Courage

What is courage? I believe that courage is the ability to look directly at whatever is arising in the present moment and respond without retreating into old fears or relying on conventional wisdom for a quick and easy answer. A situation that requires courage implies a challenge. We do not need courage for mundane tasks. Courage is reserved for those tasks which ask us to step outside of the known, our comfort zones, and engage with a situation that makes us uncomfortable. What is it about a given situation that makes us uncomfortable? When a situation asks us to do something that we do not know how to handle based on past experience/our conditioning we become uncomfortable, fearful, and filled with anxiety. Courage is that quality which allows us to feel these feelings of fear and despite these fears look deep into our heart-mind and discern what is the correct response and act, or not act, upon it.

It is easy to get caught in the fear and never act. We can perseverate on an issue, thinking it over and over without ever doing a thing other than thinking and worrying. In the beginning, I think courage is related to faith, and by faith I mean trust in the unknown. We have to be willing to step outside of our comfort zone and do that which we know must be done despite the thoughts and emotions that try to hold us back from action. In my experience, I have found that many of the fears I have are in fact not founded upon reality, i.e., they either don’t come true when I do the thing I was scared to do, or I find that by doing what my higher self urges me to do I can accept responsibility for whatever happens, hence not having my actions dictated by fear what of others will think or do in response to my actions.. In other words, in the beginning we have to have faith that acting in a way that is not dictated by our conditioning will produce favorable results. We may be frightened, but even if we don’t do exactly the right thing, or say the perfect words, the act of steeping outside of the known, outside of our fear, creates a new movement in our minds, a movement towards greater flexibility of mind, of greater wisdom and intelligence.

For a moment, we are in the present moment. We responded appropriately to the given situation with as much as our being as we can muster in that moment. Ideally, we would meet each moment will full awareness of our highest purpose but until we reach that stage of fearlessness, making small steps in that directly will greatly boost our confidence in our own ability to respond skillfully to a given situation. The more we act in this courageous manner the easier it becomes to act with courage. By stepping outside of the known and acting courageously we see that our fears are actually unfounded. These fears do little more than hinder us from expressing our self in a considerate and intelligent way.

We also gain a great freedom by acting courageously. We are imprisoned within ourselves, our fears and neuroses, when we are unable and/or unwilling to step outside our comfort zone, no matter how painful the comfort zones makes life for us. As we begin to act courageously in the face of our fears and doubts we liberate ourselves from the confines of our old fears and see each situation with new, with fresh, eyes.