Fear.

Panic.

Paranoia.

These are the times we find ourselves in, riding this huge global wave of uncertainty, pandemonium, inner and outer chaos feeling.

Fear has so much potency and energy when we focus our own attention and intention on it, on feeding it with more fear. It can start a fire, and destroy a forest sooner than we speak the words it wants us to speak.

There is so much undeniable power in our power of attention, and on our use of words right now. In our messages, to each other, and from the world. As we know, the media, and fear-mongering energy is having a heyday spreading this uncontrollable wildfire.

I didn’t feel it personally, until yesterday, when I received the cautionary message from my place of work that as a wellness center, business may decline. As a massage therapist myself, providing stress relief, healing and connection to my clients, this fear was already having its effect.

We all need to be aware, of course. And, also what we do with that message is entirely up to us. We can take that message and create more fear, or take that message and transmute it into the deeper lens of how we can engage in our world right now.

It truly only feels as uncontrollable as we believe it to be, with our own perception and ability to focus on this growing fear, or instead focus on self care and hygienic protocols.

We can do our part, but only so much so when fear itself isn’t leading our actions. Fear begets more fear; this is undeniable. Unless, we can channel it for the greater good.

Shortly after being made aware of this possible more direct impact on my work, I received news that my 96-year-old, last living grandfather and grandparent was very ill, not from the virus, but from his ailing pre existent health conditions.

This hit home. Bam, right in my heart, and home. My family. Right on my own doorstep. Tears and sadness weld up from the deepest parts of my heart. Feelings that needed to be felt. And heard. And witnessed.

Isn’t that what we all need right now? Witnessing of our own individual emotional processes around these disturbances and excavations?

This witnessing, I feel, is perhaps the deeper message to this emotional and energetic purging of fear that is happening. And, it can only happen when we have shined this light on the fear. We must see it, and feel it, to expunge ourselves of the deeper seated emotions underneath the fear.

Before receiving news of this, I was just somebody, unaffected. I was somebody, going about my days, convinced this fear was bogus.

Maybe, it is, maybe it is a real threat, to certain groups, the elderly, those predisposed to health conditions already.

Most of us didn’t blink an eye until it started affecting our more immediate world. Or, perhaps, we ran in panic to the nearest grocery store to stock up on toilet paper and canned goods.

This is exactly what a client of mine mentioned to me a month ago, might happen.

I didn’t think too much of it, until these experiences came into my own world.

It’s funny, not so funny, how egocentric our little human-created universes can be. We have our jobs, our families, our communities, our sense of safety and security.

When the ripple effects start to widen though, you feel it. Maybe, your grandparent is in a vulnerable state as well, on the very precipice of death itself.

It shines a huge light, a wake-up call, on this life, through the lens of death.

Death becomes the meditation. Maybe, this is the message, the deeper lesson in this whole thing.

Death, whether of a loved one, or the possible death of one, or the sense of fear we feel around loss, losing security in our jobs, in our food system, in our health system, becomes so very real feeling. It shakes us, and our world.

Death is not just in the literal, imaginative, far-away sense anymore.

It’s real. It’s tangible, than ever before.

We’ve heard this before, how death and loss can shake up the very security and foundation of your world. How it literally shakes and disturbs you to the core of who we all are, spirit in passing human form.

We are not permanent. We are temporary. This human life is temporary. These material senses of security are so very fleeting and precarious.

Nothing we attain goes with us when we die. We know this. We just don’t always feel into the truth of this.

Maybe, the Coronavirus, despite all the conspiracy, media drama, fear-mongering energy, is here to wake us up. Here to rattle our small and larger worlds. Here to show us how intimately interconnected we all are.

Religions, countries and belief systems can no longer divide us when such global things affect all of us. Your world is my world. We are now existing in each other’s worlds, no longer separate.

This is the transmutational power of these times I feel. When we are so pressed and pressurized into the fear, perhaps we are being melded into the very thing that’s at the very center of this universe:

Love. And the deepest connection between us all.

We can sit here, divided in our own homes, isolated from this fear of breathing another’s air, touching another human, being in community, or we can extend our hearts, open these very vessels to the very intensity we fear will kill us.

When we open the heart center to what is present, even in the fear, the panic, the sense of deep, deep vulnerability, we may find the very thing that will set us free.

Vulnerability to this life is the very thing we all are convinced will kill us. But, what is actually killing us is our armoring, our separation, our division from fear and hatred.

