Love or Fear - It's your choice

I talked to John the other night and he gave me some simple wisdom in response to my questions about how to choose the good inclination (יצר הטוב) over the bad one (יצר הרע).

He said it's really making a choice between fear and love. If you choose to live with love, then it will be easy to make the choices that nourish and support. If you choose to live with fear, then the choices will be ones of self-destruction.

So how, I asked, does one move from fear to love?

He answered that it's about learning to send love to your fears. Simple to say, hard to do. The example we talked about was dealing with old memories of times that were dominated by fear. We can't change who we were, but we can change our attachment to the memory.

In this particular memory, I had not realized how scared I was at the time it happened, but in retrospect, it was very clear to me that I was being controlled by my fear. I concentrated on the memory and then threw my arms around my young self to send love. As I did, the feeling of the memory changed. I think this is one I'm going to have to go back to a few times, but the fear was starting to change. And in doing so, I'm changing who I am now by changing my attachment to who I was.

I'm learning to send love to my fear, and in that way, give power to my self-nourishing inclination and remove it from my self-destructive one.