Relationship with Fear

The one thing that is almost universal about fear is that we all want to avoid it...naturally.  It may even be built into our DNA to avoid pain, discomfort, and unease.  And, for many good reasons, that is perfectly appropriate.  However, there is a way in which, through our attempting to avoid fear and discomfort, we actually generate our own suffering.  We actually, as human beings, put an extraordinary amount of time and energy into securing a sense of comfort and avoiding a sense of discomfort in order to establish a sense of 'personal solidity' that will help us feel safe and invulnerable to ever present tides of pain, sickness, dis-ease, and finally, death.
Spirituality is in many cases the further attempt to find and secure a sense of safety, or a sense of having some ground beneath our feet.  But the real purpose of our 'spirituality' is the possibility to encounter our fear, our insecurity, and our groundlessness directly.  In one sense our true security lies in a total absence of security, our true fearlessness lying in the absence of any 'safe place' to reside.
Our relationship with fear need not be one where we must get rid of fear, or abolish fearful thoughts....Rather, our relationship with fear is one where we enter in directly to the fear, removing all sense of security and safety in order to see that there is a huge void that we exist eternally in.  In resting in this enormous void, we find that even without a sense of security or safety, who and what we are is eternally safe, eternally secure.  It was simply in our imagination of what we were securing safety from and security of that we missed this eternally present abode.
Life then becomes an opportunity to encounter all the ways in which we seek security and protection of an image of ourselves, and how that leads to deeper delusion and suffering.  It becomes an on-going investigation into deeper and deeper experiences of having nothing to hang onto, nothing to comfort you, and being willing to see fear for what it is...ultimately useless.
With fear no longer at the helm, life begins to look different...namely, there's really nothing wrong, nothing to be fixed, nothing to find, nothing to become~
we finally have the freedom to just Be.