Lesson 160: “I am at home.  Fear is the stranger here.”

The Course teaches us to be comfortable in our own skin.

The ego is used to being in conflict within.  When we are not aligned we end up with attack energy within us; and then we are never comfortable because our insides are all up in arms.  The ego makes hostility common place as it is always trying to cause an uproar.  This happens when our minds are not clear and we are engaged in thinking that creates our sense of being out of balance.

Therefore, the first thing we must do is deny any feelings of attack that we notice in our minds.

We simply deny their existence so we experience them as unreal.  We can simply release  them with no struggle because we make them inconsequential. 

Denial in this case is totally positive because we are simply making clear decision to deny their reality so they have no effect on us.

That is why denial is so imperative.  We want to be good at being perfectly clear that we have made the firm decision to allow no negative impact of the attack thought energy.

We need to watch attack thoughts and catch them when we find them amidst our thinking.  We let them go because we learn to simply put in our minds thinking only that is with love.  We include any thought that has loving qualifies.  Some thoughts may not even look totally loving on the surface but we learn in the Course to appreciate that love can and does show up in all appearances.

We are learning to allow our fear to be nothing but a stranger.

The Course is encouraging us here to deny fear’s power to impact our minds.

We want to simply allow fear to be not bothersome at all because it is totally foreign to us. 

We practice persistently.

We want to feel fear when it comes. 

Allow ourselves to give fear to God’s altar if we are struck with crippling fear and don’t know what to do with it.  Give it to God.  Take some quiet within and space to sit and feel the fear.  We want to feel it because it is poignant and feels tangible.

Give it space to be expressed and then it will become less fierce when we give it this time and space. 

Our fear may have a legitimate voice and it may have plenty to tell us.  This is why we want to make a practice of getting to know ourselves emotionally.  Fear, for example, may have a real legitimate purpose for coming.

The only way we can get to know how we should meet our fear is spending time with it.

We may be meant to take some quiet time to sit and experience the feeling until it runs its course. 

Or we are meant to deny it instantly and not allow the fear to have further voice.

The denial may be important to keep us balanced in the moment if we are not sure how else to manage the fear.  We want to be sure to use the idea of denial when we are guided to use this method for clearing our minds and hearts of any memory of the fear.  Sometimes we want to get right to the denial and we may not need to sit and feel the feeling first.  They both work to resolve fear.  What we must do is learn over time how to be appropriate and helpful with our own needs.

We can learn through practice, and trial and error, what is the best way to approach something like a potent fear for example.

We all will discover a huge amount of learning as we go because our emotional needs are unique.  Only we can do our own emotional work to find our own way.  We must be present with our own process and give it space to be what it is.

We must develop a relationship with the process of resolving our feelings in the best way that we can with our current emotional tools and God.