Part 3- Fear
Lots of fear. Around us and in us. I feel it pushing on me, like I’m all of a sudden carrying a boulder up a hill. It is literally in the air, in the energetic field of the earth; a wind of fear is blowing through the world, sliding through every doorway and cracked open window. I see and feel it gripping the people I come into 6-feet measured contact with at the grocery store, hidden behind masks, on the walking trail. I see us all twisting our bodies into gumby shapes, trying to find a new paradigm of personal space dictated by the potential for transmitting death to one another. We don’t know what to do with our bodies, our faces. Is it ok to smile, to wave, to acknowledge another human? We are living with the thought that we could become murderers, or be committing suicide, by stumbling.
I need to breathe, ground myself and focus on someplace in me that can firm my consciousness in someplace fundamentally different than the fear, and let the blobs of fear (that’s really what they are) slide off me rather than building up and squeezing me into a compressed ball. That feels like a matter of survival of my spirit, as much as respecting social distancing is protecting my and others’ bodies.
What I really want is for it not to be there. But here it is. Outside and in.
Because of course I carry fear in me. Everyone does. It’s built into our original equipment. If I’m truthful, it’s there in my gut, waiting, biding its time, ready to rise up and grab me by the throat. I scramble to stay above it like I’m treading water, because I’ve been trained to deny it and be ashamed to have it. I am (in my boomer case) after all a man, a father; to boot one who would claim to be a spiritual man, and then most especially a teacher of others. In my secret, self-castigating inner world, I can’t, by someone’s (you know, “them”) standards, have that fear in me and still be who I’m supposed to be. In my wider culturally mandated shame, and in my no-less-false sub-cultural demand that I fit a certain image, I’ve covered my fear in many ways: with habits, with busyness, with shopping, with anger, with bravado. Even, in moments, with meditation, with “wisdom”, and talking transcendently to and about my guides and teachers. Not always, but definitely sometimes, (and way more than I like to admit) skating above the pockets of fear, inside and around me, that try to suck me down into a lower-self swirl. My denial is particularly painted with criticism and judgment of all the people who don’t do what I imagine that if they only would, I’d feel safe.
I have well-honed and tested spiritual and intellectual justifications for my criticism. But really, underneath, it’s simply about my relationship with my fear. Which the Chinese doctors taught me lurks curled up in the region of my kidneys, which when it’s healthy, fear provides the yin balance of inner focus and cautious awareness. It contributes to grounding. It links me with the vibration of water in the earth. The kidneys steadily secrete inner liquid fuel until the exhaustion of overwork, stress, and denial of the fear unbalances them, leading to eventual contraction and withholding and even pollution of the kidneys’ essential vital force. The result is the unbalanced manifestations of fear: anxiety, paranoia, weakness, confusion, burn-out, and susceptibility to illness; physical emotional, mental. The symptoms can look like many things; the root is unbalanced fear.
In this moment my fear is aimed at the people I love dying and not being able to save them. Again. Of ending up on the street, abandoned, starving, and mad. Again. I’m not scared of my own dying. I’ve come that far. I am scared of the devastating impact I know it would have on the ones who I have come to realize, late in my life, actually love and cherish me. I’m scared of ending up isolated in the hospital at the mercy of a system that has become completely reliant on machines and in rejection of anything outside the allopathic box, in an atmosphere so loaded with negatively charged energies that I might die just from the mediumistic overload. I am scared for the people whose range of options for living within this new paradigm of distance, washing, and controlling our environment and interactions are so much narrower than mine. I am aware of the millions of people who have and will lose their jobs. I am supremely grateful for where I live and for the choices my family has made over decades to adopt a lifestyle that happens to be optimal for these conditions. And my awareness that we are all of us connected- by inner spiritual and energetic reality, and by social, cultural, epidemiologic and moral conditions- links me with those in very different conditions than mine.
