Master Key Experience Week 7: Fear

Uncovering my heart’s desire has not been easy! In this Master Key Experience it’s called my definite major purpose or DMP. My writing down goals in the past has always been in the context of earning an income doing work that I love. So I would set goals for the day, the week, the month, the quarter, and one-year, 3-year, 5-year goals. Because I’ve truly loved my work, too often the other parts of my life were in support of what I thought was my mission as years unfolded.

As I’m sure we all experience, I would have little nudges of intuition all along the years to think about doing things outside of my very full days. I have always felt “in the zone” interviewing people and got compliments about my insightful questions. So I’d wonder what it would be like to have a talk show–maybe one that considered all the kinds of healing modalities across the world. Wouldn’t it be interesting to talk about what they would do to heal an illness with 3 guests? Perhaps one would be a rain forest shaman, another a European physician, and another a medical intuitive. I would help them open to each other to learn from each other, as well as open insights for myself and the audience and enrich us all. It would be a contribution to our world’s integration of healing wisdom across centuries and cultures. But the thought of doing a talk show would go on the back burner. I’d say, “When the time is right, if it’s right, the means will come…”

My other frequent intuitive nudge was not to keep putting on a back burner my fascination and hunger about all things spiritual. But my time budget and money budget never seemed enough to allow for extended daily spiritual time, let alone retreats, online classes, books, and other experiences other spiritual seekers I admired immersed themselves in. The several times scholarships came along and I could be included, I’d glow through experiences and feel “in the zone” there as well. I just couldn’t see the way to doing that daily, even when I sat for a reading with a spiritual guide in my city–a thank you for doing her a favor. I couldn’t get my mind around a vision she saw of me in the future. She likened me to a glowing tent in the desert, sides beckoning in as they flowed in the breeze, attracting seekers from all over. What?

This fall I finally stopped to ask “What is my real heart’s desire?” I got the courage and guidance to erase the slate and begin from scratch to frame the rest of my life, trusting that my burning desires and my Creator-given gifts could combine with new mind skills to be the key to unlocking the fullness of the life that was meant to be for me. In the context of amazing presenters, classes, writings, a MasterMind going through it with me, and a personal guide, I began the process of deep thinking, writing and re-writing, clarifying, testing, and looking for resonance as my blinders came off.

My “in the zone” experiences came foward. Talk show. Focus on spiritualtiy. Healing. I wrote, I attached S.M.A.R.T. goals as directed, I revised. I mostly let the words seep into my days and nights, imagining that Shirley. I was startled to find myself energized to start listing steps needed for a talk show about the magic possible in ordinary lives, something that had never happened thinking about a healing modalities talk show. I was startled to count how many hours of spiritual study and meditation I had gradually included in my life over these weeks–it’s possible to fit it in! I became aware that my passion for clearing toxins is now extending to eliminating negative thinking through the Week 7 mental diet and our ongoing watching not to express an opinion.

But then I started experiencing enormous fear. With all my experiences of past limitations of time and money and partnerships, how in the world can I dare to even whisper my heart’s desires let alone write them down? Where will the money come from? Where will the time come from? How can the pace of these weeks continue? Fear paralyzed me even to the point of wondering if I should dump what I’d written and replace it with what’s certainly doable and practical. I believe all the examples of miracles and magic that have happened and are happening for others using these tools, but can my heart’s desires become real for me?

At the end of the class beginning Week 7 we were shown a clip from the 2005 movie Coach Carter. These words again resonated powerfully for me. This time I printed them out and read and re-read them in a week of self-doubt and fear and struggle. I thought about the power they’d had for Nelson Mandela and Oprah and that they are actually Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles, a spiritual classic. It has taken several agonizing weeks, and a crisis of faith this week. But today I finally have the courage to overcome my fear of making my seemingly impossible DMP real in words I will steep myself in as I live into their reality. I am going to dare the impossible, reading it as “I’m possible” because I’m combining my I am with our omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient I AM. I am so humbled and grateful.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

1992’s Return to Love by Marianne Williamson