You're part of absolutely everyone and everything

Confronting Our Fears

I want to overcome fear in my life. I am afraid of a lot of things. Somethings that i am afraid of have been with me for a long time. I have noticed that most of my fears involve others opnions. And i have never really been sure of their opnions becasue it will always be my "perception" of their opnions. Wayne says, "Its none of my business what you think of me". I think he is right. Its a losing battle to try and control others opnions of us because we all see the world so differently. We are never judging with the same standard. One good reason to stop judging i guess :-)

Today i will be confronting a fear of mine. I am nervous. I have been making up all kinds of stupid scenarios where this will go bad for me. Nevertheless, it has to happen. I dont care how ugly my attempt. i am just ready to be free. I already am free, i just want my mind to see it. I want my conditioning to recogonize it. New patterns.

We are just here to be here!!!

FIRE

Its a moonless night and i am in the woods. Armed with only a cell phone for light, two beautiful ladies and heavy boots; i make my way toward our campsite. A small wave of panic washes over me as i have trouble navigating in the complete darkness, but almost on cue landmarks start to say hello. They assure me i am on the right path. They comfort me the way old friends do. If the holly bush could talk i am sure it would say, "Your doing great, just keep going". I find my destination with relative ease and begin making a fire. I have made many fires in my lifetime and it never gets old. I am genuinely amazed every time i see the sharp red, orange, and yellow consuming the wood. Fire!! I love fire! So destructive...so useful...so angry....so gentle....so painful....so comforting!!!! It has every aspect of life in it. I think it is alive.

Promise of Tomorrow

Lately i have had this feeling of being absent. I feel as if i have been watching myself. Its like i am on autopilot and the real me has taken a break and watches silently as i go through the motions of what i call my life. There is a beautiful neutrality to it all.

Moments no longer hold rain,

I yell for the sun to notice me,

but it just casually warms the earth.

Time hasn't had a second thought about my train.

When you told me your dog died,

my only words of comfort were rehearsed.

I wanted to tell you the truth,

but for your sake i lied.

You were taught how to spend your tears,

it was suggested to feel this way,

it was encouraged to speak this way,

you have done this for years.

Now the canvas is once again white,

we picked the gravel out of our wounds.

we went to sleep with the promise of tomorrow,

it just felt right

Worlds We Create

There is a direct relationship between anxiety and peering too far into the future. They are synonymous with one another. We start looking (guessing really) into the future...survival instinct tells us to expect the worst....so we do that automatically...before we know it we are deep into our thoughts feeling anxious, frustrated, fearful, lacking, and unhappy. These future based thoughts create present anxiety. In our minds we are working out game plans to avoid the "negative circumstance", but there isn't a negative circumstance....its just our creation...its our guess; a guess that is full of instinctual fear. We are combining two things that served us well over the years (thousands of year)....fear has got us this far....and our ability to predict has got us this far. Fear kept us sharp and alert to predators and our ability to predict outcomes quickly made us the top predator. However, as we have changed, these things are starting to give us psychological trouble. We are creating worlds that do not exist....not a big deal really if these worlds were not problematic and full of fear. Every future thought is an alternate world. We live most of our lives in our heads, bouncing back and forth from happy worlds to sad worlds, a world where i am king and worlds where i am ugly and rejected. Its just virtual worlds that we create. Even the "real world" is our creation or interpretation.

This is such a new concept for me and a challenge to recognize in my own life. It is easy to become absorbed in our created world...generally we think we are doing ourselves good by taking life so seriously, but we aren't living because we are preoccupied with preventing these negative worlds from becoming reality. Our obsession with prevention actually makes this negativity manifest into our present moment. In other words, we bring about all the negative we're trying to avoid because we think about it constantly.