A New Courage

From Gary Zukav:
Spiritual growth requires becoming aware of everything you are feeling and using your will to change yourself instead of trying to change others. It takes courage to experience your emotions because many of them are painful, and it takes courage to do something you have not tried before or really applied yourself to doing before.

Courage is using your will to face your own fears instead of trying to change everyone else. That is the new courage. It is not the recklessness of a daredevil, or breaking thirty bones in your body while rock climbing (which an acquaintance of ours did), or parachuting at night with combat equipment (which I did). It is the courage to do what you need to do in order to keep your commitment to yourself, especially when your commitment is to experience all of the frightened parts of your personality and challenge and change them instead of indulging them or running from them.

When you are in a power struggle, for example, and you know you are right, you are impatient, judgmental, and angry. Will you continue the struggle until you win or until you and the other are both fatigued and more distant than ever, or will you challenge the part of your personality that does not care about the other and stretch yourself beyond the limited perceptions of the frightened part of your personality that is determined to be victorious? Choosing love at that moment requires more courage than most feats of bravery that you can imagine (such as rock climbing and night parachute jumps).