18
SHAMANIC DIRECTIVESM
FOR ADDRESSING FEAR
Then he said to me, do not fear, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your heart to understand, and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard, and I have come because of your words.
SHAMANIC TEACHING
Nothing shakes us up like fear. It is a bone-rattling, skin-trembling encounter with an assumed threat to our way of being. But wouldn’t it be a good thing to be able to retain the energy of fear, allowing its impact to shake us into shamanic experience, but without the negative baggage that fear brings along? Imagine that in the face of threat and death, you would tremble only with the life force.
The old ones tell us that this is our goal: to rid ourselves of the toxic fear of fear and to be receptive to the gift of energy that threat and death bring. “Keep looking over your shoulder to make sure that death is near,” some of the old shamans used to say. “Keep looking to make sure that threat is all around.” Fear can stretch us to live more fully. This is an old shamanic teaching.
Problems arise when we don’t accept fear as bearing a gift. We try to shrink and destroy it. Again, fear makes us tremble, but so does joy.
Fear and joy are related to the trembling of life and death, the pushing and pulling of a cosmic dance. Bring forth the lunatic angels of God. Ask them to teach us the ways in which fear can be a teacher, a gift, a guide and compass for finding joy. Embrace fear in all its forms. Its serious presence will remain, but now add its absurd presence and stretch the two forms into a horizontal line, stretching yourself along with it into new realms of shamanic possibilities.
DIRECTIVE: PEN PAL FEARS
Write the name of what you fear the most. Under the name of this fear, write the name of a fictitious person. Pretend that this person is more fearful than you are of what you named. He or she is twice as fearful as you, as hard as that may be to imagine. He or she would be greatly relieved if they could reduce their fear to the level you experience.
Your assignment is to write an imaginary letter to this fictional person. Ask them what it is like to have a fear that is twice as bad as yours. Mail this letter to your own address.
When you receive the letter, answer it as if you were the imaginary person. Write a letter to yourself describing your situation from their point of view. Mail this letter to yourself. Continue this pen pal relationship in which you write the letters for both sides of the correspondence. Over the next two months, write the letters in such a way that it appears you are actually helping the imaginary other with effective spiritual and shamanic advice. Do not cure this other person. Limit yourself to reducing the other’s fear to one half of what it was originally.
Considerations
DIRECTIVE: SOUND TREATMENT
Get an audio recorder and make the necessary arrangements to record your voice. The tape should be at least sixty minutes in length. Before recording, ask yourself who else has the same fear you have. It may be someone you know, someone you’ve heard about, or even a fictional person from a movie or novel. If you don’t know anyone with the same fear, you must find someone. You can do this in any way, even finding a magazine article about someone with this fear. You may want to do a search on the Internet. When you have the name of this person, record yourself saying his or her name over and over again, for the full length of one side of the tape. Try to say the name slowly, with the same tone, intensity, and volume.
The next step is to make a list of all the spiritually oriented people you know, from the past and the present, who probably don’t have this fear. Spend at least a week working on this list, making it as long as you possibly can. You can use any means to create the list. Make sure you include some biblical characters. When you have your list of people who do not share your fear, record yourself reading their names. Repeat the list, if necessary, until you have filled up the other side of the tape. Every time you utter a name, try to speak in a different way. Change your volume, the pitch of your voice, your speed of speaking, and so forth.
Wait one week before listening to the tape. At that time, you will have to make special arrangements for your listening. Obtain a portable cassette tape player that can be operated with batteries. Plan to go into a remote place, away from other people. At sunset, turn on the first side of your tape, the one on which you recorded the name of one person who shares the fear. As you listen to this side of the tape, walk away from the recorder. Keep walking until you can barely hear the tape. At the spot that marks the borderline between where you can hear and where you can no longer hear, walk back and forth between hearing and not hearing. Do this for the entire side of the tape.
Turn the tape to the other side, on which you recited many names of people who do not have the fear. Lie on the ground with your ear on the tape machine. Make sure it is at comfortable listening level, and listen to the entire side of the tape.
When the tape is finished, disassemble it. You will have to bring pliers and any other tools you might need to accomplish this part of the task. Pull out the whole tape and wrap half of it around each of your legs. Drive away from the spot with this tape around your legs. Go to a gas station and throw the tape away.
