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Jan 17, 2021Liked by Steven Morrison

Love this. Dan and I were really struggling on how to parent Alleyah and Alaza since none of the things that worked with Maeda and Clare seemed to work with them. We attended a workshop by Bryan Post postinstitute.com. His premise was that all behavior came from one of two places - love or fear. To understand and change behavior you had to figure out and address the underlying fear. That concept has been life changing for me in the way I relate to the kids, Dan, friends, family and myself.

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Got to chime in here. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” is a worthy observation. Fear, by itself, is quite useful as an emotion. It has kept us from doing unwise things for millennia. Hear the tiger? Gather in the cave and make a fire. The emotional trigger (hearing the tiger roar) precedes the thought of how to respond (gather in the cave and start a fire). The fear and the thought about it are distinct biological events, as neuroscience is now able to inform us.

I agree that how we respond to fear is the thing. I disagree about eliminating fear outright. Eliminating fear would be as foolish and frustrating and biologically impossible as eliminating love - we human beings are hardwired to resonate for both emotions, and both emotions are judgment-neutrally and biologically necessary for our survival.

We agree about choosing a response to fear. That’s where we can claim some agency, offer intention, engage LoA, etc. But there’s nothing inherently wrong or right about feeling fearful. Lots of good things have resulted from fear in addition to choices that keep us from being eaten by tigers, including the practical and biologically-supportable observation that fear isn’t in itself to be feared (the quote above) and Gandhi’s amazing quote that led the newsletter. Without this learning we wouldn’t have basic human rights, democracy, or any other sort of evolved group strategies for dealing with stuff that rightfully ought to scare us into better wisdom...which it appears to have been doing, slowly, during the course of humankind’s history.

I also have to respond to this notion of fear and love being somehow vibrationally exclusive. I don’t know if there’s a single, measurable vibrational frequency for either one, although there are plenty of informed theorists who’ve used kinesiology and other means to make such claims. The trouble with those claims is that, while they may be diagnostic, they ignore the interrelatedness of fear and love in actual physical practice. Would we even know love without the presence of fear? But beyond the dualistic arguments about fear and love, taken simply at the vibrational level, how can one offer any judgment about how the “low’ notes of fear somehow must be eliminated by the better “high” notes of love? Both high and low notes are necessary for the creation of any kind of music, and it is the skillful employment of all vibrational frequencies that creates music tension and movement and climax and release. Take away the “low” notes and what have you got? A three-color rainbow? Doesn’t exist.

So I encourage informed discussion about the notion of fear and love and anger and joy and sadness and whatever emotion, as well as informed self-evident practices that allow the safe experience of big emotion and skillful response in the laboratory of self-awareness. I agree: no one wants to be fearful, but when fear is welcomed as a change agent not succumbed to as a terror-inducing blockage, fear can often accomplish miraculous things, as you hint at when suggesting that transformation of fear into power is the way forward. Clearly it takes uncommon courage to feel the fear and act wisely, and on that I’m in wholehearted agreement with you, even though I cannot agree that “fear is not a given.”

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Jan 19, 2021Liked by Steven Morrison

Yet another eye opening, conscious way of looking at the political landscape. This is great. I love the quotes, too, and find them encouraging and discouraging, respectively. Thank you for your perspective and this weekly awakening.

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