fear – CM Barrett, Author

Post-Election Stress Relief

So many people are stressed out, frightened, and angry. Brain biology teaches us that when the primitive brain, which controls the fight-flight-freeze reaction, is activated, it draws blood from the frontal lobes, which control the ability to think and act with the gifts of intuition, reason, and logic.

With that in mind, I’m offering a list of things you can do right now to reduce stress in your life.

1. Breathe. Stress and anxiety can lead to shallow breathing, which in turn increases these feelings. We need oxygen, and we need to relax the solar plexus muscles. When you feel yourself getting stressed and anxious, stop and take several long, deep breaths.

2. Drink water. This goes along with breathing. Fear and anxiety can create toxic emotions that turn into physical toxins.

3. Take flower essences. Dr. Edward Bach began his work following the horror of World War I and the influenza epidemic. As a world-wide economic depression deepened and fascism began to rise in Europe, he developed the Bach Flower Remedies, which helped countless people restore emotional balance.

They are as helpful today as they were then. I will provide a future post about this and for today will list a few that can help immediately.

Rescue Remedy is one of the world’s most popular Remedies. Combining 5 Bach Flower Remedies, it can help with shock, trauma, terror, numbness, and other emotions.

Sweet Chestnut is valuable for despair. Mustard helps with gloom. Star of Bethlehem helps with shock and trauma.

4. Tap. If you aren’t familiar with EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) or other forms of tapping, this is a great time to learn. EFT Down Under is one of my favorite sites for learning.

5. Be cautious about social media. I see lots of inspiring posts on Facebook, for example, but there’s a lot of negativity, too. I’m not condemning the people who post negative articles, but I’m avoiding the self-destructive urge to click on those links.

6. Reach out to friends. For many of us, this is a time to connect to others for mutual support.

7. Be active. If you belong to groups working for social justice, increase your participation.

8. Practice mindfulness. This may mean meditation, yoga, chi kung, or any discipline that returns your focus to the Now.

9. Cherish the present moment. Mindfulness also means remembering that what we create in the present becomes our future. And fear of the future poisons the present moment.

10. Don’t hate. It’s so easy to do at present. I’m reminding myself that it takes two sides to make a divided country (or world). I may vigorously disagree with people, but to deny their humanity diminishes my own.

Finally, I’m sharing links to two poems that are guiding me through the present moment.

This links to St. Francis’s poem that begins, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.”

The second is Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Please Call Me by my True Names.” This is a beautiful plea for compassion.

Mindfulness and Independence

On this weekend that celebrates U.S. independence, I’m thinking about the foundation for true independence, a condition of much deeper freedom.

Mindfulness, I believe, is that foundation. When we allow ourselves to be mindful, to observe what goes on both within and without, we declare independence from the ego, who wants to tell us what we should notice.

The ego has a declaration of dependence in that its survival depends on noticing only what threatens or enhances its survival. It filters its observations through a thick veil of fear: that it won’t win, won’t come out at top. It fears that it will land at the bottom. It fears its extinction.

Some observe that the ego acts like a child, a child who has lost its innocence, who has learned the adults it counted on for survival are also vulnerable and fearful. This child has also learned that to relax, to be in the present, to see without survival filters, is dangerous.

As a result, early attempts at reaching a state of mindfulness may, instead, bring up resistance from the ego, who doesn’t want us to see beyond it to the childhood experiences and decisions that created it.

Thich Nhat Hanh often says to smile at negative emotions. “I smile to my anger. I embrace my anger as if it were a crying baby.”

The first step in a declaration of independence from the past is to smile to our resistance. When we do this, it softens, little by little, and when we are ready to know the answers about how we became who we are, our deepest truth will speak.

The practice of mindfulness is a journey, and each step gives us a greater level of independence. This is true cause for fireworks.

Adventures in Mindfulness

My friends think I’m very adventurous because in June 2015 I moved from upstate NY to western Massachusetts. Although I had two close friends here, I basically had to get out and meet people—and I am an introvert.

Now, a year later, I’ve met many people, got involved in some major group activities, and am becoming integrated into life here. In addition, I’ve explored the area and know my way around. I did, however, avoid one adventure: going to the BIG MALL, the kind that has hundreds of stores and miles of parking lots.

This week, that opportunity, out of necessity, came to me. My Apple desktop started to make unpleasant sounds. After a phone call to Applecare yielded no results, I had to take it to the Apple Store at the big mall 20 miles away. This involved highway driving, which I’ve largely not done, to an unknown and quite possibly confusing destination.

I planned for it with mindfulness, looking up the best route, locating the Apple Store on the map of the mall, and telling myself that thousands of people have found this mall. I have read no reports of someone becoming lost forever there. Secretly, though, I thought I might be the first.

