Fear is the Poison. Faith is the Antidote.

Fear is the Poison. Faith is the Antidote.

Let me explain. First, here’s what I don’t mean. This is not a pitch for any particular religion, or any religion at all. Your religion or lack of one, how you organize your spiritual life, is your business. And any religion, path, group, practice, perspective, set of ideas, or philosophy is at best only succeeding in giving organized form and approximate explanation for an experience of what already exists. The same can be said for the physical sciences.

Don’t get hung up on the word “faith”. I’m not slyly evangelizing you. I’m not trying to get you to adopt any belief. I am wanting to empower you to gain command over your inner world and subsequently to have more command of your life. Faith- like compassion, like forgiveness, like spirit, like truth, like mercy, like devotion- does not belong to any group. Religions have declared ownership of what they do not possess. That is because all of what those words represent are actual universal forces that exist beyond any concepts or belief system. The universal forces are real, in that they exist beyond ideas and concepts; beyond the mind of humans aching desperately for explanations of what can seem amorphous, untamable, and therefore scary. They are eternal, or at least eternal as far as any human can conceive. The religions and philosophies that seek to encapsulate reality, to give understandable-to-the mind form where none exists, are not real. They come and go, dispute with each other over imaginary differences, demand loyalty to a set of concepts created by humans for human comfort and/or control.  At best, they can be useful in providing a disciplining construct, a path of internal and worldly work that can facilitate spiritual and moral advancement.  But they’re not real. No one owns the universe. No one owns the forces that underlie what we narrowly call reality. No one owns your heart or your knowledge of truth or your free will to choose what you believe based on sequentially revealed inner information. I am trying expand your choices, not narrow them.

My fundamental point is that those forces that have been given those names- faith, compassion, forgiveness, mercy, justice, beauty, humility, devotion, truth- that religions, spiritual paths, and philosophies have sought to absorb and own, those qualities that have been ascribed to gurus and teachers and healers and shamans and priestesses and gods and goddesses, are all in you.  Really. Not metaphorically, literally. The great and not-so-great ones can reflect those qualities to us. The presence of true teachers in our lives is a great blessing.  But they are actually mirrors for us. In this fraught moment on our planet, we have the opportunity to reclaim, retake, those divine, universal, powerful qualities. The secret is, they were never gone. They have been waiting quietly inside your heart for you to turn your gaze inward, recognize their vibrations in you, apply your amazing power of choice and your immense higher will to their uncovering, and learn how to  make them counselors in your project of living a full life on earth.

What I want to do is show you exactly where some of those qualities reside in your energy bodies. Most particularly in this moment on earth, when we are surrounded by and inundated by so much fear, I want to show you where faith lives in you. Because the living vibration of faith in your body is the antidote to the vibration of fear.

This is a time on our planet when the skill of intuitively navigating the looming rocks of fear and opinion, and the rapidly shifting winds of life on earth, can be especially useful. What you need is a boat that has built in navigational equipment that can sense the way through the rocks. If you agree with that statement, you’ll want to read on.

I want to introduce you to a place that exists in you, where the antidote to fear lives and has always lived. Your opportunity in the next few pages is to get to know that place and what lives there, make friends with it, and begin to develop a partnership with it. To do so will require attention and practice. And it will require you to, perhaps, change your ideas of spirituality. True spirituality is really quite simple. The complications around it, the explanations and philosophies that so many brilliant people have expounded for us over thousands of years, are all coming from and pointing back to the simple inner vibrational reality that exists simultaneously at the heart of the universe, meaning underlying all the layers of vibration that make up reality, and also within the heart of each creation of that universal heart, that being in this case you and me.  That underlying vibration has always existed, does now as I am writing and you are reading this, and it always will, no matter what happens to us or our world.  Guiding our way to the authentic, non-mental, non-metaphorical, felt experience of living, eternal spiritual vibrations is what all useful teachings are for, or should be.

Your Two Minute Energy Anatomy and Physiology Lesson.