I’ve spent my life since I was 18 as an observer, critic, activist, and creator of alternatives to the dominant culture and political structures of my country and world. When I was 18 that critique manifested in political and cultural activism. I marched, fought with cops, went to jail, concerts (I was, honest, at Woodstock), protests, communes, and factories. I was part of various organizations declaring the need for revolutionary solutions to inequality, war, oppression, and fear-based systems. Later, I became a practitioner of natural medicine, joined a spiritual path, and eventually became a teacher of healing and spirituality. I’ve prided myself on my insights, my bullshit meter, my critiques, my unwavering commitment to a new way of life, the small victories for freedom I’ve participated in. I’ve supported, co-created, led, and been part of organizations that claim to be creating a new way to be on earth, operating in ways that aim (with mixed success) to correct the glaring defects of the old order. And now that that order is at the least shaking and no one knows how far it’s going to fall, I realize that in my railing against it, I’ve also counted on it being there. My identity has been, in part, as someone fighting against an opponent who could always be counted on to show up to the bout. I could always put up a valiant fight, knowing he would usually-not always- win. That gave me a certain comfort, even as I railed against it. I knew how the game was played. Now he’s in the corner being patched up with trillion-dollar bandages. And I’m left with secretly mixed feelings about his lying on the ropes. I see how old he is, how tired. How he’s been propped up with drugs and plastic surgery and bailouts and lies and racism and armies. In his ideology-infused dementia, he relies on a team of managers who are proving to be as incompetent and hatefully destructive as is he. They are speeding his end while declaring to be saving him. But he’s still strong, even in his obvious terminal illness, flailing and threatening to take everyone with him as he pollutes everything around him. But he’s been there for me as a foil for my complaints. Next to him I’ve looked good. And I’ve lived in and benefitted from his system that I’ve criticized and hated. Maybe now, I and all my fellow complainers are going to have to finally put up or shut up.
The dominant worldwide paradigm is shaking, showing that terminal weakness, brought to its knees in a matter of a few weeks by nature asserting her dominion. We didn’t pray, plan, and visualize that this is how it would happen, just as the predictors of the shift in humans’ relationship to earth and vice versa didn’t know that nature would choose this way to shrug her shoulders and shake the unconsciously feeding parasites from their complacency, letting us know without any question who is the boss of this planet.
The result, among the many unfolding consequences, is a global uncaging of the beast of fear that lives in each of us and among all of us. The fear that is so obvious at this moment is not new by any means. It has been the underpinning of our economic, social, medical, and religious systems for millennium. The utterly erroneous but almost universally accepted belief in scarcity- of food, of land, of meaningful work, of freedom, of love, human and divine, of salvation, of happiness- has led to eternal conflict, war, inequality, all based on the fear that if I don’t get mine and hoard it, you will take it from me.
The belief in lack is wrapped around a profound fear of nature, misinterpreting the divine gift of a planet with such beauty and abundance as an excuse for a party without thought of consequences, instead of as a responsibility of stewardship. Our civilization has come to see nature as a foe to be conquered and voraciously consumed, simultaneously treating it with complete disregard and disrespect, and yet expecting that it will continue eternally to support us and benignly endure our depredations. We are addicted cannibals, knowing instinctively that we are seeding our own destruction by continuing as we have been, yet unable to stop. Until now. She’s said, Enough. And if you look at it from a certain angle, she is responding to our collective, long-time desperate prayer (whatever you call it) that some things need to seriously change big time, but we are helpless in our inertia to change them on our own initiative, so help. And in Her infinite mercy, rather than just ending us, which would in fact solve the problem, and which anyone with half-open eyes can see she could, we are being given a dope-slap chance to pause, take stock, and make some decisions.
There’s more.
Behind all of these fears is the big one, the ancient misunderstanding; fear of death. We come into this life as blind amnesiacs, incarnated subject to a law that dictates that, in order to learn our lessons and not cheat, we forget where we came from and to where we will return. We are meant by design to focus on this life. And then religions that would scare us into obedience to the small wills of fearful men paint cartoon pictures of post-incarnation reward and punishment based on that obedience or lack of it. And scientific medicine has defined victory and defeat in terms of the battle for the prolongation of physical life.
And so, in the unnecessary terror of inevitable death, we spend our lives withholding from being fully alive. We are offered but refuse being part of and directly participating in nature, subject to its ebbs and flows, its unpredictability, it’s nuances. In denying each incarnation’s inevitable ending, we miss at least some of the richness, the fullness, the potential of the incredible gift of life. Life for many, many people is mundane, repetitive, empty of meaning. The symptoms and consequences of that emptiness preceded this present crisis.
We’ve constructed our worlds, internal and societal, to keep the awareness of our fears under wraps. And yet they are roiling just below the surface of everything we have created. And they leak out and permeate our world and our relationships of all kinds. We just chose not to see; we gave our fear other names.
And now the virus, which is after all an expression of nature, has come and disrupted the structures with which we have organized our world and with which we have kept the fear caged, growling but not biting. Now it’s loose. A positive aspect of this moment is that it is giving us a chance to see what we’ve got for real, what we’re made of and what we’ve made, and decide what we want to do about it. The question before us in this moment of crisis and opportunity is what place will we allow that fear to have in those future decisions, personal and societal. Because the nature of fear is to seep like a poisonous gas through every crack in every wall. You don’t even know that it’s fear as it influences your thoughts, your feelings, your words, and your actions. It tells you fancy excuses, rationales for staying stuck and for defending your stuckness.
