I cannot tell you how many people I have worked with who hold themselves back because they are afraid of what they “might” be in extreme situations.

How can you be afraid of yourself? Its you! Well, it’s easy to be afraid of your imagination of yourself when you don’t really know who you are.

Here’s the trick -

The people who don’t know who they really are (i.e. most of us) are the people who are constantly holding themselves back from experiencing situations or emotions for fear that they will hit some point and become someone else. Like “If I get really angry I don’t know what I’ll do so I never let myself get really angry.”

When we are exposed to both the angelic and demonic aspects of human nature – think Mother Theresa and serial killer Ted Bundy – we mistake the spectrum of what’s humanly possible as the spectrum of what’s possible for us, as individuals. But these are very different things.

It is essential that each and every one of us knows our own, unique spectrum – what we are capable of when we are at our best and our worst. Because what is possible for Ted Bundy is not possible for 99% of us. And what Mother Theresa did is also not possible for the majority of us. It doesn’t mean we aren’t all capable of a lot. We are. But it’s within the context of our own individual capacities, proclivities, genetics, and consciousness and not determined by the entire spectrum of human possibility.

One of the best ways to know yourself is to experience yourself without stopping the experience. What I mean is to sit with the intensity of a particular emotion, whether love or anger, in a way that is like buckling your seat-belt. Sit with it, observe it, feel it. It will rise and rise and rise then…peak. Then it will fall and go away. It will neither sustain itself nor rise indefinitely.

In growing our capacity to sit with emotions we learn two things:

1) our own individual spectrum

2) that all emotions have a beginning, a middle and an end and will not last forever

Much of our suffering is not the feeling itself, but the feeling that the feeling will never end.

This is as true for grief as it is for love. Many people are overwhelmed by love. They can feel consumed, overly expanded, or out of control. This is because love pulls us out of “self and other” and into all that it is. And it can be scary out there.

As we develop the capacity to sit with our own emotions and learn the perimeters of our on self we not only benefit by being more secure and more open to aliveness, but we also become much more able to sit with the spectrum of other people. The less we fear and judge ourselves, the less we fear and judge others.

Something hit me a number of years ago when I was reading the Christian bible. I came across the verse “Love you neighbor as you love yourself” and it hit me: this doesn’t mean “be nice to everybody” This reveals a profound truth which is: The degree to which we are able to love ourselves is the degree to which we are able to love another.

Think of all the times we leave love, step away from love, abandon the opportunity to love, because we simply cannot get past our on “issues” or our how often our “issues” get in the way. We don’t need to get rid of our issues to love. we need to grow big enough to accommodate all that we are. When we do this we are then big enough to love others as they are.

Learning what our own individual spectrum is doesn’t eliminate our issues, it simply makes it so that we can see what’s really there and not be afraid of the dark – in ourselves and in other people. Imagine how much more trust would be between people - when we stop being afraid of ourselves it’s a heck of a lot easier to love others.