STRIVE TO BE MOTIVATED BY LOVE NOT FEAR

Extract from Your Holographic Soul

© Ian Lawton 2010

Every single emotion originates in either love or fear. These are the two fundamental, emotional reactions that dominate everything we think, say and do. And it hardly needs emphasizing that we should all strive to bring love, not fear, into every aspect of our lives. This is one area where there’s no disagreement, irrespective of where you place yourself on the experience-illusion line.*

But is this easier said than done? What about when someone annoys or insults us for example?

Let’s say a fellow motorist gets annoyed at our driving, with little reason. They gesture rudely, their face contorted with rage. Do we react instantaneously with more of the same? Or do we take a deep breath, calm ourselves and remember: ‘That’s their dream. I don’t need to take this personally.’

Let’s not forget that we don’t know the underlying dynamics of the situation either. Maybe their partner has just left them after twenty years of marriage. Imagine how you might feel in that situation.

Their rage is really nothing to do with us at all, so there’s no need to react with equal venom. That would be the fear-based reaction, expressed as anger. Instead, why not imagine that their partner has just left them, and send them caring and compassionate thoughts? It may or may not do them much good, but it’ll certainly be better for us.

In fact if any situation starts to provoke a fear-based reaction in us, whether it’s anger, hatred, jealousy or whatever, we can ask ourselves this simple question: ‘How can I look at this differently so I feel love instead?’ And if we don’t know the other person involved, we can make something up to explain their behavior, like they just lost their job or their partner just left them, or whatever we like. After a while we can even have fun with this by making up humorous things.

People talking about focusing on the positives rather than the negatives in life, but how do we do that when so many bad things are happening?

Well, for a start we might make a deliberate effort to notice the teenager helping the old lady across the road; or the dog leading his blind owner; or the beauty of the snowflake on the window pane.

This doesn’t mean blissfully ignoring the bad things in the world. But we shouldn’t let them overwhelm us, and we should perhaps give them our attention only when we aim to do something to change them – by sending out love to those in distress for example. Otherwise we’re just worrying and putting out negative thoughts to no constructive effect.

Another great approach is to remember to be grateful for what we do have, rather than bemoaning the lack of what we don’t. So when we wake up we might give thanks that we have a warm bed, a roof over our head, hot water, food in the cupboards and so on.

More than this we can work at being grateful for everything that happens, and look to find the positive aspect of any and every situation. For example that traffic jam might have saved us from a disastrous crash. Losing our job could be the spur to make us start doing something we love for a living, or it might allow us to meet our soul mate in the job centre. If we train ourselves to trust in the flow of the universe, we’ll start to see the potential for growth in everything.

Bringing love not fear to everything we think, say and do in these ways is incredibly good for us. Every time we do it we feel so much better about ourselves and about our life.

And we’ll be having a much wider impact too. Remember that stranger who smiled at you the other morning, instead of just walking on by engrossed in their own thoughts? How did that make you feel? When we bring love to someone else we have an impact on them too, and so on and so forth, like ripples in a pond.

But what if someone or something consistently gets to us? Can’t we at least let our feelings out in private?

We all need to let off steam sometimes, whether just by ourselves, or to a close friend who knows this is merely a temporary release and not our normal, loving self.

But we should be wary here too. If a certain person or event repeatedly produces a fear-based reaction in us, it’s a likely sign that we need to analyze what’s really going on underneath. No matter how much we might want to blame someone else for our anger or frustration – our partner, for example – our reaction almost certainly points to there being something that we need to work through ourselves.

Remember too that we might think we’ve reached a point of total balance, but pride comes before a fall. It’s pretty likely that sooner or later something or someone will come along that pushes another emotional button, or even one we thought we’d dealt with already. And so we go to work again. This is healthy, and all part of the growth process.

It’s also worth remembering that every single thought has an impact, not just on the reality we create for ourselves, but also for humanity as a whole. All fear-based thoughts mount up on one side of the scales, all love-based ones on the other. And guess which side’s been winning for a long while? It’s time for a global shift in consciousness away from fear and towards love.

* Although the underlying thought process might be somewhat different. For example those who are more illusion oriented might bring love into every situation more due to their appreciation of the unity of everything than for reasons of personal growth.