One consistent finding I have after doing a lot of meditation work on death, is that not fearing death -in abstract- percolators through the system over time.
I have always had a lot of practical anxieties, but I find that year on year I am less fearful of, well, anything.
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This also seems to be where meditation work starts to intersect with some scarier forms of social pathology.
Loss of fear is empowering, but it is omnidirectionally empowering.
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At the same time, many of the worst human impulses that exist are really just by-products of embodied fear reactions, strengthened over time.
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Social hostility, e.g. passive-aggressive behavior, undermining and jealousy, often trace directly back to embodied anxieties.
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If a latent fear that's been bothering you for years starts to slip, you will often realize massive, largely unintended personality changes with it.
Another thing you may notice is that relationships with some others, built wholly or in part around fear resonance, get strained.
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A lot of therapy work, done well, basically becomes a way to process fears that are so fossilised, you're hardly aware you have them.
It's often messy, crazy-making work, because the natural human reaction to fear is to freak the fuck out. We are prey animals also, y'know.
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At the period where my meditation work started to deteriorate a couple of years ago, a big reason was that I started digging into huge reservoirs of anger.
So much anger, I didn't have any idea where to put it or how to handle it.
Turned out I was scared of getting angry. Yeah.
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I still have a lot of work to do on dissolving fears around anger, but since realising that fear, I've had a much more conscious relationship with it.
Anger has stopped just accumulating interest, and started becoming a more integrated behavior.
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The upshoot is that most defense mechanisms that contort you into uncomfortable shapes of being, are composed of webs of behaviour around personal scars, sort of similar to adhesions after a C-section.
They're the result of a healing process gone slightly awry.
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It's not necessarily easy or even possible to heal any such wound, but to the extent that we can, it usually begins with tugging at a strand until the whole thing comes loose in a big, gory mess.
(P.S.: don't do this with endometriosis.)
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And then, afterwards, you have to work through whatever comes up. Which things have a way of doing on their own, once you've started.
Anyway, those are my loose experiences. Probably spend some time with (competent) professionals if you can, and don't muddle through like me.
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