This is an email I have written to a group of people I am working with around our fears of survival. These folks are leaning to take care of themselves, to move through obstacle and challenges, and to trust that they can do this in a good way, in spite of the major challenges we are all facing on that level right now.

There are so many people right now, feeling just the same kind of survival fear that is arising for you. I have this strong feeling that this is a big gateway for so many of of us right now, and that we can really learn to work with this fear, step by step, call ourselves back into the present moment, and start to see how many of our difficulties are based on inner blockages, not what is going on in the outside world. It’s extraordinarily empowering to realize this--in the face of our whole economy unravelling...that if we remain open, and clear, and focused on our goals in a sane and responsible way, we will actually be able to take care of ourselves. And that involves becoming more and more aware of how our thoughts and beliefs create our experience, over and over again.

I was speaking with someone last night about this kind of fear, and she said everytime she thinks about finding a good job, the thought arises, “It’s not going to happen.” I asked her to drop into her body and see if she could feel how that kind of thinking is related to our desire to be in control. She felt that instantly, and replied, “Oh, yeah, these kind of thoughts let me be the boss..because I know what’s going to happen.”

We started to laugh about how strange the mind is, and how much we still cling to the feeling of being in control in an uncontrollable universe, even when the sense of knowing what will happen brings us great suffering and limitation.

“What happens, “ I asked her, “when you let yourself feel that you really don’t know what will happen? You could find a great job tomorrow, or next week...we are actually living in a field of consciousness that includes this possibility. .”

“Oh that’s scary, “ she said, “To think of receiving what I want. It makes me feel quite vulnerable.”

I had a sense of the whole field of her awareness slowly opening, and penetrating through the layers of protection, as she started to see that these thoughts like “I can’t do it, “ or “It will never happen, “ kept her feeling safe, in some strange way.

I think we are being called to open up to a much more fluid and innocent way of living our life, where we have room for both success and failure. If we stop holding back, and let ourselves jump right in and participate with life, we will notice that success and failure happen all the time. We can experience them both in the same day. And there’s nothing wrong with either one of them. They are part of our lives as human beings. We can’t avoid success and failure. We think we can, by locking ourselves up in a very small world of our own, but eventually we suffocate in there, and need to emerge into the wild river of life.