Recently, I’ve started to wonder how my experience of life would change if I embraced aging as an invitation to radical openness. I’m not talking about simply becoming more open-minded, curious, and vulnerable, though I am fully committed to those practices.
When I say radical, I mean it. I’m compelled by the idea of a heart so open that it’s actively engaged in unlearning fear itself.
There are so many reasons we may tend toward the opposite, toward constriction, as we age.
Our mortality comes into sharper focus. Misgivings about our financial and physical security hover in the back of our minds as we face the possibility that one day, we may not be capable of holding the reins of our own lives anymore.
But of course, it’s the passing of time, the implied loss of opportunity, that we fear most of all. Less time to experience this wild ride of being human. Less time to figure it all out. Less time to learn how to love more, and better.
So we brace, we protect, we bargain. We reactively do whatever is in our power to extend our lives and the quality of our time here.
I’m certainly not immune to these fears, though I am intentional about the relationship I have with them.
My journey thus far has been about opening just wide enough to let fear in – to accept it, to walk hand in hand with it. I’ve sought to make room for it right along with beauty, joy, gratitude, and awe.
The path unfolding before me these days, however, points to an openness that transcends labels of good and bad, desirable and undesirable. The whispered desire of my heart is to know the whole as indivisible Love. To open wide enough to take in everything so that there is no longer something ‘other’ to guard against. I ache for it – an intimacy with all reality.
For that, I need to move beyond simply allowing fear to come along for the ride. I need to dissolve it. To embody the knowing that whatever comes my way is OK. That fear was never truly needed here.
This seems like an impossibly tall order, and I wonder if I will ever be up to the task. But then I remember that unlearning fear isn’t without precedent.
Consider your own life. What fears have you unlearned?
Maybe it was the fear of asking for help. Or your fear of the pain of childbirth. Perhaps it was the fear of speaking an authentic truth to a parent, despite knowing it wouldn’t be well-received.
Whatever it was, we all have the very real, very human capacity to unlearn the story of threat. Light is already pouring in through cracks in fear’s facade.
For my part, I can’t yet see clearly through the cracks, but I’ve begun to notice that every time I question fear as a ‘Truth Teller,’ more of fear’s pretense falls away. More light finds its way into my life through the gaps.
Every time I lean into Trust, every time I lean into the wild notion that it will all really be OK, something rearranges itself in me. The gaps are widening to become a window onto something more beautiful than I could have imagined.
Every time I say ‘Yes’ to fear, every time I meet it with love and genuine gratitude, the facade crumbles further. I sense the outline of a doorway, a threshold emerging upon an ecstatic way of being, one that is radiantly in love with life and everyone in it.
Maybe the work of our later years isn’t to shore up the walls, to brace for the inevitable, but to let them fall, and see how much light has been waiting for us all along. Maybe radical openness is the steady dismantling of every brick that fear has ever laid so that nothing stands in the way of Love – until the boundary between our own light and the world’s brilliance disappears, making it impossible to tell which is which.
-Jennifer
Jennifer Wade is a classical violinist turned Identity & Worthiness Coach based outside of Washington, D.C. She is a proud MEA alum, having attended the Owning Wisdom workshop this past summer in Santa Fe, and is eagerly looking forward to her next MEA experience.