To Love or Fear is Your Choice!

What if you could have the reality of your choice? Would that experience be one that delighted you or one that disgusted you? Of course, we all want a pleasing reality, something beautiful to feel passionate about! If you could have your choice of experiences and those decisions effected everyone and everything in the world, you’d be sure to use your best creative power! Right? We choose our thoughts and what we say and do each moment. Everyone does. If you don’t recognize that these micro-choices matter the realities you co-create may not align with your foremost desires.

Imagine now that a multitude of other people are simultaneously choosing similar thoughts and having matching dialogues, perhaps those stemming from shared fears. Individually and collectively, you pick compatible experiences. There’s much foreshadowing I want no part of.

Unrealistic and Negative Expectations Can Overshadow What’s Good

The importance of an event or holiday depends on the meaning we assign to it. External influences shape our expectations, particularly on ‘special days’. This is true even if Macy’s marketing executives inflate the day’s significance. A commercial I heard today suggested people have Valentine’s Day Lists. Advertising ploys steer some lonely souls away from love and toward thoughts of its absence. This state of mind leads to self-inflicted heartache.

Your Choice at Valentine’s Day: Love or Demands For Chocolate, Roses and Wine

The commercialization of love is not surprising. After reducing Jesus to Black Friday frenzies to getting or not the newest Apple product, it makes sense that Cupid comes with a list of purchase criteria.

To honor Saint Valentine, the patron saint of love, romance, beekeepers, AND epilepsy, you must buy your loved one chocolate, flowers, and maybe jewelry. The more superfluous the transaction, the more you love one another. This is how we, as capitalists, celebrate the day of this saint’s execution. Does that make sense? While it’s human to wallow in sadness from unmet expectations, a shift in one’s consciousness will uncover another reality. I hope you remember your choice.

The Meaning I Assign to Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day is the only time I honor a heart-shaped pan that lives in the back of my pantry closet. Imagine its anticipation for the yearly opportunity to perform its most special purpose of producing an apple cinnamon pound cake in the shape of a heart. Even though I scoff at holidays and events that feel like money-making shams, I still enjoy the opportunity to make things and bake. I love the pan! My belly loves the cake, and so do the people I love who share it with me. It’s that simple. You get to decide. It’s your choice what your day or life can look like. Choose with love.

You may yearn for an outward expression of love in a form grander than a cake. That’s fine. You get to choose what you want to experience. If you get what you think you want and feel unsatisfied, perhaps the urge is not about claiming any one reality. To know we are complete frees us from searching outside ourselves for fulfillment. It keeps the dial turned toward love regardless of outcomes.

When the Dial Turns

Throughout our lives, we create stories about all kinds of things, from holidays to relationships, personal situations, and world events. We may be very clear about how we want things to be, but even more clear about how we don’t want them to be. When ‘What is’ doesn’t look as expected or when faced with an unwanted reality, our perceptual lens may become distorted. Our history can place a negatively expectant outcome on a future still in the making. We assign meaning to parts of our experiences that turn the dial toward fear.

• Work project creates conflict between co-workers = I picked the wrong profession
• A friend doesn’t respond to your texts = No one is ever there for me!
• Your water heater needs to be replaced = Home ownership is too expensive
• Current Events = The Handmaid’s Tale

Every choice and experience serves a purpose – if we let them. It makes sense to befriend them, not fight them. We’ve all had a time when some repetitive thought felt painful, revisiting it with a compulsion to serve some desensitizing end. To rehash an injustice is like grabbing burning embers to hurl at an invisible enemy. The practice is akin to the broken-hearted love songs that play on repeat. The charge may become less over time, extinguish completely, or remain raw because each replay tears the bandaid from the wound that never had the care to heal.

Beware of Groupthink! Your Choice May Drive Disharmony and Division

How do groups steer narratives toward fear while offering the illusion of progress and reform?

• Strategic use of power words in writing and reporting sparks fear, spurring engagement.
• Group slogans champion members’ anger, offering a justification for the bravado they view as a show of strength against their adversaries.
• Narratives galvanize their base, lulling them with songs that feed their egos. This tune helps members feel superior to those they secretly believe are a threat.

Replays of the most disappointing ending to your favorite story are cast forward on a chapter that has yet to be written. It needn’t be this way. Change only happens when you’re aware of your choice. Look beyond the illusion that gets you to believe that ‘what is’ is so bad that it squashes any crumbs of hope. That’s where you will reclaim your power.

Enlightenment is Nothing More Than The Complete Absence of Resistance to What Is. End of Story.

Adyashanti

Without resistance to what is, you’re free to make other choices. When you continue to fight or force your will, you limit yourself to that experience. With acceptance, the undesired experiences needn’t occur. Unencumbered, you may give your juicy creative energy to what you most desire. It’s the fastest line to achieve a better quality result. In the absence of resistance, you realize what you most wanted was already there, masked by your attention to what you feared or didn’t want, hidden from view.

It’s Your Choice to Turn the Dial

When extremes derail your inner peace, let the fear that’s stirred steer you toward its opposite. This shift will clarify your positive image of what can be. Allow other realities to exist, period. Without your attention, you can align with infinite possibilities compatible with elevated feeling states. Be clear that when you’re bored with the ‘what is’ that you hate, it will cease to have power over you.

