Fear and Dragons and Self-Love

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke

To look at fear (and anything that really challenges us) closely can also be a way to look at our capacity for self-love.  We are there, frozen and embedded in all our old stories.  It seems like no matter where we turn we look again and again in the mirror that reflects back to us self-doubt, confusion, frustration, disappointment, and on and on and on.  How is it then that we are able to see these dragons as an opportunity for beauty and courage, to embrace our truth and our self-love?  It is very challenging indeed.  On one hand this can seem very simple.  In mindfulness meditation practice, one has to just sit with it, with no expectations, in gentle observation of our experience.  Sit with the discomfort, settle into the breath, watch our thoughts without buying into them.  This is a very powerful practice that takes a lifetime to cultivate.  I think that often when people don't get instant relief from this, they get discouraged, and allow themselves to get taken by whatever is gripping them over and over and over again.

My experience with this has been to keep coming back, to keep coming back to myself.  Whatever the discouragement, whatever the challenge, keep coming back.  There is a wisdom, a foundation of truth and Self, that is the clarity beneath all the static.  It is there in the silence and the stillness.  It is there as a sensation in our viscera (our organs, or our gut).  And when we can sit with this seat of our power, we can once again be aligned with our truth.  Find moments, no matter how fleeting, where this power comes alive in you.  In the beginning they can seem so elusive it makes one wonder if you ever felt it at all.  You did.  They are there.  Get to know those moments, cultivate them like you would a garden, nurture them like you would a small child.  They are there, within all of us, this birth-right of expansiveness and freedom, absent of all the cultural conditioning and the narratives that keep us trapped.  Breathe deeply and know that you are coming home to yourself, and you are worthy.