Do you enjoy intimate relationships? Do you have a compelling vision for your life? Do you have passion? Are you courageous? Are you curious and adventurous? Do you forgive easily? What do you trust?

These are some of many Soul qualities that are obstructed by the presence of fear. The stronger the fears in you the more effort you put in controlling you and others. In contrast, individuals aligned with their Soul are passionate, responsible and consistently overcome obstacles and self imposed limitations.

The Soul is also known as the “immortal personality” meaning it is the vehicle for Spirit to experience a self-aware and conscious physical Life. Death is a transition the Soul goes through when Spirit “leaves” the body. Unlike the ego identity, a Soul doesn’t die, it lives on and serves as the repository of wisdom for Spirit.

 By wisdom I mean every experience that produces Self-knowledge that transforms the Soul. Spirit’s joy is to experience experience and discover itself in the process. The Soul is not only a container with memory for past experiences, it is an expression of the intelligence of life. Your Soul is the aspect of you that feels deeply, is impressionable meaning gets affected and shaped by experiences, is intrinsically innocent and is inherently curious seeking self knowledge and understanding the meaning of this life.

 It is your Soul that yearns to know: who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where will I go from here? If you don’t ponder these questions you have not yet discover your deeper nature. To value these questions requires that you mature and transcend identifying with your ego and instead begin to identify with your Soul.

 The Soul gets stuck in limiting patterns when it pursues an impulse from Spirit and it doesn’t gain knowledge from the experience. When this happens your soul is compelled to recreate the same experience as a theme that repeats again and again. When an experience keeps reappearing it is a Soul lesson. Fears of many kinds prevent your soul from completing life lessons.

 Your Soul knows Spirit is unconditional freedom and so it knows when it isn’t free and it instinctively seeks liberation. Can you recognize the aspect of you that yearns for Self-expression? Are you aware of your fear of being dominated? Do you fear being controlled and manipulated?

 Alchemy

 Alchemy is an ancient science that seeks to turn base metals into gold by removing impurities. When an impurity is transmuted the base metal returns to its pure essence, gold. Soul alchemy is not concerned with material acquisitions. Instead, it is a determination to purify the Soul by seeing through all the beliefs in separation the ego takes for granted.

 The Soul identifies with the ego and the ego identifies with the body. This allows the soul to gain knowledge from experiencing physicality. The soul accomplishes this by “forgetting” it is non-physical and instead sees itself as the ego. The ego has a unique “sense/feeling” of being an entity that is separate from the rest of creation.

 The ego identity is a temporary mental form the Soul takes while experiencing itself as a mind with a body. The ego is the outcome of animal intelligence that has learned to think. This intelligence is hardwired to survive and therefore, fear of death and fear of getting hurt are the major preoccupation for the ego. To maintain the “concept” of safety the ego learns to anticipate threats by fixating its attention on worrying about the future. This worrying is sustained by false limiting beliefs that are suppressed out of awareness.

 “Limiting false beliefs in the ego are the impurities that Soul Alchemy removes”

 Limiting beliefs are constructed from painful experiences that were misinterpreted and given false meanings. Soul alchemy is the process of discovering your spiritual nature by completing life lessons and realizing what is false in your beliefs. The ego with its limited linear and analytical thinking is incapable to know truth from falseness. Higher intelligence from the unconditioned Spirit is required to know truth. I call this intelligence common sense, wisdom, inspiration and revelation. These forms of intelligence access knowledge directly without the bias of limiting beliefs.

 The ego identity is an extension of the Soul

 Spirit is the source of intelligence that is the essence of life. I like using the analogy of water to understand how Spirit can exits in different forms simultaneously. Your true nature is unconditioned Spirit experiencing itself as creation through the medium of the Soul. The soul experiences itself as a human being through the medium of the ego.

 Think of Spirit as the wetness of water and your Soul as pure transparent clean water. No matter what form water takes it is always wet. This is one absolute characteristic of water. The wetness of water is like the freedom of Spirit and, no matter what form the Soul is in, Spirit is all-ways free.

 Now, when water is a gas it has the most freedom to move in space, this is like the unconditioned form of the Soul. When water becomes denser it turns into a liquid, it is fluid and has the freedom to take the form of any container it is placed in.  The ego is a denser pattern of energy the souls forms itself into in order to have and understand physical experiences.

Liquid water can also take in any substance it is mixed with. When you place blue ink in a glass of water it turns the water blue. Likewise the ego’s beliefs color the density of the Soul. The ego is a denser form of the soul that ideally matures by relinquishing control. Letting go of control depends on letting go of beliefs in separation. Ultimately the ego must face all its fears if it is to function properly. Overcoming fear prepares the ego to serve as a transparent container willing to act out the Soul’s creativity, which is inspired by Spirit.

 When water becomes even denser it turns into ice, which has the least freedom of movement, and it is now in the solid state. Ego’s core fears beliefs are like walls of ice that limit the fluid and creative movement of your soul.

 Indeed fear is like ice. As water becomes denser it looses its freedom of movement. Internally the atoms that make up the molecules of water in ice continue to vibrate and move. Likewise even thou the ego is a crystallized form of your Soul it has the potential to become freer and more fluid as it lets go of core fear beliefs.

