Fear

Interesting stuff being frightened. I tend to think of fear as being a natural reaction, which it is, and that acting on it, or making some sort of resolution base on it is a useful act. For me, my ME was an expression of the high levels of fear I feel about things. This was born out very early on when I started to pace, I would lie down on bed for my rest and immediately be engulfed in waves of fear. Its quite something to lie down and rest in those circumstance. Now I'm working in a similar way with my eczema, I'm starting to see as I think I've mentioned before, how the itching is often a sign of some change or other, and the scratching is often a way of changing it. So the itching is my fear of the reaction, and the scratching is my way of controlling it. Of course the fact I'm allergic to all sorts of things can make me scratch too. I feel that my heightened fear response has probably added to this in some way I don't yet understand. But it's interesting that by expressing the fear through my itching and controlling it through scratching I managed to avoid the source of the fear. Naturally it came out later on through my ME, probably with a similar relationship between fear and control or perfectionism. In none of this have I actually looked at my fear. The fear itself is I feel a guard against some form of grief. I attended a paranirvana (death of the Buddha) ceremony a couple of years ago, and felt all my fear back to reveal the most intense raw grief I have ever felt. This was before dad died, but it was worse than anything I felt then (and that was pretty sad). I think that grief is a reaction to our separateness, I think it's that that causes the grief, then the fear, and the trying to control, as a method of trying to find our way back. In my case, me being me, there's an awful lot of anger too. I guess it's born from frustration of not being able to find my way back.

Now I'm pregnant it's very interesting because I'm terrified of having a miscarriage. I'm interested in the mythologies I believe to be true about myself, like "my body doesn't work well enough to get pregnant" - well duh! as the Americans might say ;). My second one is, "I will have a miscarriage". Fair enough, it's quite possible I could. But it's actually more possible that I wont - if human women had as many miscarriages as I'm projecting onto myself, we wouldn't be having the population explosion we're having... So where does this strong belief come from? Obviously habitual negative tendencies regarding myself, and perhaps more so from this perfectionist control of my fear. Once again I need to let go, just simply let go. I actually feel it's quite normal to be frightened of miscarriage, the 1st trimester of pregnancy where I am, has a high miscarriage rate. What I think is a shame is the way this becomes the sole focus. I'm making some attempts, whenever I find myself on a real humdinger of a fear trip, I try to imagine Green Tara is nestling in my womb. This is wonderful, as I find it easier this way to just trust what is. Really I feel the most important thing is that I allow foetus to experience that isness, after all it's not up to me what happens. The morning sickness I listen to with tonglen. Read anything by the Dalai Lama for much better descriptions on it, then I could possibly give. Basically it's a process where you visualize breathing in the poisonous afflictions of other people, and you breathe out love to heal them. One of the explanations of morning sickness, is that the foetus is passing out what it doesn't need and that causes the sickness. There are an awful lot of theories though lol. I do like that one, and breathing out love when I wanting to puke is a good thing. It's an interesting journey, and I'm already so grateful to foetus for giving me an extra chance for practice.

I also just read an excellent book It's called "The Wisdom of Forgiveness" by HH The Dalai Lama and Victor Chan. It's billed as "Intimate conversations and Journeys". Much of my inspiration behind this post comes from it.