I’m not saying this threat isn’t valid, and maybe it’s more valid because the energy circulating is so very potent with the intricacies of ways in which it has gotten into our own individual worlds.

Awareness is so tricky, because a lot of us, have tied and tethered awareness to fear.

Awareness without openness of the heart, is deadly, to the ego, to our identity, to our fragile aging, dying human form.

Remember your divinity. Remember your own sovereignty as spirit embodied. This is our truest, undeniable power.

Look to one another with this remembrance. Extend our hearts in deep compassion for the suffering.

The waking, walking, lived meta mediation. Prayers to end the suffering of the world, is a prayer to end my own. Prayers to ease the hearts of another, is a prayer to ease my own heart.

There is so much upheaval of all of our lives right now. Devastations, losses, vulnerabilities are touching everyone. No one person is unaffected and untouched.

Remember that deep, deep unwavering truth when we have been so entrenched in judgment, condemnation and separation of our hurting, breaking world.

Perhaps, we are breaking, so we can break open. Perhaps, our constructed worlds our breaking, so we can be set free in deeper truth of love as our only defying truth of existence.

This isn’t to say just think positively. This is to say, that as much as the fear is “real,” so is the counter to it, our truer spiritual nature, love, trust, faith, connection, and harmony.

Words are so, so powerful right now. Messages are reaching all of us. Fear messages, and those of hope and remembrance.

Remember, you are the one witnessing these energies. You are not fear itself. Your are not the panic you are feeling.

Open you heart. Remember, this eternal, internal point of stillness is our truest sense of safety.

The worlds, outer and those more susceptible to breaking internally, our misplaced security on global structures, on security in money and jobs, may be breaking, or made more vulnerable to these times. But, that doesn’t mean, we should turn away from each other.

Turn toward humanity right now. The suffering others are feeling, is the suffering we all our feeling. The fear we are mistaking as our identity, is the fear we all are feeling.

We can rise above by turning toward it, toward the fear, toward the panic, holding the hands of our own hearts, and knowing the resonance of our words can bring great comfort, right now.

Extend a kind word if not a hug. Extend comfort in your presence if not a hand. Extend solace and compassion in our internal dialogue and words to our own hearts that are seeking and in need of our own healing presence right now.

Connection does not end with touch. Connection can be across the distance, in our language, in our words of hope and comfort to each other.

Know how connected we all are. Know how supported we all are, by infinite beings watching over our planet. We are not the victims of this. We are the direct participants and experiential learners of this. There is a lesson in the panic, in the very thing we fear will kill us.

What we fear will kill us, what we let kill us in the figurative sense can set us free to what we actually desire. Our own sense of infinite nature.

To my brothers, sisters, old, young, dis-eased, healthy, broken, helpless, mending, healing, the scared child in all of us, know this:

We are not alone. In our breaking moments, we are not alone. Do not forget the suffering. Do not forget the ones affected directly by this, the elderly, the more susceptible to disease. The vulnerable ones.

At our shared humanity, do we not share this same vulnerability?

We so often forget, and brush aside certain populations, like they some day, won’t be us. They will be. We will all be perhaps dis-eased and will certainly be dying some day.

We can’t keep casting aside people like they are worthless, like we are worthless, at that inevitable stage of all of our lives.

We will all reach that point, that culmination of life exiting, and death embracing us. Let that be the deeper invitation. To explore with an open heart the very feelings underneath this deep sense of vulnerability.

Death is the mediation of living a life more free, to who and what we are.

These are not easy times. Know how hard these times are. Humanity is breaking open.

I look to my dying grandfather, to my dying forms of myself, to my future death, and ask for the lessons to find me, to teach me now, before I die.

This is the life meditation. When fear grips us by the throats, may we open to the deeper invitation of vulnerability. Of grief. Of deep, excavation of who and what we thought we were, and what we thought was our sense of security.

I pray for our world. For our suffering, for the suffering, that we open to it. That we keep opening to our own suffering, as if we feel it may break us.

Let the suffering break us open. Let the initial knee-jerk reaction to fear, be the deeper to open to love. To open to the deep recesses of compassion for ourselves, for our communities and for our planet.

None of us are getting out of here alive. Feel into that truth. Let it break you open.

And trust, in the breaking open, our world, inner and outer will be made anew.

Blessings, hope, heart embracing heart energy, to all of us. Love shall have its day, and that day is now.