 Did you know that the energy of fear is cold? Indeed it is and the stronger the fear the colder body temperature becomes. Panic makes you shiver and terror paralyses you, fear makes you more solid while Love makes you more spacious!

 What is the effect of Fear?

 The effect of fear is to hold back self-expression and to limit imagination and creativity to the pursuit of survival and comfort. Psychological fear is fear generated by past memories projected into the future in the present moment. This form of fear is what your ego holds onto for the purpose of creating and maintaining the concepts of lack and safety. Psychological fear generates a contraction of the Soul’s expanded awareness when there isn’t a “real” threat. Fear base beliefs create the perception “I’m not safe” by remembering the feelings of having been hurt.

 You can only fear what you already know, reflect on this. When there are no memories of fear to compare what is happening now then, the natural response to something unknown is curiosity. If you doubt this just look at young children!

 Think of fear as: False Evidence Appearing Real. What the ego fears is the reoccurrence of a known past that was scary and painful. Fear hallucinates a negative future modeled from a past long gone. Psychological fear is not real now. In daily life there are neutral circumstances few of which represent a threat that requires actions. Fear colors perception by anticipating and expecting worse case scenarios that are not real in this present moment. Therefore in most circumstances no defensive action is required.

 Ego perceives only what it believes and it fundamentally believes in separation. Fear of being separate from Love is what drives people to attack, control and manipulate those they love. The outcome of these pre-rational behaviors is manifesting proof of what the ego already believes: love hurts, is dangerous and unreliable. The sources of this belifs are the wounds of rejection and abandonment by those we needed to nurture, help, value and care for us. The truth is love loves and it feels good!

 In the human condition fear of lacking what is needed mobilizes aggression to “get” or to deny the need. People’s tendency towards anger and hatred is a reaction to the presence of fear already in them. You cannot maintain an attitude of hostility without the perception of a threat. For most people the feeling of living with the danger of a threat is a continuous subconscious experience. This is what passes as “normal” ego existence. Check how deeply relaxed you feel and how calm your mind is in anyone moment. When an adult person feels completely safe they are at ease enjoying a state of quiet inner peace and serenity.

 The healing nature of Love

 The nature of Love is to nurture, connect, unite and bring closeness and togetherness inside individuals and among people. Dis-ease is separation from ease, healing is integrating this separation. When an individual awakens to the true nature of Love they intuitively end their inner hostility. Without inner hostility it is possible to respond to external challenges with intelligence and strength, the mature form of aggression. For example, being compassionate, having clear boundaries, acting without hesitation, being truthful in difficult circumstances, all these require inner strength.

 Lovingness reveals the illusion of inner separation experienced by the ego. The ego in responding to its needs adapts by recreating inside itself the external environment it experienced in childhood.

 In childhood the child experiences her parents as the source of love that are also the symbols of authority and power. The parents ideally provide safety and the sense of value the child’s soul will be imprinted with. Childhood experiences are the source of Soul lessons. The child’s developing ego is imprinted by how it is treated. When one or both parents relates to the child in ways that threatens or devalues the child, she memorizes these events and unconsciously keeps recreating them in intimate relationships.

 Ego develops an inner voice of authority that is heartless and cruel by internalizing how her parents behaved towards her. This “judge” determines if you are good enough or not, guilty or innocent, deserving of love or not. The inner judge acts like a parent making decisions that are based on some external unreachable standard. People’s inner life is tormented by inner hostility and fear acted out as self-judgments and devaluing comparisons. This inner voice is a false source of authority because it lacks the intelligence of love and the fairness and justice of truth.

 The ego has a library of unpleasant negative emotions as the raw material for maintaining its identity. Fears of all kinds generate mental confusion, physical weakness, insecurity, self-doubt, cowardly behavior and unworthiness. These painful contracting emotions turn aggression into self-hatred acted out as self-sabotage. This inner hostility the ego unconsciously projects to others in order to maintain a familiar powerless victim identity.

 The nature of Love is to love the essence of truth. Love accepts, allows and appreciates what is as it is, love of truth is liberating! The nature of the ego is to see only the appearance of things and react instinctively. The presence of Love clarifies the perception of unworthiness and insecurity. Love’s function is to be an agent of healing by integrating the different fragments of the ego that are in conflict.

 Soul alchemy consists in unifying and owning aggression that is split into strong self-hatred that generates strong fears. Love for who you are ignites the sense of value that is missing in you. Lovingness is the only real, natural and authentic medium where a person can feel truly safe. Authentic Self worth is experiencing a sense of belonging to life, your life!

In the process of Soul alchemy attention is directed inwardly to a true source of authority, which makes common sense decisions based on truth not beliefs. Ego makes decisions from the defense-attack perspective of fear. Ego’s perception is colored by beliefs that are distortions of the objective truth of a situation. It takes courage to face challenges. Lovingness opens you up and Love’s power is what unifies strength in service of truth. Are you willing to confront your fears? Are you ready to ignite the flames of passion for your life?

Written by Osiris Montenegro

http://www.becomeselfaware.com