So although the felt vibration I’m attempting to describe exists in every plant, creature, planet, and star, for the present purpose of empowering you to become the master of your fear rather than its bitch, what exists, and the place I want to guide you to, is inside your own little universe. What you are inhabiting, your temporary home away from your spiritual, eternal home, is what I call your Human Energy Vehicle (HEV). I don’t call it only your body, because in fact is your vehicle is way more than just your physical body.  It includes what some call the aura or the etheric double. Your HEV is a dynamic, constantly moving sea of energy- thoughts, emotions, spiritual, chemical, energetic forces (all of which are also just nuances of energy)- all contained in a defined space of harmonized activity. Within an expanding and contracting series of interlocking and interacting energetic layers, that I call the bodies of your HEV, are centers of condensed energy that have been named chakras by the ancient Indian seers. These non-physical, pulsating centers that enliven the layers of your HEV are not fantasy, imaginary, or some new age cartoon. Just because we have narrowed our collective vision through the imposition of the blinders of modern materialism, does not mean that what is outside our prejudiced view doesn’t exist. As one of my teachers told me, “It’s a good thing that reality doesn’t depend on your opinion.”

You can learn, like I did, to perceive your HEV and that of other people. It takes training, but it’s actually easier than it sounds. Along with the qualities and energies I’m describing here, you have the faculties that can perceive them ready to be activated or activated more than they are now.

Every feeling, quality, opinion, belief, potential, and challenge that you possess, manifest, repress, and face in this life has its assigned and knowable place in your vehicle.  What makes you, you, in this present life you are living, is an exquisite collection of discretely located, brilliantly orchestrated energetic balls of yarn, held in place by a vibrating core of conjoined energies from the earth and the cosmos that is in front of your spine. That core organizes, focuses, and emanates the universal life force that makes everything that lives in all creation be by definition alive.  Your vehicle will be thus sustained for as long as your time on earth persists. When you are done here and the time comes for your essential self to return home, that life force will dissipate and those energy balls will unravel, the threads offered back to feed the cosmic stream from which they were drawn for your benefit.

Each of those qualities- which are the particular customizing options of your generic vehicle- have a pre-assigned location where they live and from which they vibrate their individual influences into your vehicle, collectively creating you in this life and your particular life plan. Everything you think, feel, and do is motivated by the pulsation of a quality that lives somewhere in your vehicle. That doesn’t make you a puppet. What it does is raise the question of who you really are underneath the temporary collection of thoughts, feelings, strengths, weakness, challenges, and accomplishments. That’s a conversation for another day.

You have your particular just-you qualities that make you the unique individual expression of humanness that you are. And you, and all of us, also have embedded in your vehicle the universal forces that we are taking back from religions and spiritual paths and leaders and amazingly finding waiting for us right in front of our hearts, where they’ve been the whole time.  

The step-by-step process of becoming an aware, internally free person, involves, in part, learning, from the inside, through the extraordinary gift of aware consciousness, where those qualities live in you. Gaining eventual command (which is qualitatively different than control) involves cultivating the power of focusing that consciousness through breathing and meditation and applied choice. By learning to recognize the vibrational nuance of the different chakras and layers of your vehicle, and then most particularly becoming familiar with and falling in love with the vibration of your heart, you and I become collaborators in our own spiritual evolution. We are no longer “waiting on the Lord”. We are working as part of a team with the divine forces in the realization of our internal life program.

I’m offering you what I hope is a grounded, non-religious translation of what the sages and teachers have meant by telling us for millennia that “It’s all inside you”.

It can be done. It takes practice to see what is in you beyond the scope of your mind. But since we are simply discovering what has been there in us all along, the process of inner awakening is akin to opening a drawer and looking inside to see what’s there.  Probably you’re going to find some crusty old stinky socks that you crammed into a corner years or lifetimes ago. They need to be aired out and washed clean. What you are also without a doubt going to find is the buried answers to your prayers. Where’d I leave that perfect version of me? Oh, look, here it is!

This Human Energy Vehicle is the greatest, most miraculous gift in the universe. And most of us treat it like a stolen jalopy.

Down to Business

We’re going to narrow the focus now to the issue at hand; what are we going to do with the swirl of fear that is increasing every day in our present circumstances and provoking the fear that lives in us? I’ve given you the broad sweep of a bigger picture. Let’s turn from a telescopic view to a microscopic one.

Fear has a place where it resides in your HEV. So does faith. When you know where those places are and then learn how to focus your awareness and choice where you choose, you get to decide which one’s in charge.

Fear’s domain is in your third chakra, your solar plexus, what you might call your stomach and back area. It actually originates in and primarily affects you through your kidneys. The contraction of fear, the coldness and even trembling that often accompanies fear, the urge to curl up or run away or scream, is seen in Chinese medicine as coming from the kidneys’ fundamental life energy tipping over into serious depletion and/or contraction. That depleted state can feel subconsciously, viscerally, instinctively, like approaching death.

