Fear of Being

Transcript

I’d like to talk to you about the fear of being.

Last night it was my friend’s birthday, he had a little ceremony.

We went to the hostel in Guadalajara where he stays and volunteers to have a cacao ceremony.

And then we’re gonna do some ecstatic dance. He also mentioned that he could put magic mushrooms into the cacao.

I thought I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do that but as we went around the circle he kept asking people do you want mushrooms or just cacao?

Everyone said yes please the mushrooms and I thought, okay I guess this is happening. A little peer pressure I suppose in a good sense.

Of course not everyone needs to partake in these substances. If yo have an aversion to them that’s fine. Another friend said to me the other day these things don’t come up every day. You don’t have the opportunity to commune with plant medicine every day so when it comes maybe it is the right time.

I just decided to partake and took the substance and the cacao is quite wonderful and smooth. You take cacao and it releases endorphines that makes the transition to wild ecstatic dance so much easier.

Some crazy hippy things that go on at these ceremonies. And I started to notice, there’s a lot of things I noticed.

One thing is there is this fear within me. As I’m dancing I’m trying to massage myself or explore my body in this way. My hips are moving around and I feel this fear.

In some moment I go outside and look up at the moon and start talking to it. Things are getting a little weird.

So I start talking at the moon, looking at the moon and the moon says to me, you alright?

I said, yeah I’m ok.

And the moon says “Listen to me, you are alright, like the essence of your being is right. Everything is right with your soul and that’s the message the moon was communicating or this deeper part of myself was communicating.

I went back inside and danced some more.

I thought about this later, these emotions coming up within me and I felt this existential fear or dread. Not quite so strong but something alarming. Thinking of the decisions I made whether to end certain relationships. Whether I did it for the right reason or not, all of this doubt that I didn’t realize existed.

Questioning myself on all these levels and I thought a lot about Carl Rogers On Becoming A Person.

The important message behind that book is a person is an ongoing process. When one gets to a turning point in therapy, that’s when they discover they are an ongoing process and they accept themselves as a process than a finished work.

There’s not a pressure to be perfect because they know that all things can happen within a person, from a person. So many things, mistakes and consequences and decisions in ones life are all part of this process.

I also thought about Maslow’s Towards a Psychology of Being talking about it’s not when a person is self actualized that they let go of all emotions, fear, dread, pain or guilt. It’s that they have a healthy relationship with these things.

I was looking up at an airplane flying, and I thought about how I get travel nerves. Like tomorrow I am traveling to Acapulco for Anarchapulco and this is like I’m worried about what will happen. These fears and nerves are justified because they’re here to make sure you’ve prepared everything correctly for security.

And that was my conclusion, not exactly because its part of this ongoing process. Everything is fine, it’s fine to experience things as they are. It’s even good to have self doubt.

Its good to be who you are. You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to let go of all your fears nor do you have to question yourself quite that much. Its fine to be. It’s good to be.

Thank you for listening, thank you for embracing yourself. Give yourself a hug to recognize that as you are is good and you can continue on this journey exploring different parts of yourself and the world.