I might as well get a bit playful with the fear that has plagued my life. On the radio this morning, I heard a coach tells his team to work hard and don’t return off the field saying “I wish I had… .” I reflected on my own life and thought about how hard I work on overcoming my own personal issues, at authenticity in relationships, at my jobs, exploring beneficial new activities, and trying to be open to others in life. I usually feel very undervalued for this hard work. I don’t have a coach, guru, significant other, or parent that supports my work. I’ve discovered I need to do this work for my own self and in relation to being with others.
The wet cement of suffering I wade through in life is conditioning and the causes of such conditioning. Early coping mechanisms for dealing with perceived abuse, social dissonance, and high sensitivity are now very inadequate ways of living an adult life. It’s clear my childhood was fraught with fear which enforced intended behavioral patterns of listening, obeying, paying attention, and doing things as instructed. I was really taught how to follow and fear was the primary method of coercion for making me do what I was told. I’m playfully calling this fearification as I dive into how this has functioned in my life, because this word allows me to seriously view the use of fear–by using intended or actual verbal or physical punishment or reward–to make someone act in a preferred way through the lens of unconscious ignorance.
No aware, loving, compassionate, and true human would use fear to force an egotistically desired result! I know this now, yet I still stumble along far too much in the unconscious conditioned coping mechanisms I learned as an innocent little bubba. I am trying to let go, but no one every taught me nor showed me how to live this day-to-day life in calm, open, careful, and energetically masterful ways! The old coping mechanisms and habits are the actions I learned for dealing with a life of stress, condemnation, rules, criticism, limitation, and fear. I wonder who may have actually seen that me and my siblings weren’t just well-behaved, but fearfully coerced into doing so. God, all parents (not just my own!), adults, teachers, and all authorities were the enforcers that my parents unconsciously recruited in their memetic structure of raising the people they procreated. Sounds a bit odd, but even now it resonates with tons of twisted relative truth. My life is thusly stained with patterns of rebellion, fearful obeying, silent resignation, expressive outbursts of stifled energy, reading volumes of self-help and health resources, self-marginalization from society because I think I don’t fit in with others, and thinking I am strange and inappropriate. This is the one result of fearification, though it appears to be prevalent enough. I sure don’t have a statistic, but the abundant “problems” of our contemporary world suggest that people are highly identified with their own conditioned coping mechanisms.
So, how shall I move on from the conditioning? Conscious seeing of the conditioning with both compassion and the authentic aspiration for transformation to the other shore of naturalness and being. Meditation is clearly key practice. But what about the unknown and unexperienced living activity that exists beyond the abandoned unconscious habits, learned strategies of behavior, unrealistic thinking patterns, and typical routines? Often times I think that I can’t let go of my father or fiancee because then, I will have abandoned them in the pool of ignorance and conditioning. Isn’t it my purpose to help those whom I love? Or is this too a conditioned way of considering relationships, love, and conditioning?
Enough with the questions about the unknowable. Fantasy will only provide another story, not living presence in actual life. I don’t want to create another ignorant story, however masterfully devised. Here I am reminded of the Constructive Living tenets: know your purpose (how, by what means is true authentic purpose known? meditation?), accept your feelings (I’ve been practicing this for nearly 15 years), do what needs to be done (attentive action is our real relationship with everything), and Naikan reflection (how I have caused trouble for others, gratitude for everything). Constructive Living provides a way for us to practice living beyond the conditioned ways we’ve developed. This is just one way, yet it is a good one for supplying a structure to work with in transforming our lives from identified fearification to authentic conscious presence in our own lives.
I also want to mention that yesterday was Class 2 of Cheri Huber’s What You Practice Is What You Have email class. Her class is copywrited, so that is all I can mention about it. I’m following the rules.