The adrenal glands reside on top of the kidneys. As any practitioner of natural medicine will tell you, chronic adrenal fatigue is a modern plague. Overwork, under nourishment, consumption of stimulants and downers, over exposure to screens, social inequality, financial pressure, health concerns, the pressure of various “isms”- racism, sexism, ageism, etc.- and the constant buzz of conflicting opinions in the media and energetic atmosphere all create a vibration of unrelenting stress in our bodies.

There is a natural, healthy bodily rhythm that has evolved over millions of years of testing out life on earth. That ideal rhythm has evolved to maximize the most efficient use of your vehicle. That rhythm involves succeeding periods of work and rest; inward and outward focus, expansion and contraction, focus and dispersal. It involves eating simply from natural sources, locally grown and harvested. It involves direct contact with nature in nature’s own setting. The way that most of us have learned to live our modern lives is in direct violation of that natural rhythm. And so our adrenals are shot, our kidneys are in constant fight or flight mode, and we live with a underlying, constant buzz of biologically-based fear.

Pile on that the fear that is flying around our world at this present moment of pandemic virus/economic collapse/future uncertainty/ galloping opinion, and it’s a wonder we aren’t all running screaming through the streets. Some people are, disguised as political protest. Most of us understand that running down the street would be counter- productive on a number of levels. Therefore, we are in our houses, doing what we can so far to deal with our fear. One choice that a lot of people are making is to indulge, even exaggerate, the addictive behaviors that got us so depleted and vulnerable to fear in the first place. Trying to ignore, rise above, pretend the fear isn’t there. Which it of course still is. Fear doesn’t go away. It’s like a dog barking at shadows. It won’t stop on its own. It has to be trained in a new way to be.

There’s another way to deal with the fear.

Everything in nature has its opposite, balancing force. Yin and yang, light and dark, hot and cold, contraction and expansion, etc. There is only one force that has no opposite. That force is love. I’m not talking about love in the movies, or love on a Saturday night, or in a pop song. I’m not talking about blowing air kisses and saying Love you! as you check your phone. Those expressions may or may nor contain actual love. But the love I’m taking about is the universal force that underlies all creation. That love is calm, constant, neutral but completely present. It is unconditional in that it applies to everything and everyone without judgment or discrimination. Those negative, human-created qualities are not even concepts to love, except that love holds the space for them, too.  Love asks nothing in return because it is everything and so it has everything and needs nothing because need implies a lack. When the love that is everything swells in my heart, which is its place of emanation through me, I joyfully embrace all creation as equally worthy, equally beloved, equally cherished. The barriers-of biology, ideology, psychology, distance, time- dissolve. When physicists finally make their way down through the layers of cosmic vibration in their quest to find what is underneath, within, at the center of everything that exists, they will find what mystics and children have taught us forever. What’s vibrating under and through everything, what makes reality be something, is the palpable vibration of love.

What, then, is the opposite of fear if, it’s not love?

Faith.

Why is that so?

Fear tells me that something, anything, everything, is wrong, dangerous, apocalyptic. It tells me that I don’t know what’s going on and that is reason to run, hide, quit, surrender. Or reason to fight to the death, to stick my chin out and defy the fear, pretend it’s not there, even in the face of true danger.

Faith tells me that even though I don’t know what’s going on, someone on some level does. It tells me that there is an order, an underlying harmony that I can attune to even in a moment of seeming chaos, and the vibration of faith in my heart is literally the link to that greater order.  That is because faith, being a universal force, not just a personal one like fear, is linked to something without limits, whatever I may call or however I frame that which is beyond me. The faith in my HEV is vibrationally linked to the inherent order of nature and the universe that holds all life.

Faith tells me with certainty that here, now, in this moment, there is an accompanying place of calm and safety inside my heart that fear can’t touch. And if there is a real danger, an actual threat to me or my loved ones, faith’s double buddy intuition will tell me that this threat is immediate, and here’s what you have to do, now.

I can trust faith because of the feeling it generates in me when I touch it. I feel the truth of its message to me. Fear is a liar. I can’t trust whatever it tells me or calls up in me, because it paints everything with the same brush of suspicion and contraction.

Fear tells me to quit, because all that’s ahead is doom. Faith tells me to keep going, because the nature of reality is change.

Fear tells me to freeze. Faith says, put your foot right there in front. Now do it again.

Fear tells me that nothing will work out, that I’m doomed. Faith says that the only way out is through.

Fear generates anxiety and weakness. Faith generates courage and strength.

Fear tells me to panic. Faith contains the patience that often doesn’t make sense to my mind but shows me its rewards with time.

