Finding the Silver Lining in the Black Cloud of Fear

Of all the “negative” emotions that I’ve reclaimed, I think I’ve been mulling over fear the most. At one point, I would have almost said that it was the only emotion that was truly negative, but I cringed to hold such a double standard for myself.

Usually when I try to reclaim a “negative emotion,” I try to brain my way to finding constructive uses for that emotion. Perhaps I’ve done that to some extent with fear, .e.g. telling myself that it’s healthy to be afraid of jumping off of a ledge; however, I think this particular reclamation has been far more unconscious than conscious.

Still, I want to try to at least trace the outlines of the process even if I can’t fill in the details of how or when I moved from a negative association to a more neutral place.

In beginning my new job, I’ve faced some downright terrifying challenges. (By terrifying, I mean anything out of my element, from having to speak my mind to my supervisor to potentially having to call the police on a violent person. My brain hasn’t exactly done a stellar job of determining which fears are legitimate and which are ‘just discomfort’.) I’ve found myself having to think and act quickly without nearly as much training, knowledge, or confidence as I felt I needed in those moments.

It’s exhausting to encounter so much fear, and there were days I wondered if I was really cut out for human services.

However, I’ve discovered that it’s also incredibly empowering.

In moments when I’ve been faced with my fears and I had no other choice but to respond to them, I figured out how I wanted to deal with them pretty damn quickly. I wasn’t conscious of any sort of reclamation though; I didn’t have time to think through the implications of diving head first into the things that scared me.

A large part of the reclamation must be attributed to Clarissa Pinkola Estes. In her analysis of the Bluebeard tale in Women Who Run With the Wolves, she talks about each person having an inner predator, a part of themselves that seeks to destroy or sabotage the self.

Rather than the typical self-help advice cajoling an individual to destroy or eradicate destructive parts of the psyche, Estes talks about recycling the inner predator into more positive expressions.

A few weeks after reading that chapter, I was preparing a ritual based on TWLOHA’s poignant Fears vs. Dreams campaign as a kind of ice-breaker for a group of women with whom I was planning on meeting. I wanted it to be more than just stating a fear and a dream with our names (boring!), so I had arranged to have us plant seeds in a flower pot to represent our dreams.

Initially, I also intended to have us all burn a paper with our fears written on them, a standard method for releasing; however, something in me rebelled against the idea of just getting rid of my fears, as if my vulnerabilities and sensitivities were some sort of refuse.

I noticed that my fear and dream for this project almost seemed connected to each other, like one was the shadow side of the other.

I remembered the Bluebeard story and was inspired with an alternative version for my ritual–burying. The act of putting (biodegradable) paper into a flower pot to break down and feed the seeds seemed like such a beautiful way to tie fears into dreams. By breaking down the fear, its power is taken away as a predator, allowing its nutritive qualities to be absorbed and transformed into something empowering rather than debilitating.

As much as fear can be (has been) the root of so much pain and intolerance and negativity, it’s also the root of courage. (No really, the idea of courage simply doesn’t work without fear’s presence.)

Granted, some fears are a little silly and need only be named to lose their power. But others are more legitimate, notifying me of when I might be in danger or when something valuable to me is at stake. Unfortunately, fear, as an emotion, doesn’t differentiate between silly and legitimate.

So long as I treat all fear as something that needs to be erased from my life, I remove its power to inform my decisions in positive ways, sabotaging my own ability to live courageously.

However, when I take the time to face my fear, name it, dismantle it, and recycle it, I create a way for fear to be a positive force in my life, not motivating my actions and decisions, but nurturing the places of hope and courage that do motivate my actions and decisions.

 

 

Bluebeard Tarot Spread: Guidance On Getting Free

I developed my first tarot spread recently, and I’m so excited about it that I wanted to share it with all of you! The following spread is based on the tale of Bluebeard, as told in Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

For those unfamiliar with the tale, a young woman and her sisters are wooed by a rich nobleman. Her older sisters think the dude is creepy as fuck and reject his proposal. However, the young woman is blinded by the promises he offers and marries him.

Not long after they wed, he goes on a trip, giving her the keys to the castle. He tells her she can go into any of the rooms except one. Her sisters, who think this is weird, convince her to look for the forbidden room and turn the search into a game.

