Courage is usually seen as heroism or acts of daring. It doesn’t strike us to think of courageousness in terms of one’s inner life yet as the writer Carl Sandburg once wrote, “Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.” Facing the natural and man-made obstacles to growing into one’s truest self obliges us to cultivate virtues that often surpass our imagination. Though many of us know material comfort and advantage, if we are walking a path of enlightenment, wholeness or healing, we cannot help but occasionally stagger when confronted with the overwhelm of life’s demands and tragedies. Feelings stirred by daily doses of the media’s images can be full of ambivalence. And as we habituate to “bad news” we tend to respond with numbness or avoidance. We are tempted to retreat to our distractions and rationalizations yet . . . wakefulness beckons us to look, listen and feel.

In waking we then face the challenge of learning to navigate our inner terrain. When we commit to a spiritual discipline or explore our personal psychology we encounter a mind teeming with concerns and emotions that rouse another kind of overwhelm.

In his book Going on Being, Dr. Mark Epstein describes his path as a psychiatrist and Buddhist—practices that took him beyond his known self. One of his revered teachers, Jack Kornfield, emphasized taking a path with heart. This meant that his emotional life could not be ignored or pushed aside. It called him to learn to trust the vitality and strength of his emotional experiences. As Jack guided, “The mind creates the abyss, and the heart crosses it.” And the bridge the heart traverses is one made of courage.

As I’ve repeatedly witnessed, we fear our feelings based on believing they have the power to overwhelm or capture us. We fear that the self we imagine ourselves to be won’t endure this overwhelm. So to guard against a flood of feeling we live our lives through our intellect, impulses and conditioned beliefs. But ironically this creates a false self, so ultimately the self we are fearful of losing turns out to be an illusion. As Epstein encourages, “If we can learn not to fear our feelings, we gain access to the real. We have the opportunity to reclaim our going on being”.

This is where courage comes in. For as the Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote: “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.” Yet in opening up to feelings and healing often our own courage feels impossible to imagine. At times of greatest challenge tiny ingredients of courage can both foster it and issue forth from it. These ingredients are:

C for Conviction. To respect ourselves we search within for what we believe is right and take a stand on what we find. In taking a stand it means becoming all we are meant to be.
O for Openness. In the face of fear it is easy to shrink or contract but when we open up to fear we expand. As the author Ambrose Redmoon writes: “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.”
U for the Unknown. When we step over fear and go forward, inward or outward we engage with the unknown. Courage is the power to let go of the familiar. How true it is, as stated by André Gide, that a woman or a “man cannot discover new oceans unless s/he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
R for Risk. Courage is more than standing for a firm conviction. It includes the risk of questioning that conviction and allowing mistakes, as well as victories. Risks can be life-giving for they help you grow braver and better than you think you are.
A for Awareness. With each risk learning multiplies. As awareness expands old conditioning, beliefs and behaviors are exposed. Holding steady as an outworn sense of self is dismantled takes courage.
G for Grace. We might not think of ourselves as courageous and sometimes we don’t have a clue about where our strength comes from. As Ernest Hemingway writes it may be that our courage turns out to be “grace under pressure”.
E for Endurance. Changes take time and patience—usually much more than we want or anticipate. With courage you can stay on the path of change for the long haul. It’s as Sir Winston Churchill believed: “Kites rise highest against the wind--not with it”.

Fly on!