“So what’re ya gonna choose, fear or love?” The ultimate rhetorical question, posed by smugly smiling gurus of all ilks down thru history. There is no possible answer; the two forces are not really oppositional. There’s no way of “choosing” because fear is felt in a millisecond. It’s already there, and it’s quicker than you are.

Fear is embedded in us from the start, and when the sleeping giant of fear gets stirred by an inner or outer event, the real choice around what to do with it is love it (by acknowledging, accepting and expressing how it really feels) or fear it (denying it–pushing it away by mentally lifting out of it with affirmations or a strong intent to “overcome it”).

Fear is not the problem; it is simply another emotion to be felt, like grief or anger. Fear of fear is the problem. Fear of fear is rooted in judgment and hatred for how it feels to be afraid. This isn’t wrong; it’s actually quite important to notice what is in the way of feeling and expressing. If you hate your fear, that’s the starting place. Hate it, but let the hatred blow up big and in sound. Judge it, rage at it, spew out loud how much you hate it. Stomp around, imgine putting your fear in chair and whap the life out of it with pillows or something. Eventually, releasing those judgments of fear is going to be important — more about this in the article entitled “Judgment Release”.

The way to truly transform “crunchy” emotions like fear, rage, or hurt is to let the emotions vibrate by allowing the sound to come up from the place in our bodies where we feel the emotion, into our throats and out our mouths as sounds; weird sounds, loud sounds, tears. This is the only way to organically transform an emotion at its root. We have all tried cutting emotions off as a way to “get rid of them”, separating ourselves from the feelings in various ways, but that kind of denial catches up with us sooner or later.

I propose the following definition of fear: a deep, non-mental mistrust that something which is perceived to have power over us might hurt us in some way. Or, an indefinable mistrust of ourselves or another. Mistrust is the keyword. Fear, or any emotion that we have labelled negative can be born into love thru accepting its presence and allowing its expression, and new understandings will fill us when we are done expressing, about why we felt the way we did. Fear or mistrust, once within love, becomes trust.

A big part of our problem with emotional expression is, we’ve been taught from birth to deny the fullness of our emotional expression, and here we approach the roots of denial. Emotions if completely accepted for what they are, express themselves in sound. A baby in its first year of life is a ball of sound. Slowly but surely, inner and outer forces conspire to contain the level, breadth, and freedom of expression until expression in many adults happens rarely if ever. We feel it sometimes rise up from the inner depths still, but we routinely push down this rising inclination to make sound…which then squeezes itself out of us nonetheless, once we’ve magnetized a particular life experience big enough to trigger it (funny how that works, eh?). Without self-acceptance, that expression looks as twisted and feels as yucky to ourselves and others as we’ve judged it to be.

“So how will you approach your fear, with fear or with love?”