Is your spirituality is built on a faulty foundation?

I'm writing today to continue a little conversation about something I really love to talk about.  I'm going to talk about the anatomy of fear; the true nature of what fear is, what we think it is, and why that gets us into a superficial engagement with spirituality and provides a faulty foundation of spirituality. I want to talk about the anatomy of love as well because I don't think it's just fear that we have confusion around. I think love is equally confusing for people.  We tend to confuse human love and divine love in the same way that we're confusing physiological fear with a helpful messenger. First, let's clarify what fear physiological fear is, versus fear as a friendly ally.

Physiological fear (aka survival intuition)

I want to make sure it's clear that when I speak about fear, I am NOT speaking about the biological response the body has when you are unsafe and need to get out of somewhere. That kind of fear is both a physiological response to an unsafe environment which causes a release of stress hormones that help you get up and out as quickly as possible, as well as your survival intuition (as Caroline Myss calls it).  This is often felt in the sac or solar plexus.  It is that absolute gut instinct that something is wrong with yourself, the environment you're in, the person that you're with, or your children on the other side of the world. You may have a very strong visceral reaction - a fear-based reaction - which is about keeping you alive.  That is physiological fear. It is intuition in its most basic form. Survival intuition is rudimentary and yet we still treat it as though it's a kind of special magic superpower.  Therefore in our very secularised Western world, we ignore it. How much trouble would we save ourselves if we listened to our survival intuition? It is very important to clarify the difference between that physiological survival intuition which is a very different thing to the type of fear I'm going to talk about now, the idea of fear as a friendly ally.

Fear as a messenger

We will often do anything we can to run from fear. We are now talking about the subconscious fear programs that arise in us as we begin to awake that make us feel really uncomfortable.  We get into, as Joe Dispenza says, a river of discomfort and we think, "This feels bad." If you're not prepared, when it gets uncomfortable you retreat and think, "Oh shit, I don't want it! Oh no, could someone just bring me a cocktail, because I really don't want to feel what I'm feeling!" When that happens, we return to our addictions. We go back to the strategies the ego has come up with to prevent us from having to meet that subconscious fear program. In reality, when your addictive impulse is rising, there's a good chance that you are close to meeting and releasing a fear-based subconscious program that's been sitting below the surface simmering away for some time.

How to get comfortable with discomfort

First of all, I want to talk about the anatomy of fear and the anatomy of love, what these things truly are, and how they are truly serving us all the time. Can you train yourself to sit with that discomfort and then apply the tools that will allow you to re-encode your consciousness to excavate the subconscious basement?  To draw that darkness into the light so that that you can know yourself as you truly are, which is infinite and unlimited?  Whilst those faulty fear programs (which are false reality - they are not real) are running you subconsciously, you will always be a reduced or limited version of yourself. You will not be the full expression of what you are in truth, which is God or unlimited consciousness. So it is our work and it is the true nature of shadow work to get as uncomfortable as we can.  To be safe with that discomfort rather than jumping into our addictions to help suppress those uncomfortable feelings, and to avoid meeting ourselves as God. Your fear is knocking on the door, saying, "Hey, did you notice that you forgot you're God? I have some good medicine here. Shall we go do the work?" And you think, "Oh quick, I must pick a fight with my boyfriend, or eat the cake, or volunteer for that committee that I never heard of before."  You will use your busyness and emotional chaos. You'll use your addictions and all of your human experience as a way to prevent yourself from becoming more glorious and a more full expression of what you are. That's because it's uncomfortable. That discomfort, as Joe Dispenza tells us, is a physiological death. The greatest discomfort we experience is at the end of belief, so when we're coming to the end of a limiting belief, that's where the discomfort will get really intense. That's where we have to become most vigilant about not shoving something in our mouth, or picking a fight, or distracting ourselves. That's why it's called shadow work. Because it's dark down there. You don't have all of the lights on, you have to trust something greater than your own force, your own human capacity to force things into being.  You have to surrender, and you're surrendering into the unknown. Human beings hate that! They hate that more than anything and they'll work their asses off to avoid going into that space. Yet that is where you will meet yourself as God.

