Monday, May 6, 2013

Lessons from Little Plastic Lions


I’m sure someone at some point in your life has asked you “what would you do if you won the lottery?”  It may sounds like a fantasy question and fun to play with your answers, but it really is a quite realistic inquiry referring directly to the removal of financial limits or fears from your life.  Let me rephrase the question, “What would you with your life if you had no fear?”  Before we answer that, I want to discuss my thoughts on the definition of fear.  Fear is simply the absence of love.  To me, as I understand it, there are really only two emotions, love and fear.  So if I’m not feeling love, than my emotion is coming from fear.  And the funny thing about fear is that it is all a façade taught to us as we “grow” through life.  Fear limits us.
 
The other day my 4 year old daughter, Alexa and I were playing with some tiny plastic animals in her bedroom.  Next to a few select stuffed animals, these little plastic animals are by far her favorite toys.  As usual, she handed me a tiny lion and kept another with her exclaiming that I am Simba and she is Nala.  Every so often I play along with this Lion King theme, but most of the time I try to change the rules by changing my lion’s name and giving him some sort of super powers.  When she protests, I tell her that I don’t want to play some characters in some movie someone else already created; I want to create a completely new scene, with new characters open with possibility.  I have said this to her at least 50 times before, but only recently did the message truly sink into MY consciousness.  Just like in Alexa’s creative play her lion characters are limited by what she knows to be true about their characters from the movie, the life we are taught to see limits our beliefs about our potential which limits us.  I have known this in theory for many years, but recently the magnitude of this reality is really resonating with me.  Think about this, right now, imagine, and try to truly understand the unlimited open-wide potential we all have at our finger tips when we remove the barriers of fear and perceived limitations.  Now, let me ask you “What would you do with your life if you had no fear?”