Acting Out of Love or Out of Fear?
The mind-body dilemma in practice
Have you tried to live on this planet without making a single choice for a whole day? I can’t think of any mission more impossible than that, given that even if we spend the day in bed, we have by default chosen to stay in bed.
When making a decision, it is easier to simply enquire “do I want this or not?,” or “should I do this or not?,” instead of “what am I feeling that is leading me to act like this?”
I might choose to sleep the whole day because I am exhausted after overworking myself for weeks. Or maybe I went a bit too crazy the previous night. So I spend the day in bed out of shame and sadness for something that happened then that I don’t want to deal with just yet. Only I know.
Yet, life would be easy if our reasons were that straight-forward. I can feel empathy for someone begging for money on the street and at the same time feel superior for my kindness of giving money. I can help a friend for the sheer joy of spending time together. But I can also believe that this is my duty as a friend, and I fear losing my friends if I am not “friendly”.
All of these facets could support me taking the same action in their own way, and they can all co-exist. Yet, where I am acting from and what I get to experience is entirely different.
That is the difference between living out of love and living out of fear. Living out of love is an inspiring message, and yet a hard one to apply in practice and live by.
So where comes the question:
Are we living our lives out of love or out of fear?
…and how do we answer that?
To answer the question above with our minds in full honesty, comes the following question:
Which personal reasons do we allow ourselves to see?
Our beautiful and powerful human mind is a trickster. It loves making up stories to make ourselves feel better about ourselves. Self-enhancement is nothing but human nature, as brought up by Douglas S. Massey in his beautiful interdisciplinary book Strangers in a Strange Land. Drawing from evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and sociology, Massey’s studies define human nature as the need to belong, to understand, to control, to self-enhance, and to trust. These are all needs that will increase our chances of survival as social animals.
Self-enhancement can be connected to self-deception, which is not necessarily bad. The things we don’t allow ourselves to see ensure we can go on with our lives without endless cognitive dissonance episodes.
That’s why self-awareness is so difficult. According to Tasha Eurich, only about 10%–15% of the people actually are self-aware. Add to this fact that we all think we are above average, and the math doesn’t add up.
When we don’t pay much attention to what is going on inside of us, we can deviate from our core values and act out of alignment. This makes self-awareness a core tool for emotional regulation.
That is all to say that, if we try to figure out our real motives solely through the mind, chances are we are doomed.
Given the ubiquity of fear in our society, when the mind tells us we are doing something out of fear, it is probably correct. But because of self-enhancement and self-deception, when the mind tells us we are doing out of love, it can be easily lying to us. Again there’s nothing intrinsically bad with that; it is doing it in our best interest, to preserve us and simplify our lives.
The mind can tell us we are donating money out of love when deep down we can be feeling pity, resentment, or reinforcing a sense of superiority.
The key here is that love is a feeling. Unless we actually feel it in our beings as we act, we are not acting out of love, but out of the idea of what we think love should be. When we act like that we expand a sense of righteousness, but not love.
See the difference?
To connect to the wholeness of our being requires us to connect with more than just our minds. That is how we get another perspective of what is going on within us. That is how we get to feel and act out of love.
So… how do we go around the mind?
To connect to different inner voices is a challenge when living in such a mental society. In my personal journey, I’ve found that a beautiful way to connect to our inner truth is through our bodies.
A few years ago I’ve decided that I wanted to have more pleasure in my life. Yet, I struggled. No matter how many affirmations I did and how much I wrote and spoke about it, something was not clicking.
No surprise that was what happened given how stuck in my mind I was. A consequence of being so mental is that in a way we numb our body sensitivities.
I personally had two ways to connect to my body and learn about this. One was through meditation and mindfulness. That is, it was through quieting my mind that I started connecting more to my body. The second one was through dance. The joy and playfulness of dancing like no one is watching cracked a code within me. These two practices have led me to learn how to not only acknowledge what I was feeling but allow it to circulate and expand within me.
Today I find that the real feelings behind our actions can be felt in the body. For love and fear are feelings to be felt. They are not thoughts to dwell in the mind.
What did you feel the last time you gave a present away? It is interesting to perceive how we communicate. When we justify our actions, are we telling stories for our reasons? “I thought it would be a nice thing to give him for his birthday?” Or can we reframe ourselves and say, e.g. “When I saw this book I felt radiant knowing this was something he would love; I felt so much joy as I handed him the present”?
If when I do something I do it actually feeling love and pleasure for sharing love and compassion expanding in my body, then I am doing it out of love. But if when I do it I feel agitation, anxiety, a feeling of duty, of what would happen if I don’t do this? then I am not acting out of love.
To make this diagnosis we need to and feel. This is a mindfulness practice. To slow down. To come to the present, here and now, and observe what is going on with us. The benefits of mindfulness go from increasing overall wellbeing to improved behavioral regulation.
Pause the mind; easier said than done, right? Unfortunately, in a society where we grow so disconnected from our heart and body, we have difficulty (and even fear) surrendering to feeling.
To help us with that, Finish scientists have created the Body Atlas. This map shows where we feel different emotions. A simple exercise is to sit in silence and bring our attention to one specific part of the body and feel what is going on in there. The trick is to have patience and self-compassion to stay in the practice even when we don’t feel anything, and let it emerge in its own way.
How does this impact us in practice?
To reflect about acting out of love or out of fear is relevant in all spheres of life.
Are we choosing our job out of fear of having no money, or out of love for how we want to live and what we want to do? Are we taking environmentally friendly actions out of fear of environmental collapse, or out of love for nature?
When we act out of fear we live based on “have to’s”. This feeling generates pressure and dissatisfaction. Out of fear, we burn out and are never enough.
The result of our actions might be the same, regardless of the reason. But we don’t live the results. We live the processes, the day-to-day, the how. The what is the destination. The reasons, the feelings, the process make the road we walk on every single day.
Don’t we all want to live from a place of love?
The way to expand love in our lives is to keep choosing love. Not with our minds telling us we are choosing love but by actually feeling love in our bodies as we act. Passion. That is how we get turned on by life.
If what we want is a life based on love, we need to allow ourselves to feel love -and act out of it.
To dare to feel and act from it, in full alignment. Instead of spreading fear by acting out of fear, to connect to the love within that is so big that it overflows outwards.
Hi, I am Aline Ra M, spiritual guide, coach, and healer.
I guide people in their path, making sure that they have solid foundations and cohesion, and so they can heal and expand.
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