The Art of Transmuting Fear into Love and Why that matters for Leaders & Changemakers.

Eckhart Tolle speaks of transmuting darkness into light in The Power of Now. I'm starting to understand what he really meant.

When the concept of transmuting darkness into light or pain into love first made itself known to me, it became one of those ‘aha’ moments we cherish.

You know the type. A realisation that rattles the mind’s carefully laid jigsaw, a momentary lapse in sense-making; our straitjacket sense of reality flung wide open by a piece of information which it does not yet know what to do with. If you look closely at these moments, it’s possible to see that the sense of awe and freedom we feel comes not from learning something new but the unlearning it forces us to undergo. The mind enters a state of spacious unknowing and for just a moment, we experience the deep peace inherent to our universe and therefore ourselves. Over time, the pieces find their new grooves, the mind stabilises and we return to a state of relative indifference.

That moment of awe contains the kernel of enlightenment. Alas, I digress (quite happily, I might add) - that’s another post in its entirety.

Back to transmutation. When I first read them, Tolle’s words produced an aha moment that quickly made perfect sense to me.

Ironically, I had no idea what he was on about.

I took the process of transmutation and did the only thing a mind can do with things: I solved it rather than sat with it. I figured it out rather than felt into it. Bought the biggest torch I could find and sprinted off into the darkness to give it the light it deserved.

In trying to create light, I dominated the darkness.

In other words, I told it that it was wrong.

I thought that transmutation meant changing oneself as a result of ‘facing’ one’s fears. But the way we normally face our fears is by trampling over them. We don’t truly meet them. Our version of facing our fears really means walking through the experience that causes us fear, armed with a cognitive baseball bat ready to whack any of the negative thoughts that come up. Our minds win yet another battle, but the body is left with the bruises. Our strengthening surface serves only to leave us softer underneath.

Here’s a question. Have you ever crawled inside the experience of fear itself, explored it’s nooks and crannies and invited it over for a cup of tea?

Have I? Until this year, the honest answer is no. I thought I had.

I had no idea. I was a pot calling a toaster black.

Spiritual awakening (in the non-dual sense) forces us down into our body. One of my de-facto teachers - Adyashanti - speaks about this. Our mind opens completely in a moment but we find our heart and gut need more time. By moving into our body and allowing ourselves to feel fully, to embrace life through the body, we continue to awaken. There’s much in the body to let go of and for the root of the self to be pulled out, we need to let go of everything. Another article in itself, and one better written by someone much wiser than me.

I can speak to my own experience of this process though. One of the many great gifts I have received as a result of that experience of nirvana has been the radical reshaping of my relationship with my body.* I have always been deeply aware of my feelings, emotions and bodily sensations but I never fully understood how to relate to them. Or perhaps rather, how to stop relating to them and become them. There’s this funny oxymoron that happens on the spiritual path. First, we learn to step back from our emotions and feelings and create space so we can watch them and not react to them. Then, we learn how to come back to them and embody them. Allow them to truly live.

Karina Carter - a distinctly eloquent deeply wise human - recently described to me the most appropriate way to handle someone lost in their emotions: ask for more. That permission to feel allows energy to run clean and burn itself out. It’s a pure process. It’s alchemy.

I was struck by the wisdom of this and realised I have learnt to do this for myself. By becoming a safe space for that emotion, the other person let themselves feel it unreservedly until it’s gone (this is assuming safety within the situation for yourself). I have become the person that asks for more of my fears, pain, anger and sadness. I have become the safe space for my emotions.

By doing so, I realise so much about emotions stuck in my body. I crawl inside them, explore their nooks and crannies and invite them over for tea. I get to know them intimately whilst allowing them to be. I watch them with enough stillness and equanimity to realise they cannot hurt me. I observe them deeply; see how they rise, how they fall, how they flow. Most crucially, I see what they are made of.

Energy. Vibration. And the core, the absolute zero of this energy? Space. Stillness. Silence. Peace. Love.

Pain is love. Fear is love. Anger is love.

Darkness is light.

This time, the aha moment doesn’t so much jumble the jigsaw as it nukes it out of existence. I feel my brain literally re-wiring as my heart opens, erupting with a lava-like love, seeping through my mind-body, setting in stone new pathways in my mind that include less attachment to self and more flow to heart and gut.

It is happening out of and because of the pain. The pain in my body is transmuting itself into love, and that love is becoming the force that holds my mind open, less attached, more free.

I can’t believe it. I’m dumbstruck. All these years, I’ve been stomping all over the elixir of the universe. We look closely enough at the darkness to realise it is light. Then, we let it shine. We move from it. We move with it. We let it move us. We let it awaken us. This entire project, I am constantly reminded, returns to a simple message.

Let it all go. Surrender. Go with it.

The lesson I glean from this is to not run too quickly either away or through the challenges of life. To move with a balanced grace, offering the time, space and compassion necessary for our body to feel what it needs to feel and our minds to process what it needs to process. Sometimes, situations take us outside of our window of tolerance and in these moments, stepping back and out is advised. However, every moment we sit in our feelings fully and truly accept them, we become alchemists.

The benefits this has for our lives - both personal and professional - is exponential. Without it, our bodies hold all of this, whether we slow down to allow it or not. We bring our entire life into every situation in our lives as an energetic charge whether we mentally compartmentalise or not. We become somehow less flexible and more malleable at the same time. We have a shorter fuse and less resilience. We are easier swung by external tides and yet miss the cues that suggest it's time to shift gears. We are more prone to taking and less likely to give. We are out of touch with ourselves and therefore cannot truly be in touch with the world.

If you're a leader, pioneer or changemaker who aspires to leave a truly positive mark on society, being aware of and able to alchemise your inner state is crucial. Nicole Gibson - would love your perspective here. There's nobody better to speak to awareness of our inner state and the effect it has on purpose and performance.

Why do I say crucial?

Our world is largely run by systems and structures imbued with incentives that are not optimised for the benefit of wider humanity. It takes inner stillness and clarity to exist within this system. It's common to either angrily try to break it (the idealist in me loves this one, I recall a wonderful conversation with Mark Rowland that inspired me to reflect on the pain driving my idealism), being broken by it or allowing it to bend you to its will. All of these outcomes are the result of an energetic reaction.

All of the stuck energy, trauma and darkness within us exists as a natural function of living in an imperfect world without the practices that enable transmutation and alchemy. Life gets wonky and our bodies react to it. If we can't process it immediately, it sticks. Then, we react from it, sending more of the same into the world to stick to other people. And so the cycle repeats until we're shooting each other and razing our planet to the ground.

By observing yourself and transmuting your own pain, you're also transmuting the world's pain that was left in your body. You not only become free to pursue the path that is innately suited to you but you do so in a way that literally heals the world. You have taken the world's pain, alchemised it and then returned it back to the world through your project and purpose as love.

Let that sink in.

It's like magic, but it's real and you can do it.

* It’s worth saying that relating this deeply to our emotions does not require an experience of nirvana. These experiences can help us deepen but are not required. The more work one has done in this way prior to these experiences can in fact serve to deepen the impact of a glimpse when it happens. I have written of my own experience here as a way of expressing , but these experiences and ways of working with emotions and the body are not co-dependent.