And then, as the Who said, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
The first step in the process of being liberated from the domination of fear is to stop denying it; look at it straight on. It counts on your turning away from it to get stronger. It also counts on your fighting with it, trying to make it go away. Don’t do either. Just see it, acknowledge it.
Don’t fight it, don’t fix it, don’t follow it, don’t figure it out.
And with that acceptance comes the ability to see what else is happening at the same time.
Simultaneously and paradoxically, as is the actual way of life on earth, we are being presented with an opportunity to learn another way than being run by fear.
Everyone I know who has a practice of meditation, and everyone I know who does any kind of healing work, and religious and spiritual people of every stripe, every angle, every domination, is reporting that, along with the palpable vibration of fear that can be perceived both in and around us, there is at this moment a palpable increased presence and availability of the vibration of Universal Light (prana, chi, Christic Light, God, pure nature, the Mother…)and of intuitive spiritual council and help. None of those words that I just wrote is a metaphor. Spiritual forces are not necessarily fantasy and knowing that the spiritual worlds and energies exist is not contrary to being a grounded, functional, useful person. It’s just being a person who can hold multiple realities and ideas at once. I tell you because I know, that beyond-physical spiritual forces exist alongside and within what most people in my part of the world have come in only the last century to define as the sum total of reality. The fact that we have narrowed our view to the point of blindness does not change reality, it just makes us blind.
The discernment as to what is inspiration coming from beyond the human and to what extent what you are receiving is being distorted by your human ego, ideology, and fear is the art of being a progressively more useful instrument of Divine Light, or God, or Nature, or truth…. It is the difference between being a true healer or teacher or preacher, and a fool. But that is a discussion for another day.
The physical world is one of many simultaneous vibratory layers of existence. And humans are, in our essential make up, made up of and linked to both matter and spirit. That’s a really good thing to know, remember, and explore right about now. What is going on now is not just a physical crisis, but a spiritual one as well. The questions before us are not just about what we are going to DO, but what we are going to BE. What will be our relationship to being alive, to inhabiting this planet, to each other, to death?
One of my teachers told us that you can’t make fear not be there. Being a human involves having a resonance with all the emotions and the forces that exist in this world. What we can do, he said, is choose how we work with it. He said that fighting with the fear, trying to kick it out, crush it, deny it, argue with it, only makes it stronger. Like feeding the dragon gasoline to make it stop spewing fire. Trying to placate the fear by agreeing to be sort of afraid all the time instead of really afraid most of the time also doesn’t work.
Fear has an agenda. To make you dysfunctional, separate, curled up in a metaphorical ball, available to the manipulation of those liars who would claim to not have the fear that they are provoking in you.
But we can give credit where it is due. At best our fear is trying to protect us from danger. You can thank it for that if you are so inclined. At worst, though- and this is what is happening right now in our present circumstances- our fear, besides naturally occurring in the face of the unknown and with a threat to our persons, families, friends, and fellows, is being stoked by people who benefit from us being scared and separate. Some of the people given responsibility for leading consciously mean to use the present shaking to their narrow advantage. Some are sincerely trying to help, to create solutions to the problem of illness and of the resulting economic and social dissolution. But whatever their motivation, nefarious or altruistic, they are also subject to the ubiquitous paradigm of fear.
The extreme expressions of the trap of believing in the fear as a guide are apparent. On one extreme we are faced with those who hungrily gobble up conspiracy theories. Many are innocent people who are terrified of life. They see the world through a self-created, trauma induced filter, a prism that shows them that the world is a terrifying place. To mitigate that terror, that overwhelming uncertainty, they will believe unfounded, exaggerated, pretzeled, absurd, factless ideas just to be able to have the odd comfort that at least someone is in charge of this madness.
On the other end are those so committed to saving every life, so afraid of death, so caught in the paradigm based on the illusion that nature can be dominated with science- seeing it as an enemy rather than a multi-faced friend- that they would sacrifice freedom, privacy and the mental health of millions of people until they can be absolutely sure that they are in control of nature once again. Which they won’t be, ever. And they are both missing the opportunity to address the deeper causes of vulnerability to this and other illnesses that have been brought into stark relief by the crashing of the systems that kept a thin veneer over the inner realities. Inequality, racism, and the rapidly growing monumental health crisis, mental, emotional, structural, and physical that predated this moment.