How to train yourself to sit with discomfort

We do this by knowing we have tools and strategies we can engage at any time to actively make friends with that fear. If you've hung out with me for any amount of time, you know the tools I'm going to suggest.  EFT or tapping, the micro method, which is freely available. You can do the meditation version where I guide you through it, you can read the written version, you can get a sister in my Priestess Posse to take you through it. There are innumerable ways we can work with our fear. An important thing to watch for is when shadow work stops being useful.  When we are meeting our fear, going into our shadow, and embodying the dark goddess, that does NOT mean hanging out with our fear and looking for justification for why we are broken and then using that as evidence of why we can't evolve and move beyond it. To truly work with fear as a friendly ally you have to be unafraid of fear. You're not looking at that fear as a problem. You are recognising that fear as an illusion, which it is.  As a friendly ally and a messenger.  All you have to do is decode the message. Remember - your fear is sitting in your subconscious basement that can't be accessed in ordinary states of consciousness. You can't be running around in the craziness of your life and expect to truly engage and commune with your fear. This is deep work. Fear is deep soul work and as soon as it arises in my life, I'm like "Stop everybody, stop! Mama's got to go in and meet this fear because something has come up that is clearly going to get me to know myself as God. I'm gonna prioritise that above everything else." It's vital that you don't put distractions up. Don't plan to come back to it later or do it tonight when you're doing your pranayama. Recognise that every impulse of fear that rises in you is calling for your attention. Do you know what happens when you don't go meet that fear? It gets a little bit louder. If you ignore it when it gets a bit louder, it gets a little bit louder again and again and again until a tsunami of fear crashes into your life until some devastating or catastrophic event finally makes you stop and realise there's something you really should look into. Why did this car crash just happen? Why did that relationship just end? Why I'm suddenly 20 kilos more than I was six months ago? If you don't take the time to do the work as its arising in you, it will just get louder. There's no mad magic about this, this is just the way it works.

