When Fear Falls Away

A book came home the other day. My Significant Other ran across it in the library and brought it home. We've both been reading it. It's a fascinating tale of metamorphosis, of the disappearing of an old way of life and the welcoming of a mysterious new one, a new life without fear and suffering.

The author is a writer named Jan Frazier, who was facing an annual mammogram after a couple of breast cancer scares. She was terrified--and then she asked for the fear to be taken away. Mysteriously, miraculously, she not only awoke with no fear but found that a profound change had come over her life, something that changed everything.

Now, this transformation didn't exactly come out of nowhere--she had been studying with some adherents of Siddha yoga, under the tutelage of an Indian mystic named Gurumayi. Still, her transformation was sudden, and unexpected in its completeness.

I haven't spent a lot of time contemplating enlightenment as a goal. It has always seemed like the kind of thing that is so unlikely, it's not really worth all the painful years spent meditating and eating tofu in some temple, hoping to get there. Either that, or something like what happened to Byron Katie or Eckhart Tolle after seeing their lives fall completely apart. Not something you exactly strive for, because you have to go through all that mess first.

Yet, you hear all this stuff about an evolution in consciousness. And it makes me wonder if this might be paving the way for this kind of stuff to become more--mainstream, more commonplace. I don't know. I don't know if I want to be some enlightened being, because that sounds kind of freaky and way out there. But the idea of not worrying about death, and illness, and having some amazing reserve of love and compassion, that doesn't worry about whether your coworkers like you, for example--that doesn't have any worries, but only the desire to help relieve suffering in others--well, that might be all right.

At any rate, it's a fascinating read, I think, for anyone who knows what it is to live with fear, especially those special fears that come about by being a mother, by bringing vulnerable children into this world, and thereby learning what it is to fear loss of all kinds. I remember when my son was just a few days old, and I heard a news report of some children killed in a school bus accident or something, and I thought, What have I done? How could I go and have this baby when it would destroy me to lose him? What was I thinking? There is a part in the book where she is facing a breast cancer scare, and she thinks, I would be OK, if I weren't a mother. And she hears a voice, the voice of Gurumayi, saying "You must be OK, even though you are a mother." Sometimes I think I could face all the fears I have of the future so much easier--if I did not have a son. But I do have a son. And I don't regret that decision. But it makes how I face the future that much more critical, and makes this book all that more meaningful, and reading this book has made me think about enlightenment, and what it might mean, in a whole new way.

Link:
When Fear Falls Away website