When she finds it, she discovers that her husband is a serial killer who has chopped off the heads of all of his former wives.

Stuff happens where, of course, he finds out that she found out and tries to kill her, but she is miraculously saved by some random brothers that come out of nowhere (really don’t get that part!)

So, yeah. Really short summary.

Clarissa’s version is way better. In fact, it was so good that it inspired me to create this five-card spread for getting out of stuck situations. I’ve used it several times already and have found it to be one of my most direct and powerful spreads.

The layout is as follows:

~~~5~~~

2~~1~~ 3

~~~4~~~

Card 1—The Proposal: This is what the querent wanted and thought they were getting when they entered into the situation

Card 2—The Predator:  This card represents what is entrapping the querent currently. Although this could potentially be a person, the predator can also be a belief or situation.

Card 3—The Trick. This is what has been lost in the process of pursuing the proposal. The querent may already have some inclination of this loss but may be unable to see it because of the emotional investment in the proposal.

Card 4—The Secret. This card represents a truth that the querent must confront. Sometimes it’s about something in a relationship with someone else; sometimes it’s about something within the querent themselves (negative beliefs, lack of boundaries, etc.)

Card 5—The Key. This is what will give the querent the power to free themselves. It could be an action or it could be the new perspective that the querent needs in order to avoid repeating an unhealthy pattern.

If you read Tarot, give this spread a whirl and let me know what you think!

Spiritual Crisis in a Psychological World

Our society is fairly young in its abandonment of spiritual journeys and rites of passage. What once would have been the territory of the sacred has become the territory of the psychologist.

We’ve tried to sterilize, medicalize, and materialize human existence after centuries (or millenniums) of spirituality. We’ve buried our guides, forsaken our ceremonies, and detached ourselves from our process in exchange for diagnoses and medications.

Carl Jung believed that myth was

the primordial language natural to these psychic processes, and no intellectual formulation comes anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythical imagery.

In other words, the psyche speaks in myth, and science and psychology alone cannot begin to even touch the depth that mythology reaches for the soul.

I once thought that reclaiming my spiritual life was something I had to do for my healing because of my history within a cult, where so much of my abuse has been at the hands of religion; however, I don’t think I believe that anymore.

At an herbal conference a couple weeks ago, I attended a class about sacred herbs in spirituality. The teacher started the class by talking about tobacco and its use in various Native American spiritualties as a purifying herb. I was struck when she mused about the high rate of cigarette addiction in the United States, wondering whether it indicated that people were seeking a cleansing without realizing it.

The comment stuck out to me not because it was a light-bulb comment on its own, but because it came on the heels of several similar thoughts I’ve encountered in a wide variety of settings.

At another conference I attended, the speaker (Ron Coleman) was talking about how mental health crises sometimes resemble spiritual awakenings. In this instance, he was talking about the experience of hearing voices, which in mainstream society is seen as a sure sign of psychosis but which has often been a signal of spiritual encounters in other cultures.

By every indication, he himself was atheist, yet he was arguing against labeling spiritual experiences as mental illness…

Few in today’s society would try to argue that exorcisms, witch hunts, and tortures that developed in response to unacceptable experiences were good; however, what options do we, as a society, offer people for their modern “unacceptable” experiences? Illness labels and medicinally exorcising fictional demons?

On some levels, I think we might offer even fewer opportunities for people to confront their experiences and find a way to work through them to a positive end, perhaps not because we think they are demonic, but because we can’t handle the discomfort of not being able to control their process.

Maybe we’re not meant to.

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek.” -Joseph Campbell. Found over at quoteswave.com

Ron Coleman described the “proper” role of psychotherapists as midwives of the soul. It’s a radical perspective, but not a new one. Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, and so many others have proposed many times over that the psyche doesn’t necessarily need fixing. It needs to find itself again. It needs to take its mythic journey, delve into its spiritual encounters…go into the dark cave.

Perhaps it’s time to start paying attention to the soul again. Perhaps the mind and soul aren’t so different. Perhaps healing “mental illness” isn’t about finding the mental equivalent to antibiotics and surgery. Maybe it’s about finding the mental equivalent of: “It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this.”

Zelda, that is all. Found at zeldauniverse.net