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.
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