Why do we fear?

I woke up earlier than usual this morning and did yoga. By the time I was finished, it was only 4:40 a.m., so I went back to bed. One portion of my dream was very clear: I was somewhere I'd never been. A friend of mine was driving and we pulled into a small town with little wooden buildings and a dryish landscape. It had an Arizona or New Mexico kind of feel to it. We parted ways - he went off to do his own things and I went to do mine.

I kept walking and found myself on a wide dirt mountain road. There was a vast river running below. Despite a discomfort with heights, I climbed up and stood on the narrow ledge at the roadside to look down at it. I had never seen such a large body of running water. I suddenly felt I was in Guyana (the first time I flew over Guyana I cried when I saw how huge the rivers and trees looked from the plane).

The water in the dream was miles below me, yet because the river was so huge, the spray coming up from its gigantic rapids reached my face. I was frozen, unable to come down from the ledge. When I eventually did, I flopped onto the ground. Because it was bare earth and wet from the spray of the river rapids, it was muddy. I lay there and started to cry in a heaving, chest-opening kind of way - not from sadness or fear, but because everything was so big - in a way that I had never experienced and never imagined experiencing. I was overwhelmed by the unbelievable vastness of the road, the river, the mountainside, the sky, the openness, the emptiness ... and my smallness, like a pinprick in the midst of it all. In that moment I realised it was just me, physically alone, in a place I'd never been, with no one around, no way of getting in touch, no way of knowing if I would ever return. I was totally in Unknown Territory ... and yet for the first time ever, I felt that I was not alone. This realisation is what made me cry. That something so big and open and empty could still embrace me and make me feel like I belonged.

When I got up, I was muddy. I had no cellular phone, no way of knowing how I would get back to the town (because I'd walked so far) and no way of knowing how I would find my friend so that we could drive back "home" (wherever we had come from). Yet it didn't matter. I got up, chose a direction, started walking and made my way back.

This dream was very important. I find myself wondering why I/we ever fear anything.

Why do you doubt? The One who made you will take care of you.

- Yogi Bhajan -