lara simmons

Just one today, but I think it is a powerful one. And maybe one that explains our whole election...

  "What is not love is always fear and nothing else." -- A Course in Miracles I have been thinking a lot about fear as I explore the topic of love. So much of what stands in the way of love is fear. Fear of rejection, fear of embarrassment, fear of intimacy, fear of joy. We have been taught - in so many ways - to fear love that we can be paralyzed in the face of it. In the face of expressing it: telling someone how we feel, asking someone out, or even letting someone we are in relationship with know how important they are to us and in the face of receiving it: allowing someone to do something for us, graciously accepting a gift, or feeling worthy of the relationship that we really want. If you believe, as I do, that all fear is at its core a fear of death, you can see why we are all so afraid of love. If we believe that the lack of love leads to death, that makes the stakes pretty high and many of us would rather circumnavigate this fear rather than face it, hopin...

"Everything you want is on the other side of fear." -- Shelley Lundquist

"It's a funny thing...but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really what guides them is what they're afraid of. What they DON'T want.”  -- Khalid Hosseini , from his book And The Mountains 

"Behind your greatest fear lies your greatest gift." --The Universe on TUT.com Amen to that!

"There's nothing wrong with being scared....long as you don't let it change who you are." --Grammie's Ghost in ParaNorman Some of the quotes I collect I write down because they teach me something, or give me hope, or make me smile; this one was like a kick in the gut. I know that throughout my life I have let fear change who I am many, many times. I have behaved in ways that are not the "me" I want to be because I was scared more times than I can remember or perhaps even count. I still do. We all do, I think. Fear may be the number one emotion that drives us here in the United States. And there is so much to fear. Crime. Disease. Job loss. Retirement. Natural disasters. Death. But I am not sure it is these larger fears that drive us day to day so much as the smaller ones: being found out, being known and disliked, being seen and rejected, being judged and found wanting. The irony, I think, is that if we did not allow our fears to change who ...