Hello. Not sure why I have had difficulty coming up with inspiration for this newsletter, but I have. Maybe its because I have had lots of things that could easily be seen as mishaps occur this month, and I would be lying if I didn’t admit that its been hard to see them as anything else. However, the beauty of being on a spiritual path of self discovery is that I don’t believe it any more. There are always reasons why things crap out, if we take the time to examine what we have been up to. What we experience is the consequences of the choices we took earlier, and now, down the track, we are living them. I can trace my car difficulties right down to when I made decisions to get the gear box fixed 8 months ago, and the choice to opt for a reconditioned one rather than to have the existing one rebuilt down to one word–fear! I was afraid it would take to long and I wouldn’t be able to get to work. I was afraid about the price of fuel and the climate change caused by the fumes. Now I have been without a vehicle for about two weeks one way or another and the rebuilt gearbox would have originally only take 10 days. Still everything is as it should be and I now have a new car, and the nice men at Southern Honda are trying to get my money back from the reconditioned gear box that wasn’t up to scratch. I am having a great experience of community, and have learned yet again that decisions made out of concern and fear are never good ones. Expensive lesson this was. Another interesting experience associated with this scenario is that in order to buy my new car I have had to get a loan at 12% from the company that froze my assets to stop themselves from going broke last year. So they have my money and are lending it back to me at interest. Crazy? Yes. But the interesting thing is that two years ago when those debentures came to maturity I had every intention of cashing them in but decided that I better leave it where it was or I might spend it. Might has well have done so hey? Fear again.
Now I’m not telling you all this just to cathart my woes. Oh no. Theres a moral, and that is that at the moment there is enormous amounts of fear floating around the collective unconscious and its sooooo easy to get infected with some part of it. There is bound to a bit tailor made to fit your own childhood trauma or family beliefs about how bad things are or how careful we have to be. And once the fear gets you, you can be encouraged to make all kinds of reactive decisions that you will regret (or learn from) later. Whenever we turn to the contents of our heads for advice we get lost in what others think or have thought. We get caught up in the mythology of the times. But surely fear is an emotion, I hear you frown. Yes it is. A natural indicator that shows us that we are about to do something we have never done before and step into the unknown where we can grow, and learn new skills. Once the mind gets a hold on it though, it turns it into a three ring circus where the caution of others that has embedded itself in your brain is telling you to be careful to stay safe rather than to feel the fear and do it anyway. We listen to the parents in our heads rather than the excitement in our hearts and rather than moving forward into the new, we take a safe option that is not on the path of growth for us and we go round in circles for another decade or two. Humm! Well how do we know that following the fear is the right thing to do not a warning to stay well away??? We know because warnings are not fears. They are ‘knowings’. They give us tingles of intuition that says don’t go there. It’s prickly, but its not fear. Next, when fear is beckoning us to greener pastures, there is always a tinge of excitement with it. It’s scary but it’s good. The other old cautious warning about the bad things that could happen is plain old scare mongering from the head, replaying all the stuff we have had drummed into us from society that is designed to keep us mediocre. Don’t listen to it. It’s just trying to turn your good fear against you and keep you small. There isn’t anything really to be afraid of except not growing. After all, thats why we’re here. The only sign of life is growth.
So what should I have done??? Who knows?! That road was not the one I walked down. I played it safe. Threw good money after bad, and listened to my head. The interesting thing about all this is that its easier to see in hindsight. I do know that listening to our hunches will take us where we need to go to get the lessons we need to have. Maybe mine was that in order to get a new car I had to loose money and have a gearbox seize on me in the pouring rain at the lights at the junction of three inner city streets in peak hour traffic. But I had a handsome man and a gorgeous woman tow me back home! In the end, I guess none of it really matters anyway. We end up wherever we need to be, as long as we keep looking at the lessons life chucks at us. In these times of mass hysteria, stay centered in your heart and you cant go wrong.
