You cannot live from fear and be whole
The roots of fear run deep. But you cannot live from a place of fear and be whole. To choose because you fear the alternative is to fragment, rejecting the current within you that is reaching towards life.
Sometimes, we cannot help it. We cannot escape the patterns of our biology when we are under threat — starving, thirsty, seeking shelter — but for most of us, the fear is social. Fear of falling in status, of being ashamed for ‘doing the wrong thing.’
No one starves to death in the developed world. Most anxiety around employment is about defending the world that you have created and the way of being you would like to preserve. Yet with little sensing into whether this way of being is a Yes to the river of life.
The blind French resistance writer Jacques Lusseryan said that he was always bathed in light, as were those around him, and that this light would quite literally illuminate the way out of situations where annihilation by the Nazis felt all but assured1. This light was always there, even as he faced certain death in the infamous concentration camp at Buchenwald, with one exception: when he allowed the mood of fear to enter. Only then did he become truly blind.
When we act from fear we are essentially fragmented, reactive. The hardness of a fearful No is comfortable as an old habit, but the grooves through which it was formed are set. Living in response to fear is a continual escape, and you will find your life force dispersing in every which way. Living when oriented to love is collective and integrative — it becomes possible for all your capacities to become animated an coordinated in a resonant orchestra. The feeling is connection, agility, agency, lightness, resource, flow.
Lusseryan for me is a vital reminder that, even in the darkness of a labor camp, love is present.
Thank you to Alessandro, Alexey, Marley, and the many friends who have shown me fearless living.
I find myself reading again Lusseryan’s autobiography, And There Was Light. It is potent, moving, and deeply spiritual. It remains one of my all time favorite books.