Flower and Fear

Flower and Fear


Think about a bud…it holds the flower within, waiting for its time. It exists in its potential till the right circumstances come about. Water, soil, nutrients and light all assist in its emergence. We welcome the bloom and its beauty into our hearts, receiving its gift.

Fears. It’s hard to imagine that you may one day embrace and welcome them into your heart like a flower but it is possible. Why would someone even want to? Because if you do not they are like mines waiting buried till some innocent victim sets it off, often ourselves.

We have buried fears along the way for many reasons, from overwhelm to trauma to judgments, to being too young to know what else to do. We often have no idea how to find them no less release them. Sometimes life gives us a chance to let them go and we do. Other times they get buried deeper. Many of us walk around with fears just beneath the surface. We mostly stop listening to them in hope they would just go away. If I don’t look there it doesn’t exist, right? We rarely look them straight in the eye and deal with them. But maybe we should.

Why bother with them? If they are being quiet and hidden, why make trouble? For one thing they are rarely quiet forever. For another we are expending energy keeping them at bay. We maneuver around them so as to not wake them up. In other words they control us. They own us. But we don’t see it that way, we have changed or rearranged reality to fit an edited version that is our own. We craft beautiful stories, heartbreaking stories, and scary stories; just about anything you could think of to not go THERE. We have patterns impossible to pin down that are being controlled by a fear and often a belief of some kind that is attached to the fear. They lock arms around each other, (the fear and the belief) dive deep into your being and you don’t even know what happened. You just know you no longer go to the beach, or like your brother or what ever quirkey or possibily logical thing it may be. It may not and most likey won’t register that clearly. Just something that happened and got filed away.

They are things we name, put in a box, sometimes put a label on and place of a shelf. Often we have to make room for them in order to allow them to emerge. When we learn to embrace them and welcome them we will have made great strides in setting ourselves free. Our other choice is to allow them their moment in the sun. They may come out yelling, punching, crying, hurting, shameful, or some other color. They won’t last long. They have a limited time span. But they often need a moment of acknowledgement before they dissipate.

Sometimes we’ll find the thoughts that got stuck in there with them that were so inhospitable that we locked them up. Much time we aren’t even aware of what we’ve done. We were so much younger and it was all we knew what to do. This is were we can reach in and allow what ever it is to emerge. Welcome, encourage, allow and accept the piece that got disconnected, put away, and buried. You’ll feel so much lighter, clearer. You will not need to pay all those storage fees that were getting pricier all the time.

Mary