Notes From the Center of the Spiral https://andreastar00.com
I’ve recently been sharing my journey concerning the turn my life’s been taking. The immigration issue and the issue of resources have been the triggers for me to go much deeper below the surface, beyond the superficiality of it all. By this I mean the superficial understanding of all this fear over the task of asking.
On the face of it, it’s been looking like the same old story, and it’s a story we all share at some level or another. In fact, on a surface level, it IS the same old story. It’s a story so old and moldy, this fear aspect, so ancient and primal, that it would be easy enough to ignore what lurks beneath it. After all, it’s just human, isn’t it?
But, there is something lurking beneath the fear. It’s a scaffolding put in place specifically to protect the sleep-walking human until there is an expansion of consciousness necessary for moving into sovereignty and the awareness of being co-creators in this world.
We’ve been operating on auto-pilot for so long! Blessings to this protective mechanism we’ve installed for this long and weary trek through the unconscious times, the dark ages of this planet. It’s not the enemy. In fact it’s been a blessed ally who’s protected us through our infancy, just like a loving and fiercely protective mother.
To find the beginning of this thread of fear would be difficult. In truth, the beginning of it probably goes back as far as the falling into the forgetfulness in our journey of the ‘descent’ of our formless, immortal consciousness into matter. As pure consciousness, I think it’s been far easier to be expansive, inclusive, and otherwise unhindered by the challenges we’ve had while inhabiting human form.
The body has been both a blessing and a challenge to us, coming as pure consciousness into this earthly saga of bliss and woe. The intense beauty of the capacities of the human form to feel and move in the world of matter is a mixed bag of challenges as well. Our physical and emotional capacities for extreme feelings are our crowning glory in one sense and our crown of thorns in another.
The polarities of pleasure and pain are most often the measuring points that we use to determine how well we’re doing in life from moment to moment, and this value system comes from deeply physical and emotional places in our being. Inherent in this process is the value judgment that pain is bad and pleasure is good. When we feel good, it’s a good day and life is good. When we feel bad, it’s a bad day and life is bad.
I’m not trying to say that pain is good, but oftentimes it’s the pain or discomfort that’s the signal from the body, be it physical or emotional, that’s trying to get through to us that something isn’t in alignment in the Now. It’s very seldom in the Now moment that there’s something life-threatening happening for most of us. Yet in my case, there was a shield of spiritual pride held in place by this fear lurking just under its surface.
If fear expresses as a physical pain in the body or as an emotional one in the spirit, either way, it’s a clear and present signal in the now that something’s there that’s asking for our attention and our love. Something out of balance which is asking to be seen, felt, and known.
The Role of the Body in Holding Fear
As anyone who has been in any kind of fear can attest, the more intense it is the more the body is likely to experience discomfort and pain. If this discomfort alone isn’t enough of a deterrent to forging ahead anyway and moving through in order to do whatever the fear is trying to prevent, then its intensity can increase to the point where one can be left feeling like their very life is being threatened.
This is what happened to me recently when I pushed through my own fear and resistance over a simple task of asking for help. Rather than doing what I normally would do in the situation of feeling extreme discomfort, which would be to avoid it by aversion, I defied it and forged ahead anyway, and it extracted its pound of flesh for it too. Just like being bitten on the posterior by a junk yard dog.
While the pain of having a chunk bitten off my pride is now on the receding side of this little litany of uncomfortable signals, the underside of that is now delivering pulses of deep sadness. If nothing else, this emotional train ride has been one of duration, it has yet to leave me.
It’s obvious that the act of asking isn’t actually life-threatening. That’s over-dramatizing it by a long shot. I have the memories from having cancer under my belt, and from those experiences I understand the connections that fear and the threat of death from dis-ease share. At that time, I perceived that fear ‘tasted like’ death, and I knew in order to live I’d have to be determined not to indulge in fear, which I clearly perceived as the very fuel of the disease. I suppose this could be called courage, but in this case, the choice was clear, as in do or die clarity.
In that instance, in order to survive, the fear habit had to go. What this entailed was a long practice of bringing awareness to and quelling those internal dialogs which are negative in nature, particularly those which were victim-based, self-destructive or self-demeaning. If it ‘smelled like’ fear, I acted ruthlessly to eradicate it from my world. I simply didn’t have the energy to mess around. With such a high level of motivation, I did succeed, and I’m still alive to talk about it.
(Continued in Part 2.)