Ad'dress' Your Fears for Halloween

Halloween is a celebration of fear. It is coming face to face with that which may frighten us, and befriending it. It is finding the fun and excitement that fear can bring. We all have our fears, some more than others. When it is our own fear, it can seem very serious and very personal. We can look at the source of our fear and create suffering, physically and mentally.
I spent today putting together my Halloween costume, and as I was lying in bed this evening contemplating the whole ritual of the holiday, I thought about the different costumes we wear, the decorations. It seems to me that we either make these popular fears friendly through humor or caricaturing their features, or we actively seek our edge of fear through haunted houses full of dreamt up nightmares. I thought, what if we did the same to the fears that we hold personal to us? It is easy to step back and take a third-person perspective and enjoy other people’s goblins, but what about our own?
What are our worst fears, the fears we consider ‘real’? Is it death, worthlessness, illness, rejection? What fears cause us to suffer? What would happen if we took a similar approach to our real fears that we took to the imagined fears of Halloween? What if we dressed up as our worst fear, cartooned it, befriended it, and actively sought it out- just as we do the witches, ghosts, vampires, and frankensteins of October?
I don’t know about you, but as I lay there in bed, imagining what a rejection costume might look like, imagining myself walking through my own internal haunted house, the spooks I’ve held onto seemed much less scary, still a bit thrilling, but the thrill, the thrill had a smile to it.

Namaste.

Family Trees Shed Leaves

I have a good friend whose parents died when he was 6. It is easy for people to see the tragedy in this. Yet I watch he and his two siblings interact, as if they were best friends as well as family, and there is new perspective. At first I covet, wishing that my family had the same relationship and interaction. Yet I quickly acknowledge that unhappiness comes from not accepting what is, so I let that desire go and look at today, and what is. The leaves from yellow to red, piling up outside my door.
My family tree, I think is deciduous. Though it may live in harsher regions, causing leaves to shed, the tree turning in on its self to conserve life, this is only necessary so that the past scars of severed limbs can lead to greater growth in spring. If this did not happen, the tree would not last the winter, trying to care for foliage with energy it does not have. We do not mourn the loss of a leaf in fall, we see its beauty, and know it is only temporary. Yet a connection lost within family, can seem devastating.
I like to think of my family tree more akin to a Pando, that giant grove of aspens, where one is unsure to label it a single tree with one massive root, or many trees interconnected. My family does not come from one trunk. It has spread beyond the blood, and where one trunk may have separated from the rest to begin its own path, another has connected its roots. Or, perhaps the roots themselves have suckered a new branch into existence. There is no loss here. The Pando has existed for thousands of years, in continual cycles of death and rebirth. If one member lets go in the fall, there is new growth in spring.
Have you ever sat outside and listened to the sound of quaking aspen in the breeze? They almost trace the silence. Their color, in its absence, mimic the sun.

In the wake of winter, let the leaves go. Come to center, root down. Nourish within, only then, will you have energy, when the spring comes, to grow.

Namaste,

Reina