sidewalk near the big oak tree.

I don’t drift off as much to think about other things when I’m doing everyday things. Because I don’t have a car, or much money, I’ve taken up sink laundry. I wash my laundry in the kitchen sink and then hang it to dry, usually in the shower. On hot, nice days, I hang things over the little railing running the one side of my porch. I have hated doing laundry. It seemed like such a repetitious, thankless task. You’d no sooner get clothes clean than they’d be dirty again. Now, though, I enjoy the feeling of scrubbing the clothes, of swishing them through the warm soapy water, and then struggling to wring them out, the part I have yet to really master. They go, dripping and warm, to hang in the shower and drip some more. It takes longer for them to dry, but by the next evening, I have clean laundry. Life is good.