When you return home, try to refrain from thinking about what you did for two days. On the third day, send yourself a post card on which you have written these words: “I heard something important.”
Considerations
DIRECTIVE: THE FEAR CARD
On an index card, write down what you fear the most. On the other side of the card, write what you fear the least. Place this card inside the Book of Psalms in your Bible. Let it “sleep” there for twenty-four hours. After the card has rested, carry it with you at all times. When you find yourself becoming fearful of what you fear the most, pull out your card and stare at the side that states what you fear the least. See if you can get what you fear least to divert you from your strongest fear.
Considerations
DIRECTIVE: BOTTLED-UP FEAR
Obtain a plastic bag and a glass jar large enough to contain the bag. Go to a private area and spend several minutes thinking about your fear. Place your mouth over the plastic bag and shout into it the name of your fear. You may then scream or make unusual noises into the bag, as long as they communicate everything you possibly feel about your fear. When you have exhausted the possibilities of expressing your fear, tighten the end of the plastic bag and place it into the glass jar. Immediately seal the jar and reflect on how you have bottled up your fear.
Take your bottled-up fear to a church building that looks friendly to you. Open the jar and unseal the plastic bag. Say the verse, “Fear thou not; for I am with thee.”
Considerations
DIRECTIVE: FEAR SOUND TRACK
Obtain an audiotape recorder and record the name of your fear once every ten seconds. A ten-minute tape will contain sixty recordings of your fear’s name. Make certain you say your fear in a very dramatic, fearful way. You may have to practice until you can make it sound fearful in an old-fashioned, theatrical manner.
Rent a videotape or DVD of some slapstick humor. Episodes of the Three Stooges, Charlie Chaplin, or the Marx Brothers would serve you well. Watch the videotape or DVD at the same time you play back the audiotape of your fear. Turn up the volume of your audiotape player, so you can hear your voice making a very pronounced delivery of your fear. As you watch the comedic antics, you will hear your fear sounding off every ten seconds. Watch a full ten minutes of slapstick until your audiotape has completed its job. At the end of the tape, say aloud, “There’s nothing like baptizing fear in the ridiculous.”
Over a period of several months, watch many silly comedies, silent film classics, and other forms of filmed lunacy while listening to your most serious effort to articulate the name of your fear.
Considerations
DIRECTIVE: RICE CEREAL BOMB
Place two teaspoons of rice cereal into a small bowl. Stare at the cereal and imagine projecting your fear into the cereal, as if you had a special kind of thought power. Ask the spirit of a saint to help you do this. Hold the bowl of cereal and shake it around as if you and your saint were transmitting the vibrations of your fear into the rice.
Place this cereal into the bottom of each shoe, one teaspoon for each foot. Proceed to take a fifteen-minute walk. Feel the fearful rice cereal becoming pulverized as you walk on top of it. Imagine the crunchy sounds you would hear if your feet had ears.
After the walk, empty the rice cereal into your hand and complete the job of fully pulverizing the cereal, turning it into a powder. Place this powder into a piece of tissue paper and wrap it up. Pretend it is a bomb—a fear bomb. Go to a safe place and light the bomb. You may twist the tissue paper to make a fuse. Walk away from your bomb and listen to hear whether or not there is a loud explosion. Judge the power of your fear by the loudness of the explosion.
Considerations
DIRECTIVE: FEAR PETS
Go to a toy store and purchase two stuffed animals. One should be the most frightening stuffed toy you can find and the other should be completely nonfrightening. At first, keep the two animals separate from one another. Keep the scary one in a closet and keep the nonfrightening one on top your bed, near your pillow.
For five minutes before you go to sleep, go into your closet and pet the frightening animal. Pretend it is afraid to be seen by other animals because everyone thinks it looks scary. Pet it and believe you are providing comfort. Say a little prayer for it. Do this every night for a week. This will give the animal courage to come out of the closet.
After a week of building courage, present the closet animal with a piece of your clothing that you find comforting and attractive. With this piece of clothing, bring out the closet animal and set it next to the other animal on your bed. Every evening before you go to sleep, do the following with the two creatures. Have the nonfrightening animal pet the other animal and say a prayer for it. Let it help build up the other’s courage in the same way you helped it before.
