Brave Heart
Find the courage to face your biggest fears
by settling into the truth of who you are.
By Sally Kempton
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Scott, an ex-Special Forces guy I met in the late 1980s, had spent 20 years as a covert operative for hyperdangerous missions. He was one of those guys who would sneak into Soviet embassies in places like Cambodia to steal secret papers. Then the Cold War ended and he went home to someplace like Pennsylvania. There he discovered that his formerly hard-drinking parents had gotten sober, joined AA, and wanted Scott to go to Al-Anon, the 12-step program for relatives of alcoholics.
"What you have to realize," he said, "is that in all my years in the Special Forces, I'd never been afraid. I loved danger, and I was really good at it. But when I walked into that meeting, I was so terrified that I couldn't stay in the room."
Scott had literally never spent a moment looking at himself or at the source of his pain. The world of feelings was a place of darkness for him and, like all unknown territory, profoundly scary. But he faced his fear and not only went back to that Al-Anon meeting but decided to journey further into himself by learning to meditate. For Scott, that was about as brave an act as, say, parachute jumping would be for me.
Scott's story redefined my understanding of courage. I'd always thought of courage as synonymous with what hard-boiled novelists used to call "guts." I'd assumed that if you were unafraid of physical harm, you were, basically, unafraid. Scott helped me realize, though, that courage and fearlessness are not the same-in fact, if we didn't have fears, we wouldn't need courage. Courage implies moving through fear.
An act that takes tremendous courage for one person might be someone else's "no big deal," or even their day job. For me, doing an unsupported Handstand is an act of courage, yet I'm unfazed by stuff that terrifies others-speaking in front of a thousand people without notes, for instance, or facing my own anger. And, of course, each of us has a different edge, a psychological precipice beyond which lies a personal abyss. Your edge could be the 500-foot drop below a mountain footbridge. It may be the fear of career suicide that keeps you from speaking out about corporate wrongdoing, or the fear of losing your partner's love that paralyzes you when you try to convey certain truths about yourself. Your edge might be very subtle indeed-it might be, for instance, the moment your boundaries dissolve in meditation. The point is that each of us, sometime, will be asked to step past the borders of the known world and do something that scares us. Courage is that quality of heart that lets us do it.
Home of the Brave.
Anyone who reads inspirational literature knows that the English word "courage" comes from the French coeur, meaning heart. One Sanskrit word for courage is saurya, which has the same root as the Sanskrit word for sun. In fact, many ancient systems associate the sun-heart of the solar system—with the pulsing, radiant muscle at the center of our circulatory system. I like the heart image, with its implication that courage comes from the center of being, from the organ that most directly resounds with the pulsation of life.
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