My Colors of Fear

I thought I knew what fear was, I didn’t know jack. Earlier this week I had a session with another practitioner and discovered fear comes in many flavors and shapes, and I had managed to hide myself from most of them.

We traded sessions. It’s a practice among us practitioners to help the newbies gain experience. I use it to help keep myself grounded. With over a 100 clinical hours under my belt, I’m no longer a beginner, but I’m hardly the seasoned professional either. I need to ‘check in’ from time to time to ensure that I’m not drifting off course. I’ve done a couple of these trades over the past few weeks, but they didn’t work out as I had hoped. The sessions were I was the client went poorly, because I am still significantly blocked from getting access to my subconscious. I was hoping things would have gotten a lot better, but I was disappointed. This time, access was a lot easier, but it was still far from easy and wasn’t of any real value. The past lives were interesting, though odd, but no real information came through, as I can remember. (The other practitioner had trouble operating my recorder and so my session wasn’t recorded.)

My first life was as a dark-haired young man, in what looked like renaissance Italy. He was wearing expensive clothes and a puffy hat. I don’t remember anything else about him. The next life was as a young girl, about 10, with long gold hair and a red velvet dress. It seemed like England, sometime in the middle ages. In the first scene she’s sitting on some grass, smiling and listening to someone sitting on a stool. I don’t know if it was a teacher or a storyteller. The next scene was a party in a large hall, but now she seemed only about 2 or 3 years old, holding hands with some really big person. In the last scene, she was old, with long grey hair, sitting up in a bed in a clean, brightly lit room in, what felt like, a small cottage. She seemed content and not afraid to die. i remember that there was a purpose to the life, but I can’t remember what it was. Then things got strange.

I jumped to a scene from depression-era America, the great plains. I saw the same girl, this time barefoot, in a plain dress, standing outdoors. Everything was dusty and cloudy around her, like there was a dust storm. Behind her I could make out the shadows of a small farmhouse and a windmill. She was just standing there, hand straight down at her sides and staring straight ahead, right at me. She seemed frozen as the wind blew around her. She seemed very unhappy, in stark contrast to the first time I saw her. Her eyes were hopeless.

After a while where nothing changed, I finally got the idea that she was stuck and I was supposed to help her ascend. I tried, and achieve partial success, as part of her seemed to go. But part of her remained. I tried showing her the light and showing her love, but it was a struggle. I should go back there and have another try. I think that what I’m seeing there is part of me that is stuck, somewhere.

The subconscious portion of this session was a bust, as I remember, I was so busy fighting the process that not much came out. I remember almost nothing.

But things finally got interesting when we switched and I ran the session for the other practitioner. Things went well, and at the end of the session, I sometimes the client’s subconscious if there is any message or advice for me. Usually I get some some simple advice, “Keep doing what you’re doing…” etc., but this time I got a whole conversation. A whole conversation about fear. Yeah. I know I’m blocked, but this conversation really showed me that the blocks were fear, in stark terms. I don’t mean that I was told about it, I mean that as the conversion went on, I was remembering and feeling the different kinds of fear that were there.

I remembered when I was working with someone on my LinkIn profile, and how reluctant I was to accept what she was saying. At the time I was thinking “I don’t know how,” though now it’s clear that I was afraid. I’m not sure of what, exactly, but we I was feeling was fear. I never realized that before. I also noticed arrogance. This is hard to explain, but I saw myself in recent situations and realized that what I thought was helpfulness was actually arrogance, and the need to force my opinion on the other person. It isn’t like this is the first time I’ve done that, but it’s the first time I recognized it for what it is. It seems that everywhere I look in my life, I see fear. I am hemmed in by fears on every side. Here I though I was so enlightened and so in control of my life, when I’ve been actually navigating a torturous path among the rocks of my fears, while pretending I was sightseeing.

That’s what the past week has been like. I’ve been doing it so much I’m getting weary of the whole thing, but truth is truth, and hiding from it just makes me feel worse. I’m beginning to question the authenticity of my words and actions in almost every interaction. I’ve started short posts, retyped them several times, taking over an hour, then ended up deleting them entirely because I couldn’t convince myself that I had anything worth saying. I’ve been serially doubting myself. But then, this morning, I read something that moved me and wrote a reply, and it just felt right. What I said isn’t important, but it was honest and genuine and authentic, and that’s what matters. I find myself reading certain things that provoke me to think and remember when I’ve been less than honest, and deal with confronting what was behind those actions and feelings. (I also seem to be expressing myself differently, or at least it seems that way to me.)

That seems to be my job, for the time being, confront what I’ve kept hidden. To pull penetrate the facades, remove the masks and peer through the disguises on all the things that I have been pretending were something nice, or at least acceptable. I’m done with pretending, so what if everybody else does it, I don’t want to do it any more!