Love is our birthright.

Unlearning Fear

“Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we learn. The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts. Love is the essential reality and our purpose on earth.”

Marianne Williamson (Return to Love)

I read this quote this morning and asked myself, “How are we doing?” Some days I feel as though we are moving away from love at warp speed. But, as an optimist, I know we are straining forward in our evolution toward self-actualization of the human species. As a person living in the twenty-first century, I think we've lost track of what's important, and we're trying hard to remember. In Biblical terms, we're wandering in the desert.

If love is what we're born with, and looking at photos of my friend, Melissa, with her brand new granddaughter, I believe it is, then it still resides within us—as a trace memory. We have a facilitated pathway open to love that gets zinged now and then—such as when we hold a sweet baby. We see their vulnerability and gentleness and remember what that feels like—and it feels wonderful. While we're there, in that moment, what we feel is our connection to the divine in the baby, and the divine in ourselves. That's the purest form of love. We could feel it a lot more is we gave up fear.

My instant response to that suggestion of being afraid is to reject it. “I'm not afraid!” I insist. And while that's true, I'm not paranoid about safety, it doesn't take much to scratch the place within where fear does reside in me. Where fear is also a facilitated pathway—fear of not-enough-ness, of loss of all that I love, of losing my comfortable life. Suddenly, power and money loom larger in my mind and I pivot from love to greed. That's what my culture has taught me—to fear loss of power and status. It moves me from original love to learned fear in a nanosecond. It doesn't feel good.

I don't have a solution to this conundrum, except to say, hold fast to love and walk away from fear as fast as you can. Fear turns loving, caring people into something unrecognizable. We can support ourselves by affirming: “In this moment, I have everything I need. In this moment, I love my life, and I love who I am, and that's enough.”

“Love is the essential reality, and our purpose on earth.”

                                                               In the Spirit,

                                                                   Jane