Include the Excluded, or Fear is Not for Sissies

Have you ever felt afraid when about to step across a threshold into a new possibility? Stood there, jittery, nauseous, clammy with sweat, telling yourself all the reasons why you should not do what you’re about to do?

I am at a threshold now, about to commit to a new direction in my work that reveals what I most love. Listening to Radio Freakout, I am convinced I shouldn’t do this. We know how this ends: derision, humiliation, and the worst of it all, aloneness. I am sweating even as I write this.

Yet my worst fear has always been not to live in alignment with the essence of my life force, though that too seemed like mortal danger in the past. I remember derision, humiliation, aloneness. But that essential impulse was always stronger. I have always followed it, thrashing wildly part of the time.

So I pause to listen more deeply. I feel how firmly I am rooted into the embodiment work I have practiced and taught over the last three decades, Soul Motion playing a huge part. Sensing into the space behind me, I feel the immensity of the visible and invisible back up I have received along the way. I feel a wave of trust, a sense of being supported and held. Alone? I have never been alone, or I would not be here today at all.

I allow the freak-out to ride the big wave of trust. It’s important that neither is lost, because of the gift each brings. Trust is a no-brainer; trust is buoyant and beautiful, something to rest into, knowing that Life will carry me where I need to go. But fear? What could the scared little kid have to offer here? As I open to the experience of fear, which let’s face it, is not on anyone’s list of favorite things to feel, I sense the groundless pit inside, the sick feeling of falling through space with no support, the uncontrollable shaking. True, fear is not for sissies. But at the bottom of it, I feel a softening, humbling quality, intimately connected to the essence of humanness.

I teach from this both/and perspective, because guess what? we all know (consciously or not yet), the vulnerability, helpless insecurity, and terror of living in a body. At the same time, we are all held in a big embrace of love (felt or not yet). My invitation is to dance together – shall we? – into the heart of the human existence, with all its muck and magic, mess and majesty, where everything is included. Please, no exceptions.

Published in October 2014 Soul Motion Village Newsletter