Both of these seemingly completely different paradigms are poisoned by fear.
Because of this, they all will, consciously or unconsciously, try to keep us from realizing that there really could be another way to live, one that could allow us to be protected and whole and functional and happy and useful and essentially free. Not just civically free, although civic freedom is something to be cherished and preserved. Not entirely free of fear, and not entirely free of illness and problems and challenges, but free to choose something other than having the fear as our guide and leader. And we do have a choice, whatever your mind may tell you; maybe the most important choice we will ever make. To keep fear in its present place of domination, in us and our world, or to no longer canonize fear, to stop giving it the place of primacy in our present and upcoming world; to put it in a different place, in a minor, subsidiary, slightly advisory role.
The presence of fear in our bodies doesn’t make you or me bad or weak; it just makes us humans. But being human, we also have the amazing divine gift of choice. We can’t choose everything about our lives and our circumstances and our destinies. But we can choose how we work with those things.
I know what I choose, here and now. This fear, to the extent I honor it and give it primacy of place in my inner world, brings me everything I no longer want in my body and my life. It brings me separation from other people and separation from parts of myself. I can’t cut off one part of my emotional self, sequestering my fear in a lockbox somewhere in my body, without denying or at least diminishing other parts that I want: aliveness, happiness, pleasure, freedom. When fear is the foundation of my life program, the building of my life is hopelessly unstable. The compensation necessary to achieve some integrity above the sinkhole of fear twists me into distorted shapes that engender pain on many levels. Fear makes me desperately hold onto the past, what I’ve known and imagined gives me safety. It makes me universally risk averse, unless in my denial I am risk seeking, which is the same thing. It tries to distract me from my actual courage. And it will eventually make me sick. And in this moment, the contraction that fear causes in my whole energetic system makes me more vulnerable to the entrance of foreign molecules.
Why would I keep it as my main advisor when what it advises me to do not only doesn’t actually keep me safe, but makes everything worse? When it would stop me from seeing and putting into practice new ways of being, doing business, interacting.
By my feeding my own fear, by believing it, giving it primacy in my body, I am both weakening myself and inadvertently contributing to the weakening of the collective immune system.
I’m going to add one more thing to this discussion that may challenge you more than I already have. Here’s something I know because I’ve seen, felt, studied, and worked with it for 30 years: the vibration of fear, when either denied or indulged, literally creates places of contraction- dents, weak spots- in the energetic fields of the indulgers/deniers. That weakness in your vehicle provides entrance for illness. It doesn’t cause the illness, but it depresses your energetic immune system, which is equally as real, important, and intimately linked to your physical immune system.
Simply put, fear weakens the energetic and physical immune systems. It is not the only thing that does. And I am not suggesting that if you do what I’m going to suggest you do and find another place, another vibration in your body that will counteract the fear, you will absolutely not get sick. And even more, I’m not suggesting or thinking that if you or I do get sick, we deserve it because we are not perfectly fear free. There are a lot of factors at work, and it is silly at best, pretentious, obnoxious, arrogant and harmful at worst, for me or anyone to make simplistic declarations about what’s going on with you. What I am suggesting is that we can make ourselves less vulnerable to many forces, including but not limited to physical illness, in a number of ways. We are many-leveled beings. Other people are covering other levels; physical, social, planetary. There are teachers showing us how to breathe to strengthen our lungs. Wise ones telling us what herbs and exercises and foods will help us be stronger and clearer as we make our way through this strange and fraught moment. Thinkers examining the social, economic, and political angles of our present opportunity. My contribution is to tell you that we can use this moment of increased fear and increased Light to develop and empower ourselves spiritually, emotionally, energetically, and mentally, so that we are covering all our bases, strengthening ourselves on as many levels as we can, and preparing ourselves so that when the wheel turns again and we can leave our homes and reenter the world, we will have learned something precious and useful as we all rebuild our lives and take the next steps in our own and our specie’s evolution.
And what I’m going to teach you, if you decide it might be of use to you, is something that can also unite us on the inner planes, in a palpably different paradigm than present reality, even as fear would divide and put us in despair, and even as our bodies are in quarantine.
My offering for you today is to think, feel, pray, sense, contemplate what I’ve said to you. If you come to see your fear in some version of how I’m seeing mine; as poison that I don’t have to keep drinking; as temptation that I don’t have to give into; as an old drinking buddy with whom I want to have a new and healthier relationship, then you’ll want to read the next part of this blog.
Because in it, I’m going to give you the antidote to fear, and tell you how to make it.
Peace be in your heart.
Jonathan