Dealing with scared

When I went to india a few years ago, I felt certain I didn't want to go before I left. I'd had a great deal of resistance to buying the ticket in the first place, but once i'd finally bought it, once I was going regardless of what I felt, I still felt like I didn't want to, or perhaps no longer needed to, whatever, but accepted that I now was. I still had a choice in reality of course - nobody forced me to get on the train, but, I felt I lost something about myself in going like that, or had lost it before I even went and just revealed it more profoundly. Instead of seeing why I was in this state, why I couldn't accept myself as I was where I was, when I had had so many wonderful realisations about who I was and what life was about in the past there. All I wanted to do was get back to what I knew and was familiar. As a result, I felt different. And so I couldn't stay. Couldn't connect with the spirit of the place. I was only there to escape, or at least to escape to a place where I might find and feel myself again. But instead of giving myself time, or feeling there was any, everything seemed to conspire against me from feeling comfortable and settled so that I might. I see now why I needed to go through that experience, or why I was always going to.
\nYour situation is different, yet similar. You are stable where you are. You have support from everyone around you, yet always know that nothing is ever set in stone, but everything you need to deal with your new environment, your new life, is all there. Nothing has really changed except the people and the objects you see around you. The experience of becoming a nurse, if that is what you become, is not just about learning to become one. It is this too. The leaving, the new, the strange, the need to take and make choices that you haven't made before, or not in this way anyway. Feel things you haven't had to feel. It is this that forms part of the experience so that in having to do it, in accepting that you are, and doing it, you change and grow into someone else, someone you cannot really know about until you're being it. If it works properly, you don't know you're being it, you just start being it and that is who you are.
\nBut whatever happens, there are no wasted experiences, no real mistakes, only differences in the way we see things. Bravery is not NOT feeling scared when something scary is there, it is knowing you feel scared and dealing with it anyway. That is what builds character. That is what opens things up. To grow we must do things differently, in a different state of mind, so that we see things differently.
\nWas I right to leave india and not find a way to feel comfortable there? Not sure. At the time, I felt I had to. But there were other choices, I just never took them, or tried to take them but found myself thwarted. I was there to break my connection with that place, with that man, and remove the idea he had of me. By the end he saw me as someone else - “you are not the man I thought you were”, he said. He was both right and wrong. I wasn't the man he thought I was because that man never existed outside his idea of me. I wasn't the man who turned up 22 years earlier that was sure, but he was still there, underneath, feeling there was no need to see this man, any man, as Guru, which I'd always had a problem doing anyway, and to only find and feel the Guru within me instead. That I was always doing this myself, and by deciding there was someone I needed to/ought to look up to, even though it was right to see him that way then, but only for a moment. That to see him that way from that point on, was just an idea of who he was, and when there were moments that caused me to doubt him, reality was beginning to break through the illusion already. I needed it, found it, learned much from my time with it. It worked best when I had no idea what to expect. By going back again, as an escape, imagining I knew something, gave me a shock when the reality dawned on me. Not only did I feel different, but the place was different. So much had changed, the very feel of it, as if the spirit that I had felt before was simply no longer there, or so far out of reach that I just wasn't capable or didn't want to, reach it. I'd moved from being comfortable, looked after and supported, to a place where I had to do all that myself, and I didn't like it. That those I loved and who loved me were far away and so difficult to contact, even though I found a way. That my attachment to the old was still so strong that nothing new could appear because I simply wasn't ready to choose it.
\nAnd that is where I find myself. Wondering if I am ready to choose it? Having choices clearly obvious, yet not knowing how to walk towards any single one as that would imply I know what I want, know what i'm doing, when I don't. To find and follow my passion, my excitement, and have no doubt what I need to do next, rather than have to consider all possibilities and decide something that cannot be decided. I am letting go of mind. Of thought. I cannot then still use it to guide my life. What I feel in any given moment is the only thing I know to be real, even if it is still just my idea of what the feeling means. But when it feels real, when I feel like I want to do that more than anything else in this moment, that is the light I follow without thinking about it, without wondering if it is right or not, as the feeling is the permission through which I can move forward. It doesn't have to realise itself or come to fruition in any specific way, as there should be no idea about what that ought to be, and if there is, released so that it can become whatever the next thing will feel to do when it appears.
\nTo trust that the universe has everything in hand, and I only need to recognise this to allow it to bring me what I really need not what I think I need. To just be present in it, and feel whatever I will feel in any given moment, and do what my inner stillness allows me to see to do. Moment by moment. Experience by experience. With zero expectation of what must come from what I do. Everything is then done purely for the joy of doing it. With the right spirit. And life opens up in a way that reveals there is so much more to it than can be seen from where I was previously looking. Life is a continuous expansion of consciousness and awareness, forever. This is just this part of the journey. You don't need to know what was there before, but there was a before, and you don't need to know what will be, even though it will be. You just have to be. You are being right now.

