Fear and Turning Inward
Day #1 Fear, Trust and Learning to Tell a Better Story
I wrote for 37 days in a row about my spiritual apprenticeship with Hilma af Klint, and though I have more to say about this, I felt myself slowing down. I thought I would stop at 44 paintings/ reflections but once I felt myself slowing down, I decided rather than push it, I would let it be.
This is new to me: Paying attention to where my energy is flowering and when it’s not, allowing myself to stop, to reflect, and to go try something else.
Here is what I decided to try for the next 30 days in a row:
This last month has felt particularly turbulent, with lots of difficulties and conflicts in personal relationships and for me a sense of looming fear: things are changing and I am trying to keep up, but I am afraid.
I need to find new sources of income but I am afraid of what I will find and also that I will not find anything. I am worried about my financial survival, getting a job, being old and without a means of support in a work world made for bright young up and coming workaholics.
I am worried about the people I know and their emotional well being too.
A friend of mine can’t find a place to rent in Portland’s extremely difficult housing market.
Another friend of mine is a talented healer who needs a break from her family and can’t even find 20 minutes alone except by locking herself in a bathroom and even then she feels guilty.
I have several friends who are struggling with taking care of someone with mental illness, faced with overwhelming responsibilities in addition to too much isolation and not enough and some days I have felt myself slipping into a depression.
I stay up worrying, telling myself to just stop. To get off the train of potential slow motion catastrophes
In the past, when I became fearful, I got stuck for a long time in what I call the swamp: a place of despair where everything plan I make to get myself going seems to instead drive me deeper into thoughts and feelings that make it harder to see any other possibility. Stuck between a rock and a place of constant flailing. Knowing I need to do something but not being able to do the thing I need to do to get me out of the emotional inertia of the swamp.
The Project: I am going to spend the next thirty days exploring fear , trying to describe how it operates in my life and in the lives of those that I know.
I keep getting the message that I am not going to find the answers outside of myself but only by turning inward and listening to my own inner wisdom.
I need to learn to tell myself a different story.
In addition to describing the problem, I am going to see if I can channel some practical advice on how to develop a different relationship with fear.
I am tired of always looking over my shoulder, worried, afraid that things will get worse.
I want to learn how to turn my attention in a new direction, to imagine that things could get better.
In the same way that I have been channeling paintings, I asked Master Kuthumi who is teaching me to channel, what it is that the human collective needs to know today.
Here’s the message I got:
Connection is necessary.
Reach out with open hands
to your pets, to a tree, to your beloveds,
who are also the source of your greatest annoyance
Reach out and touch and caress, even what annoys you:
Those rumbling complaints and dissatisfactions, the anxieties you are trying to keep out of your peripheral vision
Tickle the belly of these fears.
Play a game of peekaboo.
Sing yourself a lullaby for sweet dreams
When you don’t know what to do
Cry.
Laughter and tears: This is how you get through, this is how to feel your way through, until the next door appears.
