As we walk the path of enlightenment, we learn many lessons many times over, often understanding more and gaining a deeper appreciation for the truth each time. One of the divine truths that many souls must digest more than once has to do with building our inner peace on divine connection with such an unshakable foundation that events and factors external to that connection (while they may affect us) cannot wobble or weaken our inner peace.

In and along the pursuit of these goals, we realize that certain worldly disturbances reflect the fears that evolution and society have programmed into our flesh. We become capable of the freeing realization that the fears of our flesh need not become fears of our soul. When we achieve a certain level of enlightenment, we realize our soul needn’t have any fears at all, as all that a soul needs is divine connection.

Our flesh, on the other hand, needs a number of substances to continue to survive as well as a number of optimum factors to achieve the state it identifies as comfort and contentment. Our flesh may also learn over time to send signals of discontent, even in response to factors that don’t naturally affect it, but that it identifies as irritants. When our souls mistakenly buy into the narratives of the flesh, we can come to believe that we cannot be at peace in the presence or under the “influence” of those irritants.

Part of our journey toward enlightenment necessarily involves rejecting the beliefs of the flesh and waking to the truth about our very self-sufficient and untouchable divine souls:

• Awakened souls may find themselves in the presence of something their flesh used to identify as an irritant (loud music, rambunctious children, conflicting ideologies) and gratefully recognize these previously “noxious” stimuli, that they once assigned as “responsible” for their discontent, no longer produce a negative reaction from their bodies and brains.
• Seekers who have more fully mastered their spiritual practice can demonstrate how, with their souls at peace, their bodies don’t even require some of those optimum factors (such as an “optimal” temperature) to remain “comfortable and content.”
• And while plenty of skepticism remains, evidence points to the rarest and most gifted among us having the ability to sustain their physical bodies, absent even the substances such as food and water, long thought vital to its survival.

If we find ourselves regularly or even occasionally disturbed by fleshly fears such as fear of disappointment, fear of “loss,” or fear of death, we should mindfully take note of those disturbances. Inside our meditative practice, we can look to divine truth to dispel them.

Importantly, this process needn’t be defined or described as “expelling” the fears or “conquering” them. Using verbs that connote an active use of force on our part only lends credence to the idea of the fear as a “real thing.” Rather, the light of divine truth exposes what our bodies have defined as a thing to fear for the illusion it actually is. As our souls progress in our dedication to our meditative practice, our devotion to truth and our desire for enlightenment, our fleshly fears naturally and passively fall away from our outlook, both inside and eventually outside of meditation.

Remember, it may not be a quick or straight-forward process. Past traumas, PTSD and various manifestations of neurodiversity can entangle and slow the progress. Every soul must work at its own pace and in its own time. Regression and what we may experience as “setbacks” in our spiritual growth happen all the time, can last for weeks, months or years, and should not be seen as failures or indicators that we have lost our ability to move forward in our spiritual pursuits. As with every spiritual practice, continued faith and commitment to forward motion, no matter how slow remains essential.

When we tap into divine wisdom, we can actualize the joyful truth that the fears of our flesh need not become the fears of our souls. In doing so, we free ourselves from the false assumptions that our flesh makes about what it takes to be content and at peace.