 

 
Scared of the thing I NEED to do sounds about right, but it's dealing with my 'demon' that knows that doing it would cast it out.

 

 
It usually is. After all, once fear is faced, any power it appeared to have must begin to wane, because it can only have power as long as it generates the feeling of fear. The fear feeling is what feeds it, what sustains it, what makes it seem real. It is not real, not really, not unless it serves a purpose.
 
Does the feeling we get as we approach the edge of a high cliff serve us, or can we simply know there is no point getting too close without a good reason without it? Such things are built in mechanisms, designed to ensure survival, but are not part of the higher mind, just the old primal lower one. Can we let go of fear entirely? Experience life without it, but with no less longevity of it? Fear is only a habit, a belief, a need to heed something that may not be anything like we imagine it to be.
 
 
Yet what if fear is my friend?
\nI must go into it properly.
\nIf god is all that is, then this fear is part of that all too. It is me as much I am me. Then is it protecting me from myself? Is it doing something for me that it sees the need for?
\nIf it is also me, then how can I invalidate it by saying I need to do something that ignores it? When I give in to it, let go of the ideas I have to change things, to let things go, am I not simply letting go of one reality in order to put the same me into another? For wherever I go that is where I am, is it not?
\nWhen I let go of the mind, the thoughts, the needs, the desires, and just truly be, I am at peace, free, here, now. Is it real? Am I truly free? Or can I just know what is in this moment, feel it as if there is no other, but as soon as my state of mind changes, as soon as ‘reality' comes back, then I am no longer free, only freer perhaps than some, but perhaps more chained then others even though they never see anything like what I do.
\nIf I am being protected from myself rather than it being something I must overcome, then that should mean there is something here that I want, that I simply don't recognise I want, until after I let go if it. Sarah? Emaly? They are my family. Yet who says I have to let go of anything? After all, I am only coming to visit. Coming to walk. Coming to smoke. Coming to share. Coming to be. I am only letting go of a life that does not serve me, or maybe I am letting go of myself, that no longer serves me also. For who I have become is not me. Yet it is still me, just not all the me I can be.

 

So I chose it, and the moment I did, felt the universe's hand reaching out to me, to remind me that is was always there, only now I can see it at work. Still have to make a few more choices yet, but those will be easier having made the big one. Life changing feels good, and yet, I am in a kind of holding pattern as I can't quite leave everything yet. But I have left a lot, already, and will let more go over the next few days. Then to leave my land and fly to another, where an other waits to light a fat one. Will sure be good to finally share it.

 

 
Mundanity isn't very exciting is it? Do you have an exit strategy? What is it that excites you? Follow that and you will be sure to find your way out.

 

Yes, although I feel it may still depend on the edge one walks along.
But yes, all is perspective. All is in the mind. Why should the idea of walking close to the edge be any different to walking 10 feet behind it? The mind can imagine the possibility of falling and it must avoid it at all costs, and without such instincts, survival is not guaranteed. Yet, suspend a plank between 2 bricks so it is 6 inches above the ground and walk it easily because we have been walking easily for ever. Now suspend it between 2 buildings, and most no longer know how to. What has changed? Same walk. Same plank. Not same possibilities. Not same outcome if one misplaces a step or wobbles off. Yet, the plank suspended between the bricks can be walked back and forth as many times as you like without these things happening. We just know that falling off is not an issue. Across the buildings it is and the weight of doing so now requires more concentration, attention, that before simply wasn't needed.
 
But if I can feel the same across the buildings as between the bricks, then I might even skip across because the primitive mind no longer needs to do its thing. Or, I can simply use my higher mind, and take the stairs down and walk to the other building that way!