What do you consider your greatest burden?  What keeps you from feeling free to enjoy life?

Some people worry, some stress.  Some people have experienced trauma that never leaves their minds.  Some people don’t want to be where they are right now, while others don’t like who they are.  

Since I was a little girl the most dominant thought pattern disrupting my natural ease has been fear.  While a fear of death outweighs other fears, it doesn’t really matter what I’m afraid of.  The content of each fearful inkling doesn’t matter because after all of these years listening to a thought pattern fueled by fear I have found that anything can be used to feed its momentum. This is also why fear is my greatest teacher.

Whatever your most intrusive burden may be, it provides you with two paths.  It has the power to drive you deeper into unconsciousness and pain, or drive you out into light and understanding.  Fear is such an easily accessible fuel for my thoughts that I can either focus on the energetic train of one thought after another spurred by the initial feeling of fear, or I can use the fear to force me into becoming completely present.

The less focused I am on the reality of my immediate experience, the easier it is for old thought patterns to gain new life.  Now when a fearful thought enters my mind, no matter how benign it may seem at first, I use it to force me into focusing on my surroundings.  I visually examine whatever my gaze falls upon and make it the center of my attention.  I listen closely to the sounds around me.  Fearful thoughts still come, but they are balanced and increasingly overpowered by the intensity of presence which they trigger.

What thoughts cause you to suffer?  Even if those thoughts are justified and grounded in reality, if they cause suffering they can become your presence trigger, they can wake you up.  While joy, peace, and love are equally effective teachers of being, if you work with what you’ve got you can transform any substance into pure gold.