Before I left, I took time to meditate and center. I realized that—maybe—I could shift the energy of anxiety into that of excitement. I would be doing something new. I would be expanding my boundaries. I would be having an adventure. By no means was I sure about this, but I at least managed to make some space for it amidst the worry.

I got lost on the way there, ending up at a reservoir. There, I flagged down some nice people who told me how to get to the mall, a mere half-mile away. Huge as I had imagined it to be, the mall had three levels of both stores and parking.

To my surprise and relief, shopping carts abounded in the lot. This made the job of hauling the desktop to the Apple Store a lot easier. I was about to take a cart when a young woman walked by and offered to lift the computer into it. I so appreciated this kind act. (When you become a senior citizen, you learn how nice people can be.)

The guy at the Genius Bar was knowledgeable and explained everything he was doing. Though I was sad to have to leave the computer there for diagnostic work and repair of a failed hard drive, I felt it was in good hands.

When I got home, I saw one of the repair people from the complex where I live. He said that if I ever needed help carrying anything heavy, I should call him. He’d be glad to help.

Instead of a disaster, I had an adventure. I learned that I could find and negotiate the big mall and met friendly and helpful people.

Most importantly, I expanded both my geographical and mental boundaries. Am I ready for more adventures? Well, next month I’m invited to two picnics in unknown areas, and at one of them I don’t expect to know too many people. I’ll be there.

Adventures in Mindfulness

When I got home, I saw one of the repair people from the complex where I live. He said that if I ever needed help carrying anything heavy, I should call him. He’d be glad to help.

Instead of a disaster, I had an adventure. I learned that I could find and negotiate the big mall and met friendly and helpful people.

Orlando, Mindfulness, and Love

Since Sunday, June 12, a day that will be remembered and memorialized for a very long time, I’ve followed links to remarks by famous people, videos of vigils, and countless other sources. Although I began in a state of despair, my intention was to find hope. Before long, I recognized a personal and collective shift to understanding and the determination that those who were murdered shall not have died in vain.

I saw signs of hope in the global LGBTQ refusal to allow the tragedy and the community to become pawns in right-wing anti-Muslim hate campaigns. I saw that community shelter and defend its Muslim members. In these acts, I saw deep mindfulness of what’s really important. And I saw leaders in the Muslim community express their solidarity with the gay community.

The Greatest of These is Love

Constantly, whether the speaker was Staceyann Chin, a black Jamaican lesbian, or Stephen Colbert, TV superstar, this message was raised: the murders were directed against a community that claims the right to love. When you are attacked for expressing that right, the only response is to love more.

Stephen Colbert said, “Love is a verb. To love is to act.”

Staceyann Chin said, “I DARE you to love.”

Love is Remembering

My first awareness of the tragedy came after I’d spent a weekend at a Quaker retreat. During that retreat, I heard this statement:

“When we’re afraid, we’ve forgotten who we are, and we’ve forgotten who God is.”

The Opposite of Love Isn’t Hatred; It’s Fear

Without this awareness, this mindfulness, we are in danger of hating the haters. Fear that the unknown is life-threatening transforms into hatred, which in turn gives rise to the urge to fight back in what is perceived as self defense.

When we realize that we harbor our own fears, we open the door to compassion. We recognize that it takes courage to expand our boundaries and become open to people who seem not like ourselves, whose ways of living seem to threaten our fragile security about how we live.

Until we can make the brave decision to no longer allow fear to dominate us, we can neither love or truly live.

Those who will not learn will go the way of the dinosaurs. Deep down inside, they know this, but fear turns their vision outward and convinces them that if they could only eradicate what threatens them, they’d feel safe. If we reach instead, for love, it will tell us that we’re already safe.

And so, much as I love the statement I heard at the retreat, I feel the need to add to it.

“When we’re afraid, we’ve forgotten who we are, and we’ve forgotten who God is. And we’ve forgotten to let the power of love direct and move us.”

We must remember—in the names of the dead and of the living.

Sources

Staceyann Chin’s speech

Stephen Colbert’s remarks

Losing Things

In November I took a workshop. During the course of the two days, I lost things.

I lose and misplace things from time to time, but this was an extravaganza.

On Saturday night, I was back home, getting things out of the car, and I couldn’t find my water bottle. I told myself not to make this a big deal, went into the house, and made it a big deal. By the time I decided to look in the car again, the bottle had turned into a sacred chalice.

I left the house, and my cat, Pangur, ran outside for the first time since she joined me six months ago. This was probably a “I’ll show you you’re not the only one who can leave,” commando action, but I was beginning to feel that the universe was conspiring against me.

