Bear with me for just a hot minute on this one. I promise I have not completely gone off of the deep end!
A great deal of the work I have done on this site and in my life the past year plus has been about facing my fears and sharing my journey in the hopes of helping others to do the same through Alchemy – whether I have always called it that or not. For several weeks (maybe months), I have had a desire to write about how facing my fears has lead me repeatedly in the direction of greater and greater freedoms. When I allow fear to become my GPS it has lead me in the direction of where I need to run towards, not from. Today, in researching an answer to a fellow blogger, I read how Carl Jung advocated the same here and decided it was high time to talk about this very (sometimes scary) thing.
Fat Protects
A year ago, I weighed 10-15 pounds more than I do now, even though I was more physically active – running/walking 12-15 miles/week (some weeks now I’m lucky to get 2 miles in). I believe now that my weight represented for me where I was holding onto fears and felt I needed protection. Fat, after all, is an insulator. Insulators protect by separating one media from another. My fat was my way to set a physical boundary between myself and others. Also, what better way to keep from getting closer to someone physically than to have a few extra layers around my middle?
As I have increasingly faced my fears by allowing them to exist, I have released them and my weight has fallen off without effort on my part to diet nor to exercise more. Allowing myself to feel what I am feeling has freed me. Allowing myself to love the parts of me that have felt broken, miserable and angry as fu*k, has resulted in my turning less and less to food for comfort.
My fears control me less today than they ever have before because I followed them into the abyss. I pulled up the taproots of fears I identified in my garden. If we continually run away from the weeds, they overtake us and control us. Just as any living thing needs maintenance, I must maintain my garden and learn how to differentiate the weeds from the flowers, fruits and vegetables.
My body is a physical representation (mirror) of what is happening for me mentally and spiritually. When I learned to no longer fear my fat nor my fears themselves, allowing them to be, I was able to shed my weight, my need for protection as well as my fears.
Carl Jung & Alchemy
Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst, began to recognize through his work with his clients that Alchemists were not referring to physical lead and gold, instead they were referring to emotional lead and gold. The lead represents our shadows, our fears, our unconscious drivers. Gold refers to what we receive when we face those shadows, for me that is spelled freedom.
While I have studied and practiced emotional alchemy for several years now, it was only today that I became astutely aware that Jung used these same principles to help his clients to heal. He told them that they needed to move into the direction of their fears to be able to be freed from them! This validates so much of what I have both been living and writing about. I had no idea (or maybe not so clearly) that so much of Jung’s work was in using Alchemy.
Listening to Fears
Growth and expansion are a continual process of self-awareness and introspection. There are places I still fear to go. However, what I am learning is that fears that are not faced are continually brought up again and again. Do I answer the calls of my fears when they gently tap me on the shoulder, or do I wait until they are screaming in my face and spilling from my eyes, crippling me in my tracks? The Universe escalates the call when I ignore it.
So I ask myself today and everyday, what do I need to face today? Far better to clean up my fears in my strength than when I cannot walk and facing the fear is the only thing I can do to overcome the paralysis of my prison.
The Universe “can only show you the door. You must choose to walk through it,” just as Morpheus says to Neo in The Matrix.
“Wake up! Because what you reap is what you sow!” ~ Zach de la Rocha
When we unconsciously plant seeds of fear and continue to nurture them by staying in fear, we create a garden of: FEAR! By facing our fears, we can choose more wisely to plant, nurture and harvest the seeds in life that we do wish to blossom. So which pill will it be, Neo: the blue one or the red one?
Do you want to nurture the status quo (blue) or do you want to stop the fears and stay in Wonderland forever, exploring more rabbit holes (red)?
Follow your fears!
Image: Google
