There are moments on the path when a single insight rearranges everything we thought we knew.

For the past several months, Life has been showing me something through the language of my own body.

Again and again, fear would arise—not because something outside of me was threatening, but because something within me was asking to expand. During a recent medicine journey, that experience reached a profound intensity. Every instinct wanted to contract around it, to contain it, to make it stop. It felt as though something inside me was pressing against my walls of protection. My body interpreted it as danger.

 I have spent years teaching that fear is contracted Life, yet there I was, meeting that contraction in myself.

I knew that this experience was not an isolated moment. It was the continuation of something Life had been revealing to me over the past several months. I knew I was encountering a survival response within my nervous system, but I hadn’t yet seen the deeper invitation. It wasn’t simply asking me to move through fear. That contraction was something altogether different—a vastness asking for more room than I had ever allowed myself to inhabit. It was asking me to become more permeable.

As my awareness expands, as my consciousness deepens, and as more of my true nature awakens and remembers itself, I am being asked to grow alongside it. Spirit is not only inviting me into something greater; it is inviting me to become spacious enough to carry it. Yet my body was registering that expansion as fear. I began to see that my nervous system was sensing an increase in life force long before my mind could understand what was happening; what I had interpreted as danger was actually love, joy, freedom, and power asking for more room within me.

The following day, I wasn’t trying to understand what had happened. I wasn’t searching for answers or trying to overcome the experience. I remained present, allowing the sensations moving through my body to exist without resistance.

Then, quietly, a teaching I have shared with others returned to me as though I were hearing it for the very first time:

Fear is power rising in the body.

In an instant, nothing had changed…and everything had changed. The sensations were the same. Only my relationship to them was different. And there it was. In that moment, something inside me relaxed; the meaning had changed.

We often believe that healing means learning to eliminate fear, but it is far more profound than that. Healing is learning to recognize when what we have called fear is actually Life asking for more room within us. Not every fear is disguised power. Sometimes fear is wise. Sometimes it protects us. But there are moments on the spiritual path when the body begins carrying more life force than the identity has ever known. The nervous system feels the increase. The mind labels it as danger. The body contracts. Not because the power is dangerous but because it has not yet learned that it is safe to embody more of it.

That realization also brought me back to something I’ve been contemplating in my own healing.

Recently I learned that the physical pain I had been experiencing was caused by congestion, dilated veins, where blood had begun to pool rather than move freely.

Blood is Life. Blood nourishes. Blood is movement. Symbolically, my body was revealing something beyond the physical. Blood carries life force throughout the body, and congestion interrupts its natural flow. In the same way, fear creates contraction, and contraction restricts the flow of life force within us. The life force itself is never diminished; it is held, waiting for enough openness and safety to move freely once again.

Not because something is broken but because something has been holding it. Isn’t that what we do with our own power? We feel something beginning to rise like joy, truth, creativity, freedom, love, and then the nervous system whispers. Too much! And so we tighten. Not because these qualities are dangerous, but because they ask us to become someone we have never allowed ourselves to be.

There is another initiation that often comes after we’ve learned to hold pain. It is learning to hold radiance. Many of us have become remarkably skilled at carrying suffering. We know how to survive, endure, and organize our lives around limitations. But can we carry joy, freedom, love of our own magnitude?

Those questions often feel far more unsettling than learning to survive hardship because suffering preserves the identity we have known. But power changes it! Power quietly asks, “Who are you if you stop organizing your life around limitations?” That question can feel terrifying. Not because we are becoming someone new but because we are remembering someone ancient. The deepest spiritual work has never been about becoming. It has always been about remembering.

Lately another word has been finding me. Permeability. I believe it may become one of the defining words of my own work. When I speak of becoming more permeable, I do not mean becoming emotionally porous or absorbing everyone else’s pain, quite the opposite. Permeability is not the absence of boundaries; it is the presence of living boundaries. Life depends upon that intelligent permeability.

Becoming more permeable is not the same as becoming open to everything. It is to become more available to Spirit. It is the quiet willingness to let truth move us, love soften us, wisdom guide us, and Life flow through us without meeting it with constant resistance. We are not asked to absorb the world’s fear, opinions, or projections. We are invited to cultivate an intelligent openness—a heart that can recognize what nourishes the soul and gently release what does not. Permeability is not the loss of discernment; it is the deepening of it.

A river offers a beautiful teaching. When water meets a boulder, it doesn’t argue with it or become less powerful by yielding. It simply continues flowing. Its strength is not found in resistance but in movement. The same is true within us. We can feel grief without becoming grief. We can feel fear without becoming fear. We can experience joy without clinging to joy. We can love without needing to possess.

Experiences move through us because we no longer insist on holding them. Power begins to flow where contraction softens. Perhaps this is why so many wisdom traditions speak of becoming an empty vessel. Not because we disappear. But because a vessel filled with resistance has nowhere for Life to enter.

We are not here to manufacture power; we are simply learning to stop obstructing it. The measure of our spiritual maturity is not how much power we can generate; it is how much power we can allow to move through us without contraction.

As I reflect on these past weeks, I find myself wondering if there is something even deeper beneath what I first recognized as power. Power is not the destination; power is what love feels like when nothing is resisting it.

So maybe the next time fear rises within you, rather than asking,

“How do I get rid of this?” you might gently ask, “If this were power instead of fear… how would I meet it?”

I have a feeling your body already knows the answer.

Aho.
All my relations.