Five Faces of Fear (and the Sacred Shift to Love...)

I reach for the red book on my nightstand, "Love Poems from God," this morning and turn to a poem by Kabir about Kali, about being wild and ravished...about letting go of fear and entering into the radical experience of passionate Love...big L, Love...the experience of passion, adoration, devotion and ecstasy that comes from being in Love with all Life. The kind of Love that messes you up, that disrupts the neat and tidy patterns of your controlled and planned existence. The kind of Love that throws a monkey wrench into your nicely constructed dream. This is the Love that I am referring to when I speak of Sacred Love...the Love that is sent from God, the Love that is God embodied...the Love that is the Beloved before you, calling up everything unlike love to be released and brought into wholeness.

As I turn the pages in the red book two large purple index cards fall out...notes from a talk I gave at Unity of Corvallis over a year and a half ago... the title at the top reads, "Five Faces of Fear." I remember creating this talk...I shared the platform with a beautiful and inspired woman that had just been released from prison, from Coffee Creek, weeks earlier. As I read them this morning they seem so relevant to this journey into Love and the shift we are called to make to fully strike a loving pose and embody a radical and unrelenting Love. I share them with you in hopes that you will also take a step, a run, a jump, a leap into the arms of Love this day!

The Five Faces of Fear:

1. Fear of Our Sacred Wildness
   Prison we live in from this fear: Being Normal
   Practice we use: Playing Small, Suppressing Authenticity
   Sacred Shift into Love: Belonging...Be Our Longing, Follow Our Longing, Passion and Desire, Moment to Moment
2. Fear of Our Holy Oneness
   Prison we live in from this fear: Isolation
   Practice we use: Judgment, Intense Judgment and Analysis of Self and Others
   Sacred Shift into Love: Radical Revealing of Self -- Fears and Judgments with Another
3. Fear of Our Passionate Purpose
   Prison we live in from this fear: Security
   Practice we use: Apathy, Distraction, Numbness, Robotic Movement, Sleepwalking
   Sacred Shift into Love: Ecstatic Service, Take the Love Challenge...See every moment as an opportunity to express and offer your Love.
4. Fear of Our Boundless Creativity
   Prison we live in from this fear: Control
   Practice we use: Perfection
   Sacred Shift into Love: Follow Aliveness, Curiosity...Express Untamed Creativity, Make a Mess...What brings you alive? Do it!
5. Fear of Our Glorious Magnificence
   Prison we live in from this fear: Doubt
   Practice we use: Hiding, Masking, Containing
   Sacred Shift into Love: Reveal Your Beauty, Expose Your Radiance, Share Powerful Presence, Let Your Light Shine!

Breaking free...giving rise to what lives within us requires a fundamental movement from fear to love, from prison to palace, from ego to soul, from control to surrender...from separation to union. I am dedicating myself today to make this fundamental movement into Love...to become aware of times when I am in my Fear Mind and Body and return to the radically freeing practice of Sacred Love.

The more I move with wild abandon...the more Love I become.

Here is the poem from Kabir that I flipped to this morning...Maybe It Will Become Chic!
I had been invited to an important conference

Where many learned men from different countries

Were going to address the topic:

Where Is God?

I was wearing my best clothes and even fasted for a week,

hoping to sharpen my mind. Just before I was to leave though,

I felt powerfully drawn to a little shrine in my bedroom and I went

there and knelt to pray.

I could not believe what then happened:

Kali threw her arms around me and started tearing at my clothes.

Then she started throwing delicious food into my mouth,

purposely missing several times it seemed,

thus soiling my pundit attire;

And then she made me perform many times as if I were

her husband; and then she said, "Now Kabir, don't be late

for that big talk, and don't change your clothes -- I like that

love-stained look, maybe it will become chic?!"

I arrived just as it was my turn to stand before this august

crowd and apologized for my appearance.

"So Where is God?" the head of the conference says to me.

"Well, (well, I stammered) if you really want to know the truth --

if you hurry -- you might catch Her legs still spread back at my pad."

Kali: A (very wild) Hindu Goddess