Fear tells me that I’m alone; always have been, always will be. Faith shows me that I have people and forces that want to and can help me, at the least by walking with me on the difficult path I have to travel. And the vibration of faith draws that help to me, because hearts speak to hearts.

True faith is not blind. Blind faith is an imposed idea more based on desperation than evidence. True faith that is held and generated from the heart offers the accumulated evidence of what happens when you choose to trust it and go forward under its guidance.

Fear will lie and lie and lie to get me to stop and do its bidding. Faith is a partner of truth, which also lives in the heart, intuition being the voice of both of them. Faith won’t sugar-coat the situation. At some moments in our lives, maybe like right now, we are brought to our knees by the weight of what we are asked to carry. Faith won’t bullshit me and tell me it’s not heavy. What faith will do is give me the strength and link me with the help I need to carry it until I can put it down.

My choice, every day and sometimes every minute, is which one I’m going to put my attention and my will towards, fear or faith; which one I’m going to activate.

Where exactly does faith live?

Like fear, faith has its pre-assigned place in your HEV. That place is in your heart chakra. Faith is a quality of the heart, along with love, humility, compassion, truth, mercy, joy, intuition, and forgiveness. Specifically, faith’s place is about a foot in front of the center of your chest. Why there? Because that place is a particularly potent place in your HEV -your field, your aura, your vehicle- that is called the mental body of your heart chakra. Mental body in this case does not mean the mind. It means the layer of the HEV that contains the beliefs and forces that define us in this life. Who we individually consider ourselves to be, what we believe, the limits we place on our possibilities are contained in the mental body. Also, this layer contains the inherent defining qualities that are built into all humans. Faith is one of those.

The good news is that faith is just waiting there, biding its time, tapping its foot to the beat of your heart, ready to start singing when you give it the cue.

Here’s how to do that.

Sit comfortably but vertical. If you’re in a chair, feel your feet relaxed but firm on the floor or ground. If you’re sitting on the floor or earth, pay attention to where your body meets the ground. Extend your awareness into the earth. Connect through feeling, sensation, vision, imagination with the vibration of the earth. Your first chakra comes out of your physical body at your perineum. Send it deep into the earth.

Pay attention to your breath for 10 breaths. Consciously relax your physical body with each exhale.

Direct your breath to travel from the bottom of your torso, through the center, up to the area of your heart and back down. You have a vibrating core of energy in front of your spine. See it, feel it, sense it, imagine it.

Put your hands gently over your heart center at the middle of your breastbone. Breathe deeply and calmly.  Put your awareness there. Recognize that when you arrive in your heart, you will be met by a sense of calm.

Turn your hands palms up with the heel of your hands touching your chest. Stick your fingers straight out in front, making a shelf of your hands. Walk your awareness out to where your fingers are. Rest there. This is the place of compassion, faith’s sibling. Be aware of what the vibration of compassion feels like. You can come back here anytime and bathe in the lake of compassion.

Now put the heels of your hands where your fingers are and make a shelf that extends from the space of compassion out in front of your chest again. This is the place of faith. Rest here.

Breathe and put your full awareness where your fingers are. Explore this territory like you have just come around a mountain and discovered a meadow of wildflowers with no one in it. Sit and rest and breathe.  Memorize what the vibration of faith feels like.

Now from this place of faith where you are firmly sitting, check out your fear. You will know intuitively from where you now sit what to do with and about your fear. Maybe it won’t even be there anymore. Probably no such luck. Maybe it will have shrunk. Maybe it’ll still yell and try to get your attention. That’s where your own awareness and choice will come in.

Firming faith in your bodies and in your consciousness is a practice like learning to play an instrument or a sport, like learning to do yoga or a martial art. It’s like learning to knit or read or write. All of those skills and arts require practice. So does making faith your go-to. At first you have to sit for a while and repeat it often to make the pathway in your body. You are creating a new habit. And at first you will give in to fear many times. But when you know what faith feels like and you see the evidence of what happens to fear in its presence, you will have an incentive to get to the point where faith is present all the time. Fear becomes like a cold fire that, every once in a while, flares up, but is quickly calmed by faith’s patient, long-viewed vibration.

Give it ten days of ten minutes twice a day. I’m betting you’ve got the time right now.

Faith is not just the antidote to fear. Faith is the force that drives the universe forward. When we link consciously, vibrationally with it, we are embodying the guiding energy for our lives, our health, and our path forward.

Here is an accompanying video of the meditation for locating the place of faith in your heart center. Now you can read it, hear it, and feel it. Then you’ll know it and can choose it.

Jonathan Goldman