Theologian Paul Tillich on the interplay of anxiety and fear and how they feed in to one another at the very foundation of the human mind.
Tag: Fear
Audre Lorde – A Litany for Survival
Audre Lorde's 'A Litany for Survival' is a prayer for the marginalized, those living on the shoreline or on the 'constant edges of decision', whose forbidden loves occur in hidden places and times.
Jack Gilbert – Failing and Flying
Fearing future outcomes should not stop us from pouring ourselves fully into today. As Jack Gilbert reminds us: 'Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.'
Ross Gay – Thank You
To feel fearful is to feel small and sometimes overwhelmed by life and death which appear to be separate and distinct from one another and from ourselves.
Florence Scovel Shinn and the Game of Love
Published in 1925, The Game of Life and How to Play It was a trailblazing tome of self-help literature couched in positive thinking and affirmative actions.
Theodore Roethke – The Waking
Theodore Roethke was an intensely introspective poet whose work has been hailed by critics as some of the finest American poetry from the last century.
Imagine That Our Only Job is to Mirror Each Other’s Goodness
Ruth King is a writer and Buddhist teacher who focuses on working with racial identity in learning meditation and using the tools of spiritual practice to examine one's own racial being. King combines western psychology with eastern philosophy and indigenous wisdom to coach her students in becoming more aware of their underlying areas of fear and vulnerability as well as the key points of their own rigidity.
If Love Will Not Swing Wide the Gates, No Other Power Will
James Baldwin describes his own coming of age and awakening to spiritual and political consciousness as beginning with the revelation of sin: 'I became, during my fourteenth year, for the first time in my life, afraid—afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without.'
The Inscrutable Energy that Preserves the Breach
In this excerpt from an article published prior to the release of Between the World and Me, Coates talks about his childhood in West Baltimore. He describes the gap he felt between his own world and the world he saw through the TV set, as well as the perplexity and disingenuity of being fed a stream of non-violent role models at school.
The One Motive Power in the Universe
In this extract from an essay about bhakti and devotional love written in the late 19th century, Swami Vivekananda - the 19th century spiritual reformist and teacher of Vedanta who was instrumental in popularizing Hinduism and yoga in the west - makes the difference between empty religious ritual and the burning desire for union with God, which is as real as any hunger or thirst.