How to do it!

Start believing in practical change. Your choice to create consciously begins by withdrawing your attention from what makes you feel awful. Read more: Conscious Creation From What’s Foul. Choose the better reality.

1. If you can’t lift it, shift it. It may feel like there’s a shortage of good news networks. Align with those who wear a loving lens.
2. Choose to stay solid and grounded, especially when you’re activated.
3. Offer support that helps people feel seen. Let your presence comfort, but don’t feed the fears.
4. Join hands with those with a positive vision, not with those in a perpetual fight.
5. Remember the power of your being.
6. Talk about the world you want, not the one you don’t.

It’s Your Choice to Withdraw From Fear

Fifteen years ago, I attended a 10-day silent mediation. The conditions were very austere. Meditation began at 4:30 am. You ate breakfast, then meditated until lunch, which was dinner because only ginger tea and a piece of fruit were available after that at 5:00 pm. The practice required noble silence, meaning besides not speaking, you abstain from reading, writing, and eye contact. The first three days are rough. People are crying; a few are even trying to escape! You meditate pretty much from sun up to sun down. It’s uncomfortable for everyone and unbearable for some.

We packed into a large meditation hall for hour-long ‘sits’ three times daily to receive instruction. These were the only opportunities to speak to a teacher quietly at the front of the hall. It offered a rare respite from introspection. By day three, I was pissed off! I heard teachers deny simple requests from students for accommodations. Their reply: “Everyone is suffering.” My inner narrative was they were sadistic, cruel, and conceited! I was determined to sit until my whole body went numb, if necessary, to make sure they didn’t see me suffer.

We Don’t See Things as They Are, We See Them as We Are.

Anaïs Nin. 

A lot was happening within my body during that time. I’d had a lifetime of swallowing anger, and it was rising. At several points, I felt like I was burning. On the fourth day, we received instructions to scan our entire bodies, instead of just the area beneath our noses, where we had concentrated for three days. The shift caused a sudden, forceful change. Sensations were rising and falling and my will was breaking. Old stories floated in and out of my consciousness. By day seven, my body felt abuzz. I didn’t know where I ended and others began, but I loved everyone.

It’s not all rainbows and butterflies

Days 8 to 10 of the meditation vacillated between bliss and dread. So many sensations were coming up from within that I observed and allowed. On the last day of the meditation, you’re free to speak again and that’s weird! For 10 days, I knew people only by their shoes, and now I saw their faces. This reintegration day shows you your choice. The veil lifts, and you can see everyone’s shit. You hear how their stories create their realities and see where they are blind to it. Most people are high-vibing, and some shine brightly! A Monty Python voice echoed in my mind, “I’m not quite done yet!”

I wanted to run home. Staring out of the large sliding glass doors wondering where the exit was, I heard the soft voice of the sadistic teacher who turned beautiful say, “You’re looking for a way out?!” At that moment, I was 5 maybe 6 years old, desiring escape but afraid to go.

Any Day Can Be Valentine’s Day

Learning to catch yourself in an old story to make a shift requires practice, patience, and self-compassion. Often, we are unaware that an emotional story under the surface contaminates the present. In time, presence and awareness replace the old way of being. The choice between a love versus fear lens becomes clearer.

Follow what feels good: your excitement instead of an anticipated disappointment. Attend to what’s pleasing each moment, and your consciousness will elevate. This higher consciousness increasingly adjusts your perception.

Rest your thoughts on how you experience heartfelt connections. Expand your heart space by acknowledging what you have. Begin with yourself, honor, and love yourself, all parts of you. Broaden your scope to include family, friends, neighbors, familiar strangers, online connections, animals, ancestors, and more. Entertain the boundless ways your connections with others add love and value to life. Sit fully in the energy of appreciation for all blessings extended and received. Remember these feeling states so you may conjure them when the dial reads fear.

My partner and I do not follow the expectations for Valentine’s Day. I prefer to surprise him with random things throughout the year. Like, here’s a spatula, ice pack, or ceramic frog you didn’t know you needed. He’ll often surprise me with a pint of ice cream. We also maintain a day-to-day attitude of appreciation. It feels honest and sustaining. The lens here helps me choose love and acknowledgment in other places, too.

Let self-love quiet old stories that suggest you can’t have what you want. Recognize that limiting beliefs, known and unknown, drive your perception and attention, aligning you with matching experiences. Fear is a lie. This lie is sometimes used as a tactic to dysregulate. No matter how real your fears appear, if you prioritize mastering your choice, you’ll come into alignment with better.

The love lens reveals the countless ways people benefit from your support. It shows us with exhilarating awe our profound connection to all beings and with something greater than oneself. Individually and collectively, choosing love over fear makes the best of this earth experience. Waste not another moment, afraid to love.

Please visit my Coaching Services or Metaphysical Services (Spiritual Tools 101) pages to learn about services that will increase your awareness of your choices.

Are you interested in supportive services to help create an environment that supports intentional living? Please visit me here: Estelle Bonaceto. The more your perceptions optimize, the easier it is to make environmental upgrades, and vice versa!