Walking the Wall

I feel like the last few weeks have been a blur of picnics and visiting friends and work and a final little small get-away with the kids–not much time to breathe and reflect. Actually I feel like the time to breathe has been in too short of quantity lately and after the art festival tomorrow, I need to take steps to slow things down. Still, I did take some time to kick back and read my new favorite magazine called Yoga Journal (which is more than slightly ironic as I don’t actually DO yoga yet–well, I think about doing yoga, and I can do a couple poses, and I can meditate on a candle, and apparently I enjoy reading about yoga…). Actually, there’s a good number of articles in them that deal with other things than strictly yoga and this month was no exception. An article called “Befriend Your Fears” by Tara Brach really jumped out at me.

“…fearful thoughts and emotions take over and obscure the larger truths of life” (67).

Brach talks a lot about people living in a trance of fear where people miss out on the larger truths of life such as the beauty of the natural world, essential goodness, love of family and friends because they are so wrapped up in worrying about the things that might go wrong. She says that some people are born predisposed to worry, some people are made into worriers by traumatic childhood experiences but whatever the reason, it sucks the joy out of a person’s life by trapping them in rigid patterns of obsessing over things that might happen and strategies to avoid them.

“Fear itself is a natural and necessary part of being alive” (68).

I thought it was interesting how she addressed fear as not something that needs to be eradicated, but as a natural function of ourselves–it has just been misused. It’s our built in system to help keep ourselves alive and free from harm and meant as a warning system. She writes, “While the basic experience of fear is that ’something is wrong,’ many people turn that feeling into ‘there must be something wrong with me’ (68). Then we start obsessing over made up fears and anxieties and fall into a cycle of fearing things that “might” happen and developing endless strategies to avoid those things that may never happen.

I’ve always been the queen of this, spending my nights fearful over every thing that might happen, playing over scenario after scenario of “what ifs” wasting countless hours worrying over things that might never even happen–they might happen, but why not wait and deal with it then? Who knows. Unfortunately my son also has a lot of fears–which isn’t surprising given his chronic illness, he has a lot to worry about and be afraid of. I’m proud of how far both of us have come, though, we’ve really worked on breathing through things and focusing on actually issues rather than possible issues.

The article gives some great tips for dealing with fear:

1. Pause–make a space for what your feeling instead of being overwhelmed by it.
2. Name it–determine what you are really afraid of
3. Remember a larger truth–evoke someone or something, or somewhere that embodies peace and love to you
4. Breathe with the fear–on the breath in allow yourself to feel all the feelings, then release them on the breath out
5. Offer compassion–first for yourself, and then for someone else who right then might be experiencing fear

This week, my son conquered the fear of the unknown. Over the course of the past few years we’ve gone to a number of hotel/indoor water parks to shake off the winter doldrums or just get out of the house for a couple day mini break. My son will never go on the water slides, much preferring the safety of the lazy rivers. I will never forget the image of my son in our pool with a life jacket, arm floaties, and an inner tube all at once! Now, I don’t think that people need to enjoy water slides to have a well rounded life, lazy rivers are great and I’m not much of a huge roller coaster/water slide person either–but what I wanted him to do is at least try a thing once, then decide if he likes it or not. To dismiss something out of hand might mean loosing out on something he’d really enjoy. We’ve have the same rule with food–I don’t force my kids to eat things they don’t like, but they have to at least try it once before saying, “I don’t like that!”

So I asked him again this time, “do you want to go down the water slide with me?” Well, the “no ways” eventually and abruptly turned into–”okay” and I quickly took advantage of that and went directly to said water slide! He loved it. He even went again. Twice. He’ll always enjoy the lazy river more, but at least he tried it and found out it really wasn’t something to be so afraid of.

I’ll never forget when I was a teenager and my great-grandfather was 86, I believe. My grandmother had passed away a year or so before and there were many things he had never done because she didn’t want him to–llike he had never driven a car and he had never gone on a roller coaster. He promptly got his driver’s license and I ended up in the seat next to him on the Gemini roller coaster. He sat with his hands gripping the bar, head down between his arms and I was terrified he’d have a heart attack or something. When he got off, he was white as a sheet and said he would never do that again–but at least he could say he’d ridden a roller coaster. I feel like that about sky diving–I honestly don’t know that I could ever do it again–but like grandpa, at least I can say I did and I’ll never look at a blue sky the same way again.