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September/October 2007 Living Now
Exchanging Fear for Peace

by Nouk Sanchez and Tomas Vieira

Imagine if you were offered the opportunity to live a life of peace, would you take it?

Imagine if you were offered a life of peace in exchange for all your fears. Sounds too good to be true? There is a standing offer available to us everyday to drop our fears and live a life of peace. It's not the offer that is unbelievable, it's the fact that so few of us take up the offer that is amazing.

Let's qualify peace and fear. The peace I'm talking about is not the dreamy love, peace and brown rice kind of peace that is sold to us in its many forms daily. Nor is it the impermanent peace of I had a good day today out of a week of misery. The peace I'm referring to is a deep seated knowing of who you are. It's about being present and conscious. It's about here and now and being detached from the daily dramas. Finding peace isn't about changing your life's circumstances but rather, your view and reaction to life's circumstances. It is about having absolute faith that tomorrow is just another day that will unfold without effort.

The fear I refer to is the deeply rooted sense of nonexistence, of being inconsequential and not worthy. It's so deeply rooted that most of us don't even realize our deepest fears. Most of us live our life in pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain so it's no surprise that we don't know these fears - we just don't go there.

If we did explore our fears we'd be shocked to find our attachment to the many emotions that make up our fears. Unconsciously, our fears represent elements of who we think we are. It's not surprising that we confront difficulties in giving them up - after all we identify with them.

So how do we exchange the nagging feelings of inadequacy, insufficiency and lack for the secure knowledge that we are okay, sufficient onto ourselves and lacking nothing? The initial answer lies in our congruent and heart felt desire to know ourselves. It is a prayer we offer when we have had enough of seeking but not finding, when the pain of living in a random world outstrips our desire for safety.

The key to commencing the process is allowing whatever needs to happen to enter our lives or depart our lives. It is critical that we allow the means to present itself rather than trying to fabricate it.

The means for undoing fear and discovering peace will find you. You need do nothing except allow and be willing to accept what ever means are presented. Most of us want peace but when presented with the means by which to achieve this, we falter. Our ego wants to control the means and dictate the outcome and will put up the battle of our lives to persuade us that whatever is presented is wrong and dangerous and that we should choose again.

The ego perceives death in the process and it's right, of course. But it is only relinquishment of the ego and does not affect us at all. This is the secret that our ego guards with all its might. It continues to keep us in fear and distraction so that we never discover the truth that the ego is only an illusion of who we are.

Truth is peace because it is undeniable and incontestable. Unlike the acquisition of knowledge, the discovery of truth is an undoing process. Simple yet difficult because we have been trained into believing that learning requires investment and effort. Truth demands the opposite - allowing and detachment.

Allowing is one of the hardest things we can do. There is a feeling of emptiness and fear whenever there is a shift within situations and relationships, and our first reaction is to jump in and fix it.

In most cases, this desire to fix is ego based and the appropriate action is to allow. Our ego will not voluntarily let this happen because it doesn't want us to discover faith in anything else but it. If we were to glimpse our peace just once, the ego would be inevitably be undone because it would set in motion the entire undoing of the ego. Herein lies the challenge and the doorway to peace.

Allowing and detachment is uncomfortable and downright scary at times, but do we want to be free? Do we want to exchange our fears for peace? The pathway is there for us all to take.

Nouk Sanchez and Tomas Vieira, authors of Take Me to Truth, Undoing the Ego, will offer an Undoing the Ego workshop on Nov. 3 in Portland. For workshop details, contact Jim Peterson at 503-407-6403 or visit www.alchemical-transformation-guidance.com/Takemetotruth.html. Learn more about Sanchez and Vieira at www.takemetotruth.com.