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I have been inspired to write about courage, and also to live courageously, by deeply listening to what I know to be true. This knowing sometimes whispers quietly, and sometimes it screams so loudly that it is impossible to ignore it. When I acknowledge this knowing, I naturally live in alignment with that courage. In fact courage is my true nature, and it lives through me.  At a certain point in my life, I came to the realisation that I have no choice but to see that my whole life is dedicated to that courage. To live otherwise, never feels truly alive. To stay in limited beliefs about myself, or to never take any risks in what I do, say or feel, seems to not be a life worth living. Once you start to acknowledge that life is really about living on the edge, and endlessly losing what you think you know, and who you think you are, you see that life brings such gifts. You may lose everything you think you have, but you receive everything that is truly worth having.

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‘It takes courage to wake up out of the dream of who you thought you were. And waking up does not happen to someone who is fitting in and following the flock of sheep. It is a willingness to keep putting your head in the lion’s mouth. A willingness to risk it all in order to feel alive. It is a willingness to live for the love of truth, no matter what. The love of truth and courage go hand in hand. You can not truly love truth, without the courage to die for it’

‘You spend your life pretending to be someone. You pretend that you know what you are doing. You pretend that you are grown up and that you know what you are talking about. You have serious conversations about things that seem to seriously matter to you. You try to build things that you believe mean that you will be more safe and secure. You hold on tightly to other people because you imagine that they know better than you do. Perhaps you always have had a sense that you are only pretending, but you don’t know what else to do, or how else to survive in this world. Perhaps you think that you are the only one who is pretending to know, and that everyone else really knows.’

‘But although you are terrified of it, you long to just simply let go and fall into the emptiness. You long for it all to just stop.  What peace, what relaxation that would be….’

‘Waking up to what is true, requires a certain honesty and enquiry similar to that of a scientist. You only rely on what you can know through investigation, and checking for yourself, without referring to what other people have told you, or what you have read.’

‘You long for peace and look in nature to find it. You long to be able to live authentically, so you adjust your actions according to what you think is more authentic. You long to be free from pain and fear, and try to fix your world to rid it of whatever hurts or frightens you. You long for a final rest from all the effort of trying to be be someone in this world. You long to disappear, and even to die.’

‘Although you may have heard of very spiritual and wise people who have become enlightened through meditation or by other yogic or zen practices, the waking up I am referring to here in this book, is available to everyone, no matter how ordinary.’

‘This story of ‘me’ is a story of limits and boundaries – this is ‘me’, and this is not ‘me’. Life is perceived as a made up of lots of separate parts, each relating to ‘me’, or meaning something about ‘me’. ‘

‘To know the nature of Self is to explore the whole of reality. To live, to feel, to touch Life in its entirety. There are no limits to this exploration. It is not for ‘me’ to arrive at a certain final goal, when everything is fully realized and when I win a prize for ‘me’. No, it is Life exploring itself, like this, and like this, and like this… Seeing what is real right now beyond the assumptions of thought. Lifting the veil of assumption to see the whole of reality. This is the nature of Self, ever expanding, ever including, ever opening to itself… myself.’

‘Once you awaken to who you really are, life as you thought you knew it, begins to unravel. Losing more and more. Realising that everything that you thought was safe and secure is actually an illusion. Being left with nothing to hold on to. No safety, nothing that is known’