Our Limitations and Fears We Are Not Aware Of

(Taken and adapted from The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges ... by David Deida)

Pick an area of your life, perhaps your intimate relationship, your career, your relationship with your children, or your spiritual practice. For instance, you are currently doing something to earn a living.

Where do your fears stop you from making a larger contribution to mankind, from earning a higher income, or from earning money in a more creative and enjoyable way?

If you were absolutely fearless, would you be earning a living in exactly the same way as you are now? Your edge is where you stop short, or where you compromise your fullest gift, and, instead, cater to your fears.

Make your life an ongoing process of being who you are, at your deepest, most easeful levels of being. Everything other than this process is secondary. Your job, your children, your wife, your money, your artistic creations, your pleasures – they are all superficial an empty, if they are not floating in the deep sea of your conscious loving. How many hours today was your attention focused in the realm of changes – on events, people, thoughts, and experiences – and how often was your attention relaxed into its source? Where is your attention right now? Can you feel its source? Even for a moment, can you feel that which makes attention conscious and aware? Can you feel the deepest nature of attention? What happens when you simply, effortlessly, allow attention to subside into its source?

This source is never changing and always present. It is the constant, silent tone behind and pervading the music of life. Feel into this source as deeply as possible, and then re-approach your work, intimacy, family and creative efforts. When you make money, make money from this source. Find out what happens to the details of your life when you live more consistently from this source. Use aids to support your relaxation into, and creation from, this source. Read books that remind you of who you are, in truth. Spend time with people who inspire and reflect the source to you. Meditate, contemplate, or pray daily so that you steep yourself in the source.

However, if you listen to what life brings up to you (your woman), taking everything (she says) into account and making your own best decision, then you are acting in accordance with your core. You are saying, in effect, "My deepest wisdom is leading me to this decision. If I am wrong, I will learn from it, and my wisdom will have deepened. I'm willing to be wrong, and grow from it. I trust this process of acting from my deepest wisdom."

This attitude of self-trust engenders others' trust in you. You may be wrong, but you are willing to find out, and thus grow from the experience. You are open to listening to others, but in the end, you will take the responsibility for making your own decision. There is nobody else to blame.

However, if you give up your real decision to follow your woman's, then you will blame her for being wrong if she is wrong, and you will feel disempowered if she is right, having denied yourself the opportunity to act from your core and grow from your mistakes...bla bla bla

Your mission is your priority. Unless you know your mission and have aligned your life to it, your core will feel empty. Your presence in the world will be weakened, as will your presence with your intimate partner.

How to grow all the time without exhausting yourself in the process of it?

In any given moment, a man's growth is optimized if he leans just beyond his edge, his capacity, his fear. He should not be too lazy, happily stagnating in the zone of security and comfort. Nor should he push far beyond his edge, stressing himself unnecessarily, unable to metabolize his experience. He should lean just slightly beyond the edge of fear and discomfort. Constantly. In everything he does.

Once you are honest with yourself about your real edge, it is best to lean just beyond it. Very few men have the guts for this practice. Most men either settle for the easy path or self-aggrandize themselves by taking the extreme hard path. Your insecurity may cause you to doubt yourself, and so you take the easy way, not even approaching your real edge or your real gift. Alternatively, your insecurity may lead you to push, push, push, seeking to become victorious over your own sense of lack.

Fear needs to become your friend, so that you are no longer uncomfortable with it. Rather, primary fear shows you that you are at your edge. Staying with the fear, staying at your edge, allows real transformation to occur. Neither lazy nor aggressive, playing your edge allows you to perceive the moment with the least amount of distortion. You are willing to be with what is, rather than trying to escape it by pulling back from it, or trying to escape it by pushing beyond it into some future goal.

Fear of fear may lead you to hang back, living a lesser life than you are capable. Fear of fear may lead you to push ahead, living a false life, off center, tense and missing the moment. But the capacity to feel this moment, including your fear, without trying to escape it, creates a state of alive and humble spontaneity. You are ready for the unknown as it unfolds, since you are not pulled back or pushed forward from the horizon of the moment. You are hanging right over the edge.

By leaning just beyond your fear, you challenge your limits compassionately, without trying to escape the feeling of fear itself. You step beyond the solid ground of security with an open heart. You stand in the space of unknowingness, raw and awake. Here, the gravity of deep being will attend you to the only place where fear is obsolete: the eternal free fall of home. Where you always are.

Own your fear, and lean just beyond it. In every aspect of your life. Starting now.