Fear is a friendly ally

Paradoxically, you might be ignoring your fears at the same time that you're paying $10,000 to go on retreat with someone. Or at the same time that you're booking a ticket to Peru to get your spiritual on. Or at the same time you're buying all the freaking crystals. It's not gonna work unless the intention of those things is to take you to meet yourself as God. Where do you meet yourself as God? You meet yourself as God in the darkness. Why do we meet ourselves as God in a shadow? Because we have this subconscious fear program that is unmet for generations. Unmet for all of this lifetime, because no one ever told you that meeting fear is the key to your freedom. Everyone has told you that putting a band-aid over your heavy, dark emotions and trying to pretend they don't exist is the way that you meet yourself as God.  That will not work. It is not possible. You can't create that reality of light and joy without meeting your fear first. We have a mantra in the Third Level which is, first you meet your fear, then you create. For example, if I am meditating and I feel something ugly in my heart, I wonder, "What is that?" What normally happens is my ego comes up with a really good story of how my relationship isn't as on fire as I want it to be, or my kids are really annoying. I'll come up with evidence. But what's really happened is that I've abandoned my meditation practice. My ego is now giving me an entire backstory as to why I feel crap. So maybe I get off the couch and have 14 coffees and some kind of cake to make myself feel better. Instead, sit back down. Don't go looking for the source or the cause of that fear. Just sit with the discomfort. Because the discomfort is saying, "Let me birth you into a deeper truth, a deeper part of yourself is ready to be awakened right now." By moving the subconscious fear out of you and just sitting with it, you will tune into that feeling state.  Simply ask, "Okay, what is deeper than this feeling?" And let that information come to you non-locally through that incredible interconnectedness.  The field that connects all of us contains all the information.  Let it tell you the story of what is truly happening - not what your ego wants you to believe. You go into that fear and recognise that the fear is that you are unlovable (or whatever yours might be). Okay, well that's shit, but thank God it's here. Because you really really want to be aware of how lovable you are in every moment of your life. Then you can use the micro method, or tapping, or whatever other tools you've got to raise your vibration. You change your consciousness. You encode a new story into your subconscious basement, and voila! You're now free of that fear. That could take three minutes when you get really good at this. The more you do this, the more quickly that fear is like plucking weeds from the garden. Then you return to your meditation and create the new reality and future out of the emptiness you've created. You've created space. You can't be cramming your new vision of your life on top of the shit that you haven't met because nothing good is going to come of that. That results in a superficial spirituality in where you try to avoid doing the work in order to pretend that everything is light and fluffy. Light and fluffy is a state of being you can inhabit, but deep and resonant is where I want to be. That deep anchoring into yourself is the work so that you may access those high dimensions, those high vibrational states.  Not out of a naivety, but out of a deep power of transformation. That is alchemy! So go meet your fear with a willingness and do the work to change the code, First, you meet your fear, then you create. Anytime you sit into your devotional practices and fear rises, high-five yourself because you've created space for that fear to get your attention. That is what you want. You don't want to wait until that fear has to crash you into another car, or break a limb, or end a relationship so that you will finally pay attention. This work is always the work of the self. Always. Meeting fear is always the work that you do for yourself, with yourself, by yourself.  You cannot be doing this with other people. You've got to take this work inside yourself and be unafraid to go into that place of you that has all of the information. So when fear shows up you start high-fiving, sit down, and say, "I'm sorry, I'm not available right now.  I'm gonna make time for this, for what's on the other side of this fear."

The anatomy of love

This is where we get into the anatomy of love.  We human beings ain't got a clue what love is, let me tell you. We think love is:

• someone agreeing with us
• someone condoning us
• someone approving of us
• someone appreciating us
• someone delaying their life and their happiness in order to follow us around
• ownership or control of another human being
• when another person agrees with everything we say
• when we have something in common with that other person
• who we've given birth to
• if I get something from you then I'm going to be willing to give you something in return
• conditional (I will love you as long as you keep behaving as I want you to, and if you stop behaving as I want you to, I'm gonna say that you don't love me anymore).

This is what the Course of Miracles calls the Special Relationship. It's idolatrous. We're actually putting a human between us and our infinite God nature, which is unconditional.

What is God-love?