After another week has passed, place the two animals in your closet together. For the rest of the year, pet each animal just before you go to sleep and make a small prayer. If you have to go out of town, give them some extra care and attention before you leave.
Considerations
DIRECTIVE: FEAR BALLS
Take a sheet of paper and write the name of your fear at the top. Then list everything you can think of that describes your experience of the fear. Go to a copy shop and make thirty-three copies of this sheet of fear. Take the copies home and wad each paper into a paper ball. You will have a total of thirty-three “fear balls.”
Carry this supply of fear balls with you throughout the next week. Whenever you begin thinking about your fear, get out a fear ball, go to the nearest trash can, and slam it into the can. Say to yourself, “In the name of Christian shamanism, so much for that fear ball!”
Considerations
To the best of your abilities, draw a picture of your fear. Feel free to be very abstract and wild in your artistic rendering. Take the drawing and rub it against a page of Revelations. Make sure the page makes reference to scary images or events. Now when you find yourself struggling with someone you fear, go to this fear picture and rub it three times with your little finger.
The next time you see the person who intimidated you, wave that little finger at him or her. Know that there is great power in the finger that rubbed against the spiritually energized picture.
Considerations
DIRECTIVE: ONCE UPON A TIME …
This directive is different from the others in that it begins with a story.
Once upon a time there lived a princess who was very fearful that her fear would never go away. She worried at least twelve hours a day that her fear would sneak up on her and give her a fright. One day she couldn’t stand it any longer. She screamed out, as loudly as she could, “Get out of my life!” She looked at the sky and begged God to take away her fear.
Within seconds, a cricket landed in the palm of her hand. She thought she heard it making a sound. Bringing it close to her ear, she heard that it was actually crying, making the sound a little child produces when hurt. “What’s wrong?” asked the princess. The cricket responded, “It was me you feared. You asked me to go away and it hurt my feelings. Now I’m stuck in the outer world. You wouldn’t let me live in peace in the inner world, so here I am in your hand.”
The rest of the story takes many hours to tell, but for our purposes it is enough to know that the princess and the cricket became best friends and remained together until the very last day of the princess’s life. After she died, the court jester found a letter she had written, with instructions for it to be opened one hundred years after her death. The letter stated:
Your fear is inside you. Make it your friend. If you don’t, it will think you are going to leave it alone. You will then feel its fear. You will feel how frightened it is by the possibility of being left alone. Remember that God loves all the creatures of the outside and inside worlds, including the creature called fear. In my case, my fear almost left me. If it had, I would have felt very lonely. Fortunately, it became a magic cricket that lived with me throughout my life. It told me to tell you this. Go purchase the metal toy that makes the sound of a cricket. Keep it in with you at all times. If you ever feel the fear inside you, just give it a click. This will help your fear know that you are there with it and it doesn’t have to be afraid.
Now, get yourself a clicker and perform a ritual to prepare it for this task. Do this by reading it the story of the princess and the cricket each night for three days. Beginning the next day, carry the clicker with you. Whenever you feel any fear, give it a click. Like the story, remind your fear that it doesn’t have to be afraid.
Considerations
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Fear can immobilize us as its intensity threatens to throw our system into emotional shock. No challenge presents itself with as powerful a tool for personal transformation and growth than raw naked fear. Embrace fear and wrestle it to the ground with equally intense and extreme absurdity. Whether you have rice cereal in your shoes, a fear card in your pocket, or fear balls to throw in the air, know that fear presents a radical opportunity for really jumping off the deep end. When fear strikes, don’t hold back. Dig deeper into the trickster’s arsenal and meet it head on. Dance with it, tickle it, and invite it to come into your playground. Fear can transform the deepest parts of you. It can bring the biggest release of humor and open the doors to the deepest calm.
Behind every extreme is a door that takes you to its opposite form. Stretch fear with absurd play and find yourself entering the ecstatic currents of spiritual delight. Cultivate an awareness of how many times you meet fear and tap into its energy. Stare fear in the face and don’t run away from it (unless it is appropriate to do so for personal safety). Look for fear’s funny bone. Tickle it and watch yourself become what fear fears most. Consider how fear runs away from the fully developed Christian shaman. It loses face when it instantly transforms from serious fright to a lighthearted joke. Let these lessons teach you the power of conquering fear with a single feather solely used for tickling the situation at hand.