Courage!
17 Sep 2009
No one wants to be a “scaredy-cat,” especially the Cowardly Lion. We don’t want to feel afraid or to be cowardly, but we’re just not sure how to feel peaceful, safe, or courageous. The Cowardly Lion famously said: Courage! What makes a king out of a slave? Courage! What makes the flag on the mast to wave? Courage! What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist, or the dusky dusk? What makes the muskrat guard his musk? Courage! What makes the sphinx the seventh wonder? Courage! What makes the dawn come up like thunder? Courage! What makes the Hottentot so hot? What puts the “ape” in apricot? What have they got that I ain’t got?
What, indeed, do courageous individuals have that we seem to be lacking? Most of us have experienced courageous moments in our life, if by “courageous” we mean that we felt the fear, but did whatever we needed to do anyway. When it comes right down to it, if we didn’t feel afraid, there would be no need for courage, right? Being courageous really has nothing to do with “fearlessness.” Courage is all about rising above our fears. In fact, the overcoming of our fears may be the greatest adventure of our life! That’s why the Cowardly Lion was willing to follow the yellow brick road…the promise of courage lay at the end of it.
Acknowledging our fears is like turning on the light. It shakes things up, gets our fears on the move, so to speak. Puts them out where we can see them for what they are: conditioned responses that can be changed. “Fear,” it’s been said, is the “misuse of imagination.” The Cowardly Lion admitted, You’re right, I am a coward! I haven’t any courage at all. I even scare myself. We are mentally creative beings, free to use our imagination in any way we choose. Too often we are using it to create fearful images and visualize negative outcomes. Fear and anxiety are stoked by our belief that something “bad” will inevitably happen to us at some point.
How can we use our imagination in a positive, life-enriching, self-empowering way? If we were to live each moment “within” that moment only, if we were to be “present in the Present,” anxiety and worry (which are future based and colored by past experience) would dissolve in our full awareness of the Great Possibilities of the moment. When the moment came for the Cowardly Lion to help his friends, he “forgot” who he thought he was and was to focused “in the moment” to even think about a negative outcome.
If we are willing to face our fears and move through them — rather than becoming immobilized by them — within the very process of asking more of ourselves, we discover a new inner strength, a more empowered self, and more confidence in expressing ourselves in the world. Swami Chetanananda wrote: “Your resources are infinite events, which you organize and mobilize to the depth of your capability at the moment.” Or, as the Wizard of Oz would say, “…you’ve got them. You’ve had them all the time.”
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