COURAGE

   Susie Hayes, M.A., CHt.

We enter life innocently, utterly dependent upon our caregivers.  We are born vulnerable and needy. With care, protection, and nurturance, we learn about our surrounds.  Life is a discovery.

We become acquainted with challenges and obstacles.  We learn the joy of success and accomplishment.  Each day holds a new adventure.  We learn to walk, to stumble, to fall, to get up, and to try again.  We are not afraid of this essential learning process.  We are patiently coaxed and supported as we take our first steps and speak our first words.

We move out into the world, making further discoveries. We deal with siblings, go to school, get an education, make friends.  We look to the future – eagerly wanting to “grow up”.

We graduate, develop a career, get married, start a family, plan for the future.

And in the midst of our life blueprint, we encounter pain, loss, disappointment, frustration, and betrayal.  Every day we are asked, “So how would you like to respond to this?” The learning curve is often higher than we imagined it could be.

"We could never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world.”

Helen Keller

The longer we’re here on this planet, the more we learn about and experience fear. It is a cumulative effect.  How we manage fear profoundly affects our destiny and our quality of life

THE VALUE OF FEAR

“Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.”

Hannah Arendt

Appreciating the purpose of fear helps us use fear effectively to move forward in our lives.  Fear signals us when we are in danger.  Built in to our primal brains and genetic code, it is essential to our survival.  Early on, we learn to “fight or take flight”.  When fear becomes immobilizing, however, when it keep us from doing what we want or need to do, it is then working against us.

“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”

Edmund Burke

Fear signals that we need safety; we need a refuge in the risk, the loss, the storm And finding safety means accessing courage.

COURAGE IS

NOT

THE ABSENCE OF FEAR

“Courage is not the towering oak

That sees storms come and go;

It is the fragile blossom

That opens in the snow.”

Alice Mackenzie Swaim

Courage is the ability to move forward while wanting to run backwards.  It is the ability to move into the fear and through it to the other side.

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.  You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.”

Eleanor Roosevelt

THE ESSENTIAL INGREDIENT

TO ACTIVATE COURAGE

Courage requires trust.  Trust in yourself, in the life process, trust in a higher wisdom,  trust in those from whom you receive support, encouragement, insight, and guidance.

“It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new.  But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful.  There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.”

Alan Cohen

One final consideration –

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

Marianne Williamson