Why Fear is Like Hot Sauce Bear Skin Digital by jen bishop

Why Fear is Like Hot Sauce

I have recently sought coaching and counselling for personal challenges and blockages.

In exploring my own issues I have identified far beneath, buried deep down in my subconscious, a far more complex and insidious root of life struggles.

FEAR.

Fear of conflict, fear of failure, fear of what others think, fear of condemnation, fear of disappointing those I love, fear of not being enough.

Procrastination? FEAR.

Low achievement? FEAR.

Conflict avoidance. FEAR.

Broken relationships? FEAR.

Friends chastise me for seeming calm and peaceful, and yet on occasion raising grievances of issues from years ago. I had been hurt at the time and instead of raising the issue then, sat with the pain for years before finally airing it.

I realise that FEAR is like a hot sauce. It eclipses all flavour and sense, disallowing the nuance of other food in the dish. When I am stressed or face conflict, I cannot feel anything except confusion driven by fear.

I cannot tell how I feel, what I think, what I want or process how the other person has hurt me. The hot sauce eclipses all others and I feel paralysed. It is only much later that I am able to process my feeling and raise the concerns with my friends and loved ones. They understandably are confused as this issue has long passed and they had no idea.

Coaching has established the need to rebuild identity that can stand up against fear. This entails responsibility for actions which have caused the issue to perpetuate and grow.

Healing occurs through receiving love and rebuilding trust. Trust of self, trust of others, trust of the divine. A kindness given to myself is like water, which dilutes the hot sauce. As the hot sauce strength subsides, the flavour returns. The ability to feel a range of feelings returns.

I am able to be present with my emotions and know what I want. I am less inclined to flee, shut down, avoid or stonewall situations that require vulnerability and presence.

I’m more inclined to try hard at things that make me afraid or risk my feelings. And slowly, slowly I am able to hope that the future might be different.

The Neverending Story: Part I ….

When Bastian Balthazar Bux, a shy, fat and lonely school boy, steals a mysterious book from a mysterious book shop one rainy morning, and hides in an attic to read it – little does he know of the adventurous journey on which it would take him.
Lost in the world of Fantasia, Bastian reads of the adventures of Atrayu, a boy his own age and his friend Falkor the Luckdragon, as they seek a cure for the Childlike Empress. The Empress is dying and with her, the land of Fantasia, a place where every imaginary character of dream and story lives.
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What is the cause of the Nothing which threatens to consume all of Fantasia? Can Atrayu find the cure for the Empress and turn back the destruction it brings?
Michael Ende’s classic children’s tale, The Neverending Story was first published in 1979 and has been since made into several films. Originally a playwright, Ende is best known for his children’s stories which have sold over $35 million of copies worldwide and translated into over 40 languages.
The story is a rich tapestry of mythology and legend and like all good works of fantasy plumbs the depths of human identity and purpose via our dreams.
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Moreover, like the works of many fantasy writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, including JK Rowling, CS Lewis and JRR Tolkein, Michael Ende’s fantasy functions as a polemic against modernity, rationalism, pragmatism, and progress and calls readers back to values of the romantic era, values such as the the imagination, intuition, and the transcendent.
One such key message emerges in dialogue between Atrayu, our hero, and the wolf, Gmork, a servant of the Nothing. Gmork explains the relationship between the death of Fantasia and the world of humans.
Humans have stopped believing in Fantasia, Gmork explains, and because they have stopped believing, they have stopped visiting. It is human imagination which gives Fantasia its life and without their presence, Fantasians are perishing, consumed by the Nothing.
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When humans did visit, they were able to return to their own world and see it through a more magical lens. In this way, Fantasia and the human world are necessary sides of a coin, each needing the other.
The creatures of Fantasia are not only dying, but as they are consumed by the Nothing, they end up in the human world but not in their fantastical form, but in the form of the lies. They become the vain hopes and delusions of the human world such as ambition, greed and vice.
With this brief parable, Ende manages to sum up the modern malaise. Enlightenment and post-enlightenment rhetoric of the 1700s and 1800s, emphasised the rational and scientific, marginalising the role of religion, myth and legend to the realm of childhood or the primitive man.
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The result however was the impoverishment of the subconscious, the dreamscape and the deep psyche which when left unexamined, plagued modern man with unresolved issues such as depression, malaise, unacknowledged vices, greed, self obsession and nihilism.
The Neverending Story is “preaching” the value of dreams, imagination, and story as portals to the depths of the human heart.
Through stories and dreams we can come to know ourselves and we learn to restore our connectedness, a sense of something larger than ourselves,  trust in one another and a hope for our world.

Prison Drama

William Shakespeare wrote:  [As You Like It, Act II, Scene vii].

All the world is a stage

Well from the plethora of literary and narrative representations of characters in prison, one could equally state:

All the world is a prison.

