From Fear to Empowered Engagement October 5, 2009
Posted by bodhidude in : Community, Society, Transformation , trackback
What does the current world situation bring up for you? This question produces a variety of responses depending on who you ask. There are seriously alarming things playing out right now many of which are major global events such as climate change. Beyond that we seem to be creating increasingly oppressive governments even in our so called free western societies. Our society at least to me appears to be suffering from a degenerative sickness which is entering a terminal stage. The degradation of our society is evidenced by many symptoms including increasing extremism, a poisoning of the food supply due to genetic and toxic contamination, a health care system that is based on profit instead of healing and sells poison under the guise of medicine, an almost complete lack of honesty and morality in government, a numbed out population that spends its time entranced by mass media promoting extremely dysfunctional behavior and propaganda and an economy where both greed and manufactured scarcity run rampant.
Two common responses to this that represent two ends of a spectrum include indifference or denial on one end and anger and resistance on the other. While these two responses seem to be polar opposites they have a common underlying basis of fear. It would be quite unbelievable to honestly take a look at what is happening in the world and not experience some degree of fear. Have you allowed yourself to see and acknowledge fully what is happening? These are very challenging times and the future has never been more uncertain but how we see these events and how we respond are critical in determining what form this uncertainly takes. Uncertainly or the unknown tends to evoke fear in human beings because of our habitual way of seeing ourselves as separate beings in a material universe. This illusory separation is the root cause of fear. The unknown in truth contains the limitless possibility of abundance which is our true nature but fear arising out of separation cuts us off from this natural abundance. This is important because if we face the current uncertainly with fear we will collectively create our worst nightmare. So what do we do if fear naturally arises in response to these trying times and it has the power to create what we least want to experience?
Empowered Engagement
One possible answer to this question is to transform our fear into empowerment. Denying or avoiding fear only pushes it into the unconscious where it wreaks havoc on our lives causing us to feel victimized by our life situation because we don’t see how we are creating our own suffering. Acting out of fear or anger masking fear is no better because it produces results that are infused with the energy of fear and dis-empowerment and this can only produce more of the same. If however we recognize and acknowledge our fear we open up the potential for transforming it. This can be done through the practice of mindfulness which I describe in detail in my article “Mindfulness and the practice of RAIN”.
By owning our fear we not only initiate healing for ourselves but we begin to act as healers for our society as well because we bring empowerment instead of fear to the collective consciousness. Being aware of and accepting of our fear transforms its raw energy into conscious empowerment which we can then put to effective use to create real change. In a state of conscious empowerment we cannot be manipulated or deceived and we directly see that we are not separate from the external world but in fact co-create it with what we think, feel and do. This co-creation of our experience can happen consciously or unconsciously and I would say we find ourselves at a stage in our evolution where unconscious co-creation is no longer possible, it has become too destructive. With empowerment we also have a powerful impact on those around us because we touch and trigger their empowered nature even if they are not aware of it at the moment. This allows us to confront destructive behavior in a much more effective way, we don’t condone it and we don’t resist or fight against it, rather we confront it with fearless empowered presence. We can do this because our fear has been owned and transformed into the very power we use to create change and we create that change by stepping into it ourselves as examples of what a fearless empowered life looks like.
We have a choice as to whether we take destructiveness to its most extreme manifestation or whether we consciously step into our roles as divine co-creators and help shape a new more healthy more nurturing society. We cannot do that without facing the darker parts of ourselves including our fear and our needs that result from past trauma. Both we as individuals and as a society are in dire need of healing and this healing needs to start within each of us. I think the positive aspect of our world situation is that its pressure and intensity will not allow us to avoid this healing any longer, we cannot continue the way we have been without destroying ourselves. We can use these intense times as the fuel for change and healing if we understand how to transform our fear and let go of our separation. Then we can respond to whatever happens with empowered engagement.
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