God's love for us, which we are a part of and have simply forgotten, is a 100% neutral. It isn't about a rush of good hormones or giving up my life for you, having your babies for you, or putting all my happiness aside for you. Divine love or God-love is one hundred per cent emotionally neutral. I'm going to explain what that means. It is simply a power and that power is so vast and infinite and all-consuming, it is all that there is.  We ascribe a kind of human personality to it because we cannot wrap our heads around it. Our ego simply cannot understand what infinite love feels like. But it has nothing to do with us getting what we want and everything to do with us knowing what it is to surrender. To let go and understand completely that it is a self-generating state. It is not responding to external evidence or stimulus. That love state that we can experience as bliss - that's how we experience it bodily. But when we're thinking about it as a force or a power externally, it's neutral. That is simply because it doesn't have an agenda. It's not trying to manipulate or control us or teach us anything. It's not giving us lessons. It literally does not care what you do with your precious human life It does not care, but it will give you whatever you request. It will give you whatever you ask for and it will do that in a way that is going to serve your return to the truth that you are infinite, unlimited consciousness. Consciousness is simply a power. It isn't light and fluffy. It is simply a power. The reason why it feels so good when we start to go unconditional and truly merge with the God-mind is that it's the opposite of the ego. The ego is absolutely about restriction, control, and fear. It's trying to hold us tiny and small. When you move out of that state and begin to merge with God-love, it's bliss. Suddenly what was constricted is open, free, and expansive.  You move into this state of absolute freedom and that freedom has no control, no boundaries, no one telling you that if you don't look like this or you don't do that, you're not truly lovable. It's simply a return to what you truly are. To us, it feels like this absolute sense of bliss and joy. Divine love is never about rushes of hormones or feeling like you're getting your needs met because it's self-contained. Divine love is one hundred per cent self-contained. There is nothing outside of it that will take away from us or add to us. I hope the difference between what we assume love is and what love actually is, is becoming clear.  God-love is all and is absolute, perfect holiness. How can it need or want anything from you or be improved or reduced by anything? It can't. It's simply not possible. The joy and bliss that our physiology gives us is a return to oneness. The sense of the union with self, not with another. There is no one else you can have a union with that will elicit the same release you have when you join with self.  That marriage to yourself, that union with self is the bliss that comes when we remember there is nothing outside of us. Because we are all. That which is all contains all within it, and it is the same for us. The holographic image, the part that contains the whole, that idea of divine love can't really be understood intellectually. It has to be experienced. I'm sure most people here have had a moment, even if it's fleeting, where you have felt that sense of absolute union with self.  It feels like unlimitedness. When we talk about love, I really want you to stop thinking in terms of this is all there is. We're not talking about the love that exists in the dream. We're talking about the absolute, unconditional freewill love that God is the purveyor of, and exists within us because we are God. We are working back to that state, and going back into that state will inevitably release bliss through the body and joy into the physiology because it is like coming home. That recognition will trigger all of the good hormones which will bring you into that state. That's what we're all yearning for. Recognising that divine love has nothing to do with the man-made construct of love is the beginning of us breaking free. Just as understanding what fear truly is, and the anatomy of fear, is so different to understanding what the ego will try to tell you fear is. Fear is death to the ego. It knows that if you go and meet your fear, you will be relinquished from that fear. So the ego will tell you if you ignore that fear, then you'll be safe. That's where all the strategies, the emotional chaos, constantly seeing yourself as a victim, constantly staying in your naive child, constantly sabotaging your own life, constantly being the prostitute, come in. Sitting in your shadow archetypes is how you avoid being with the shadow, but the shadow archetypes can lead you into the darkness, into the subconscious, into that basement where you need to go in order to meet God. On the other side, you will find the gateway to the one mind. That is what shadow work is and it's designed to get you uncomfortable. Because those feelings of discomfort are the physiological death of the addiction to that fear. So be safe in that you are experiencing, as Joe Dispenza tells us, the end of belief, which will elicit the chemical death, the hormonal death, the epigenetic death - the death of all of those physiological addictions. That will be uncomfortable and that's okay. You're completely safe to do that. What you're not safe to do is to keep suppressing those feelings of discomfort. To try and band-aid over and pretend everything is light and fluffy, and that spirituality is all about feeling good and using your tools to prevent yourself from meeting your darkness. Go meet your darkness. Go meet your shadow. Because that is where you will find God, and that's where you'll find yourself as God.

A faulty foundation of spirituality

I think this may be one of the vital missing keys in much contemporary spirituality, which is why we have such a superficial relationship with our spirituality, and why spirituality is being accused of lots of things right now that I actually don't think are spirituality's problem. I think it's our fear of engaging, of taking that vow of deep commitment to our devotion rather than just a superficial engagement.  Because it makes us look good or cool or trendy or whatever. Nothing in your world will tell you that devotion is valuable. You have to inspire that inner fire and make space for that devotion because if you don't, you will never be able to do this work. You cannot do this work running around in a crazy reality. You have to go into those altered states of consciousness and change your brainwave state so that you can access the subconscious mind and get into the shadow and do the work. Just do the work I'm going to end it there.  I'm very excited about this conversation so if you have any questions, please leave them in the comments. I'll see if I can add anything to the conversation. Have a beautiful day! RJ xo