Living Your Life – Love and Fear

After 10 years in a destructive and abusive marriage, I finally made the decision to make all my choices to live my life from a place of love and no longer allow my life to be ruled by fear.  As we walk our path, our dharma, the Right Way, or our sacred contract, we have a choice to walk our life’s path where we make choices made from a place of love or fear.  Part of connecting to your higher Self is connecting to a place where every choice we make is a choice made from a place of love.  However, we are human, we are fallible, we make mistakes, and at times we make choices unconsciously from a place of fear, due to mainly how our brains are wired at the moment.   We can connect to our higher Self and our well-spring of love by connecting to our breath in daily meditation/prayer and/or yoga practice.  It is in that sacred place, space, and time where we let go of fear breath by breath to get centered, and let all the thoughts settle so we can identify if we are taking action from a place of love or simply reacting from a place of fear.

How do choices made from a place of love and fear manifest?  When we make choices from a place of love, we feel a sense of freedom, of awakening, of light entering our inner most depths of being.  We feel alive in a vibrant way.  When we make choices from a place of fear, we lose our sense of who we really are, we are no longer connected to our highest Self, we feel irritable, angry, and may even have sadness, anxiety, and depression.

The side effects from decisions made from love or fear are not always recognizable after we make the choice.  Sometimes we must walk a long journey before we recognize the root problem of the love/fear side effects.  When I was in my marriage, I didn’t know at the time that so many of my decisions were being made from a place of fear.   I had moments of clarity that I was in a destructive relationship, but instead of taking the divine guidance I received, I made myself believe I didn’t have all the right answers when I did.   That was my own resistance telling me I didn’t know enough, wasn’t good enough, didn’t have enough resources, strength, will, etc. to let go, let God, and love.   Your biggest enemy is not someone in the outside physical world, your biggest enemy is your insane mind.  Yes, the mind that tricks you out of reaching your fullest potential and tricks you out of connecting to the beauty of divine chaos and faith.  I refused to accept the moment and tried to control my reality, which always led to more pain, more disconnection, and more destruction.

It took a long time for me to find the courage that I already had, and to learn to say no more will I live from a place of fear.  I made the choice three years ago to live and make all my decisions from a place of love.  It was at that time I started connecting to my sacred contract, to the Right Way, to my dharma, and could feel and know that everyone that crossed my path had something very important to teach me about me, my spiritual essence, the importance of connection, taking action, and refusing to react.

How do we make decisions from a place of love?  Yoga and meditation/prayer can foster a phenomenal healing of your self/Self (ego/essence) where connection to divine love filters through every cell in your body.

When we sink ourselves in fear and loss, the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol flood our system and throw our homeostasis (our mind-body balance) out of whack.  Yoga and meditation help connect the limbic system (area of the brain that regulates emotion and memory) and prefrontal cortex (our emotional center, where we process anger, fear, and aggression).  People with aggression issues have neural disconnections in the limbic system and prefrontal cortex.  That means those two parts of the brain are not communicating in a homeostasis state, they are out of balance.  They are unable to make that biological connection due to a number of factors, but most likely because their neural networks that connected those two centers in the brain broke down from traumatic experiences either in childhood or as an adult, were never properly formed because of trauma in childhood, and/or the connections were broken even further because of adverse environments such as drugs, violence, and alcohol addictions.

We have a choice to lead a life filled with joy and make decisions based from a place of love or we can create more pain than the natural order calls us to know by making decisions from a place of fear, which causes us to walk life reacting to everyone and everything around us, creating disconnection, disharmony, and imbalance.  When we practice meditation/prayer and/or yoga we make a conscious choice each time we step or sit on our mat and come to our breath, slowly and methodically staying present, to practice letting go of our own resistance, to invoke connection and balance, to invite action, to grow healthy neural networks in our brain so we can process information more efficiently and regulate our emotional arousal in a healthy and constructive way.  We will then begin making choices in our life from a place of love.

When I think of making choices from a place of love, I think of this:

“We are Divine instruments when finely tuned play the melodies of love whose vibration carries the flower to bloom.”  ~ Athea Davis

Let your own resistance go by coming to your breath, slowly and methodically in daily meditation/prayer and/or yoga practice and know that we can connect to our well-spring of love and bloom into our highest Self to live a life filled with joyous adventure.   Our physical lives are finite.  Live it up in love and connection to know how unlimited we really are.

Om Shanti Om ~ Athea

Athea