Lesson 175: Review: “God is but Love, and therefore so am I.”  “I give the miracles I have received.”  “I am at home.  Fear is  the stranger here.”

We want our minds to be a place where we want to be. 

This means the quality of our lives is at stake and so it is worth the effort of carefully and clearly managing what goes into our thinking. 

Fear is always filtering into our thinking, it is almost like breathing sometimes, it can be quite pervasive- infiltrating energetically what we think and feel. 

We want to pay attention to this feeling because it is the opposite of love, and we want love.

The Course says that fear and love are the only two emotions, and so when we have a thought or feeling other than love, then, necessarily, it is fear whether we recognize it for what it is. 

It can certainly appear to be anger or grief or guilt.  We just need to make sure we listen to all the feelings that aren’t love so that we can promptly give them an appropriate place in our minds.

Fear is always coming and going within our awareness.

Fear can come on quite strong or seem like it is just a sliver of how we feel but the important thing is sit and give the fear- in whatever form it takes- a way out of our minds. 

We have some options the Course explains.

We can see the fear as unreal and quickly discard it because we remember we have no desire for it. 

We just need to be willing to let it go.  Sometimes we get attached to it but this is ok if it happens.

Just keep coming back to acknowledging our willingness to give fear up with God’s support. 

We can see it as unreal so that it does not affect us negatively or at least as least negatively as we can feel.  We just want our own peace of mind and tranquility so just giving fear to God through our awareness that it is not real allows us to release it as promptly as we can.

We can do that.

Or we can give ourselves the process of feeling the feeling and then letting it go. 

We may start trying to see the fear as unreal and let it go right away, but if we find we are lingering with the feeling, and it feels like there is something left undone, then, we need to make sure we further give the feeling whatever say it needs in our minds and experience. 

We want to make sure we give ourselves space and time to be in the experience of this so that we can do it thoroughly. 

When we do, then we can just sit and allow the feeling to go through us.

We can even ask the Holy Spirit, “What does fear feel like?” 

Asking a question to God always puts our energy in alignment with God because we are open to receiving His guidance. 

We can pray while we allow ourselves to feel the feeling physically and emotionally however it works.  Just get acquainted with the feeling.

It seems that sometimes when we have feelings like fear- that is clearly not love- it is because we have yet to get acquainted with the feeling. 

We want to sit with it and listen to what it has to say and respect this even if we don’t want to keep it inside of us. 

This simple process allows us to be authentic with ourselves and how we feel. 

This is one of the most important and helpful things we can do when we want to release that fear we are yet harboring.

It is worth doing.