
Fear of catastrophic loss Credit: Smithsonian Magazine
I continue answering a reader’s request that I publicly process my vasana … not so much of financial stress any more as of a fear of catastrophic loss. (1) The specific fear that was raised was of homelessness.
So much is arising for me as I do the deep surgery that tackling a root vasana or core issue can sometimes involve. And this one goes very deep within me.
I’m not going to take the thread up today but issues of trust are very evident. I should be able to trust AA Michael’s promises to see to the team’s needs but my vasanas around money issues are all but overwhelming.
The silver lining is that they’re up and I can only process them when they’re up.
Earlier I saw my issues around money as a big boulder coming down on me. It became a pile of sand when I dissolved the glue of shame that held it together, with my awareness.
It’ll take a little work yet to emerge from the pile of sand.
What I want to take up today is how life unfolds when you have a vasana of fear of catastrophic loss. I suppose one attracts news of catastrophic loss to oneself.
Because a friend just lost a significant amount of cash they were holding on to. While it did not affect me personally, what I found startling was how deeply it reawakened my fear in me. And this is why I mention it: When we’re sitting on an issue, we can become triggered even by things that don’t directly affect us.
Another friend would say “as within, so without” This was the outside mirroring back to me my own lack of worthiness to be paid for my work. I do have issues there, I acknowledge.
But the point I’m making here is that, if I have a fear vasana, unrelated events in the outside world can trigger me.
Even though I’m not involved (and I want to underline that), except perhaps in helping the person to recover, my hands are near to shaking and I feel a little dizzy and breathless. I’m having a reaction nevertheless. That’s a feature of root vasanas or core issues.
***
If I broaden my exploration to just “fear” instead of “fear of catastrophic loss,” then I believe this wider vasana originates in the shattering I experienced at age seven. My Dad shouted at me from inches away from my face.
For years I felt no strong foundation for a personality, no “ground” under my feet. I lacked confidence or resolution.
Some people revert to acting like a child under the impact of a strong vasana like this one. Me, I become like someone exposed to Kryptonite – I crumple.
So here I am, almost quivering, simply as a result of hearing another’s experience.
I’m being with these feeling states and observing them, waiting for them to leave of their own volition. I’m allowing awareness to handle them.
I see that I don’t like the experience of fear. Therefore I’m at a choicepoint. Since the experience of fear is up to awareness, I now have the opportunity to rechoose whether I want to retain the programming that elicits fear or delete it.
At this point I choose to invoke universal law.
By the universal laws of change, transmutation, and elimination, I ask the Divine Mother to remove the defective programming in me that has me fear catastrophic failure and loss. Fill me instead with thy Love.
I further ask that the process be carried further and that fear itself, which I eliminated once some time ago, be again removed from me completely, never to return. Fill me instead with thy Love.
I ask forgiveness from all whom I may have attacked, my anger serving to protect my fearful child. I forgive myself for my ignorance and anger.
The crash course that I’m getting in clearing the fear of catastrophic loss will prove invaluable to me after the Reval.
***
As I finish this, I have a flash of insight. This exploration now is up to realized knowledge. I see the origin of this extreme fear in me.
I was right earlier. It does originate in the shouting incident.
The degree of fear I experience when I face a catastrophic loss approaches the last emotion I felt before I shattered in the face of my Dad’s shouting at me.
The vasana is directly tied to the catastrophic loss of self or personality that occurred from the shouting incident. And I fall apart, shatter, call it what you want when in the presence of people who are trying to excite extreme fear in me. When I approach my red zone, I react defencively by getting angry.
There is the pattern, up to realized knowledge.
I’d do anything to avoid having to re-experience extreme fear because what lies on the opposite side for me is the shattering of my personality. I start going to pieces (the Kryptonite effect) when we get close to it, just as I went to pieces when Dad shouted at me.
This knowledge is rippling through my body at the moment.
I know what I say is accurate because a tension pattern in my neck just eased. The truth of the statement has set me free from resistance at some level.
But I had to get it as a realization and not simply as an idea or even only as an experience.
***
Notice that, when we widened our exploration to fear itself, we went chronologically further back from the incident of homelessness which occurred around 2007. We’re now around 1953, when I was perhaps seven and my Dad shouted at me.
With a vasana, we need to keep looking and looking – no matter how illogical what arises seems – until we feel the release associated with seeing the truth.
It isn’t anything about the reasonableness of where our processing takes us that’s important. In instances of extreme danger and trauma, the mind works largely by association. If something looks like the threat in 1968, we react with fear in 2018.
Rather than guiding ourselves by such criteria as what sounds likely under the circumstances, we may wish to guide ourselves on whether there has been increasing release from the version of events that we’re stating or whether no release has been experienced.
If the former, we’re going in a useful direction; if the latter, we’re on a trail that leads nowhere.
I now must re-experience the shattering incident because that’s where the trail seems to lead.
Will it stop there or will events track back to the crib or even hearing my parents argue while in the womb?
All of this must be re-experienced and realized, I think, before a vasana of this size will ease. I’m using awareness, forgiveness, and the universal law to get underneath it.
How many other issues need to be released before I’m freed from the density I’ve created for myself?
Footnotes
(1) See earlier discussion in “Processing Financial Stress Publicly,”