From Viktor Frankl’s work “Man’s Search for Meaning” to Sohlzenitsyn’s “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich“, to Stephen King’s novella “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption“,

Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman sitting outside on the benches playing checkers and talking in a scene from the film 'The Shawshank Redemption', 1994. (Photo by Castle Rock Entertainment/Getty Images)

and added to by prisoner of war movies such as “The Great Escape“, J G Ballard’s “The Empire of the Sun” and more recently the biopic of Louis Zamperini,  “Unbroken” the list of prison dramas goes on and on and on.

Unbroken

Men and women trapped within a confined space with others of diverse backgrounds and with complex stories, facing chafing constraints, hardship and oftentimes abusive treatment from powerholders – seem to carry the strongest metaphors for the experience of living.

Narratives of mental asylums as prisons go even deeper.

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Consider “One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest” and Scorcese’s bad but good “Shutter Island.” Throw in a bit of madness and give the crazy ones the dialogue that makes the most sense.

Oppose this by giving the sane, dialogue full of subterfuge and chicanery and the metaphors escalate.

Shakespeare saw his world as a play; madness, hubris, revenge, love and lust were all played out upon the dusty boards of a theatre and observed by a crowd for their entertainment, edification and esteem.

OITNB

More modern narratives see this world as a madhouse, a prison of sorts, ruled by despotic guards, nurses and gatekeepers. No great narrator rules this universe, the protagonists struggle for hope, alone with other inmates for cheer.

Prison it seems a perfect platform to explore existential meaning for each generation. Within the constraints, tension, trials and suffering of this petri-dish, the characters explore what it is to “be” and find their “why” for living.

Prison dramas at their best bring out the why of living.

Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote:

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More of a realist

I couldn’t help but share this post from favourite Seth Godin.

More of a realist

 

When did being called a ‘realist’ start to mean that one is a pessimist?

Sometimes, people with small goals call themselves realists, and dismiss those around them as merely dreamers. I think this is backwards.

I guess I’m more of a realist than you,

actually means,

I guess I’ve discovered that a positive attitude, a generous posture and a bit of persistence makes things better than most people expect.

Hope isn’t a strategy, but it is an awfully good tactic.

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You can follow Seth’s blog here.

A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

“ The Soviet Union was destroyed by information
– and this wave started from Solzhenitsyn’s One Day ” —Vitaly Korotich

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Оди́н день Ива́на Дени́совича or  Odin den’ Ivana Denisovich) is a novel written by Aleksandyr Sohlzenitsyn , first published in November 1962. The story is set in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s and describes a single day of an ordinary prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.  Written semi-autobiographically after Solzhenitsyn’s own 8 year imprisonment, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is an innocent unjustly sentenced for supposed political dissidence .

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The novel follows the character through a simple day. This  day begins with Shukhov waking up sick and for waking late, he fears he will be placed into solitary confinement.  However,  he is simply forced to clean the guardhouse a relatively minor punishment.  When Shukhov is finally able to leave the guardhouse, he goes to the dispensary to report his illness. Since it is late in the morning by this time, the orderly is unable to exempt any more workers, and Shukhov must work.

Shukov manages to gain an extra piece of bread at breakfast time which he sews into his mattress before heading out to work. He takes pride in his work, laying bricks as perfectly as possible, hiding his mortar trowel during the break time so no other prisoners could take it from him.  During the freezing work he finds a piece of metal and conceals it in his mitten for later, to create a knife.  At the end of the day, Shukhov is able to provide a few special services for Tsezar (Caesar), an intellectual who is able to do office work instead of manual labor. Shukhov is able to get a small share of Tsezar’s dinner ration and packages by standing in lines for him.

Shukhov’s day ends up being productive, even “almost happy”: “Shukhov goes to sleep fully content. He’d had many strokes of luck that day.” (p. 139). The novel closes with the observation that this was but one of 3653 days of Shukov’s sentence.

day in the life of Ivan

The book’s publication was remarkable as it was the first published account of Stalinist repression.

Its motifs are powerful –  the prisoners are assigned numbers for easy identification and in an effort to dehumanize them, the conditions are sub zero, prisoners are encouraged to report each other for reward. Despite this, Solzhenitsyn shows that a surprising loyalty exists among the work gang members, a warmth and camraderie despite individual selfishnesses.  Shukhov in particular shows that the way to maintain human dignity is not through outward rebellion but through developing a personal belief system. At meal time, no matter how hungry he is, he insists on removing his cap before eating. No matter how ravenous he becomes, he never stoops to  scrounging and begging for scraps.

day in life

At the close of the novel, Shukov thanks God for his day. Alyoshka the Baptist hears his prayer and urges Shukhov to pursue things of the spirit rather than things of the flesh. Shukov follows Alyoshka’s advice in giving him one of his biscuits, spontaneously showing gratitude for the young man. He sleeps with an inner peace considering the day a good day.

Sohlzenitsyn’s literature is a form of subversion of the most powerful type for it encourages hope.  The short novel novel depicts human dignity against the harshest of immoral treatment and finding hope in the darkest place.  The Nobel Prize Foundation reports:

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1970 was awarded to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature”. – http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1970/index.html