It was dark outside, she’s a black cat, and she cleverly dove into the bushes and became invisible. This was definitely a big deal. I’d never find her; she’d get hit by a car; and I’d suffer for the rest of my life. I recovered long enough to go back inside for a bag of treats, which I took outside and rattled. She forgot that she was punishing me and ran back into the house.

The next morning in the workshop room, I found the water bottle on the table where I’d left it. After lunch, though, I couldn’t find my purse. I fled the workshop and went downstairs to the hotel front desk, where no purse had been turned in. This was a BIG deal. Not only was my life over, but I wouldn’t even be able to drive home.

I went back upstairs, looked on the floor, and then for no particular reason, looked up at the coat rack. The purse was sitting on top. Apparently, someone put it there.

Why? I asked myself when the workshop was over. Was I losing my mind?

Yes. During the course of the workshop’s intensive exercises, I’d lost beliefs that were old friends, maybe not the best friends to have, but they’d provided the illusion of security. I was there for the purpose of losing them, so I thought I couldn’t mourn about that. Instead, I transferred my panic to a water bottle, cat, and purse.

I learned an important lesson from this: that the casting away of core beliefs, habits, and other structures I’ve built to keep myself supposedly safe IS A BIG DEAL. If I don’t acknowledge that it can be frightening, I’m going to frighten myself in other ways because the emotions, whether they be fear, grief, or massive insecurity, need to be expressed.

Mindfulness means attentiveness to my emotional state. When I’m tuning into myself, I can take the necessary precautions against the results of inner chaos. I can deliberately notice where the water bottle, the purse, and the cat are. More important, I put myself in training to be aware of my outer world, too. In such a state, each moment matters.

I don’t know if I’ve completely learned the lesson, but I’m sure I’m getting closer.

The workshop, by the way, was called Matrix Reimprinting, and it was pretty great. If you ever take it, though, hang on to your stuff—your physical stuff. Let the rest go, but be sure to wave good-bye.

How to Crush Your Creativity: Worry

Worry might be described as a single-minded focus on negative possibilities. It doesn’t have the strong physiological intensity of fear. Worry’s effects more gradually—but just as surely—erode the creative urge.

Start with this scenario. You get a really exciting idea that you’d love to develop.

Worry that someone has already thought of it.
Worry that you won’t be able to keep your inspiration high for the idea.
Worry that it isn’t as good as you thought it was.

Next, work on your project, and don’t tell anyone about it, because you worry that they’ll laugh at you. Even if they don’t laugh, they will think loud thoughts that would destroy you if you heard them, so you imagine them instead.

Complete your project and worry that no one will like it. Again, tell no one and do nothing to unveil it or in any way bring it to anyone’s attention.

Solution
Worry is really very creative. You may not like what your imagination is delivering, but there’s no questioning that it’s at work. If you can pause in the midst of one of the humiliating scenarios you’re concocting, you’ll recognize this. If you’re a writer, you have material for an enlightening expose of a character. If you paint, you can describe in color and form the complex emotions that worry arouses.

No matter who you are, once you’ve managed to detach from your emotional turmoil to realize that you are the artist who’s created it, you can begin to make the necessary shift. Now that you’ve proven your ability to create through this nightmare scenario, realize that by changing your intention to experience positive energy, you can imagine the circumstances and details to do so.

Challenge: Practice changing your mental story.

After the Storm

Sometimes I think the most creative people alive are weather forecasters. Unfortunately, they usually inspire fear. If you look at the August 16 post, entitled “What Keeps Us From Being Creative?”, you’ll notice that this is the subject of that blog entry.

In summary: A single-celled organism can move towards a situation, which is growth, or away from it, which is self-preservation. It can’t, however, do both at the same time. When we’re afraid, our self-preservative instincts come to the fore. Only if we understand this mechanism and are capable of understanding and neutralizing the triggers from the subconscious mind that say, “Run! Hide! Be fearful!,” can we turn a frightening situation into an opportunity for growth.

If I were to grade myself on my response to what in my area was called a tropical storm, on a scale of 1 to 10, I’d give myself somewhere between a 5 and a 6. When I caught myself sinking into abject terror, I would meditate, call on angels, and circle the house (and the many, many trees surrounding it) in white light.

I also did many practical things to make the overall conditions safer. These, too, reassured me.

I told myself that I would do my best to be an observer, reminding myself that this might someday be valuable data for a scene in a book.

I also reminded myself that waiting for it to happen was much worse than the event would probably be.

That’s why I said I did fairly well. While the winds whipped the trees and pounding rain lashed the windows, I read on my Kindle (which I’d remembered to charge ahead of time). I’d also remembered to download a number of books, just in case I needed distraction for coming days of no electricity.

I was very fortunate. No trees on my property came down. I was only without electrical power for 12 hours, and Internet service returned the following morning. I am very grateful. I’ve had a creative and productive week.

Next time I will do even better.