 There comes a point in the spiritual journey where you can start to become aware of things that you're avoiding and that's quite a helpful thing to just start to become just aware of what it is. In this case the fear of non-existence. For many people it's something a little more specific than that. So you often times say what you resist you persist and so there's this sense of an opportunity to move through something that I think is very, very helpful and it's happened to me. I mean when I was extremely shy and I knew that I wanted to go past that experience of being so shy and being such a fixed experience that there were certain classes that I took in university like counseling classes and things where I felt like okay I'm going right at that feeling of shyness. Years ago there was this sense of going to the hospital for a tonsillectomy or something and taking the blood from the fingers and then looking at the blood and getting very nauseous and you're like I've got to get the smelling cells quicker. I'm going to pass out and noticing just I've got an association with what seems to be my blood. There's some kind of association in there which I don't know and I don't understand. I just feel like I'm going to pass out when I see it. And then having an opportunity a few years later to be a part of the vegetarian study where they would literally take the blood on a regular basis and thinking hmm let's know accident that would arise to give me a chance to more fully face and in some sense confront that feeling of wherever there's an association. Your brother's just saying it's exciting I'm going to kind of expose myself to this again and I'm going to gain something from this whether I seem to have a loosening from it and a passing through it or whether I start to have a realization like well this is I'm not ready to go there right now and start to see that either way there's a sense of a benefit spiritually instead of just staying kind of keeping away from it and kind of running from it. I think people have that feeling too when they meet somebody a relationship starts and they go oh here we go I'm going to have to face this and this and this and that's the time to really stand in and allow those emotions to come up and actually face them and work through them instead of just trying to bolt and run away and hide and guard against them. So then what's the distinction then because we don't let you ever say like don't go looking for the fear necessarily and it's not mastery through fear we've been talking about that a bit in our small group it's really like a mastery through following a joy. So where does the line come there? Well it's with the fear however the fear comes up that's where the block is to block to consistently experiencing the joy and the love so I've always felt that it is a path of negation you start to get in touch with the blocks and then allow them to be removed or allow them to be negated which is a way of like clearing the lens so more light can shine through and you can experience the love more consistently so it's not like you go looking for it but it's like when it presents itself you are very very sure that you're not going to disguise it or try to push it down or protect against it or hide it. It's more of like a welcoming, it sounds almost strange to welcome darkness when it arises but actually when you start to see the value of it it's more like okay here it comes and it's like more you can give it a welcome like I would like to move through this and feel this and as it's moving through and you seem to be in it of course there's an impetus to let it go and that's why instead of going searching for it it's more like in community and in relationships and also in meditation practice those things will keep coming and coming not that you're digging for them they just keep coming and coming and in that sense to welcome them I know the early years when I was out traveling I felt a lot of intense emotions and ego was over there chipping away going how are you going to talk to groups and everything when you're so emotionally unstable you could feel like you could turn on a dime some of these sharp emotions come and this and this and and it was a walk of trust and it felt like I guess when you start to take the lid off of the hiding and protecting of those emotions it gets very intense it was like I could kind of look for a visual in my mind but it was like you're in Maui and you're surfing and you've just caught the big wave and you're up on your surfboard on the big wave and this powerful wave is right underneath you and you're kind of a balancing going on like you're on the surfboard psychically balancing and it's a feeling like if you don't stay attentive if you don't really stay attentive here you could flip forward and just get crushed by the wave or you could just go fling and just go flipping right off the back you know like it's rolling right under you and you're right on the edge it's something that's very powerful beneath that was the experience I had when I started to go through this stuff and I was like wow there's nothing that's prepared me for this you know and then being out on the road meeting new people new places to stay there wasn't anything familiar that I could like grab onto like a hole to dive into but like I was totally raw totally exposed and things were coming at me so fast that I can now see that there was a great benefit there the spirit's like trust I've got you trust, trust, trust but I had to trust you know with like it seems like every turn there were meeting new people new opportunities invitations so much coming that it's like okay okay show me show me the wave you know and it really does develop that sense of tuning in listening and following much much sharper then to be kind of playing it safe which I see a lot of denial and repression was what I call playing it safe it wasn't safe at all you're sitting on a volcano that could erupt at any moment and just stuffing down all that energy like oh it's not there keep it together keep your life small and little and regulated you know because that's gonna do it so it was quite it required a lot of attentiveness to hang in there with the spirit I think too you know everyone's talking about how to live on planet earth and when we talk about spiritual communities consensus is a way that it comes to mind you know where you just have an agreement you keep coming to agreements and it just for most people it just seems impractical but then the deeper you get tuned in and you share the same purpose at some point this whole consensus model has to flip from being completely impractical to always looking more and more like the only way to go and not so much a consensus where it's all these separate people have to all come to an agreement but it's more that you find yourself more and more in alignment and it's more just understood like oh we're gonna do this great that is a feeling of like you're flowing with it you're flowing with what's for your greatest good not you know trying to figure out who's gonna make the decisions who are the leaders who are the followers you know who is governing us now who has the power all these kind of things that seem extremely important to the ego start to fade into more of a telepathic experience where it's like oh everything is being taken care of and I noticed that here in Mallorca last year we had I don't know 20 some 30 people and two vellas and with transportation food outings all kinds of things it just felt like as we moved on in the experience it just became more and more telepathic like these concerns and these fears just started to drop and fade like oh we this is fun we're having a ball here this isn't a problem at all this is a fun way to live and people were getting into the vibe and the flow synchronicities happening oh how am I gonna get over there will it be alright oh there's another there's still another space in that car right there okay I'm coming hold on don't go you know it just was like more a reflection of mind like you have a little whim for something and then it's just there not that you've got to go through all these steps and planning and working and figuring out and you know in a kind of an analytical way that's just very tiring to try to figure this world out and act accordingly it's like it's actually insane you think of it and it's interesting me talking about it because when I was back in high school they started telling me I had a very very bright analytical mind you know they didn't say it's worthless but they they said it was kind of held up as this great thing and they were steering me towards engineering and you know ways that I could tap into whatever mathematics and things and then then when I got into yeah University tried out engineering and urban planning some of these things it just it just didn't have a sense of resonance or joy it didn't matter how good the analytical mind was it just didn't resonate didn't feel like that was the way that was not the calling of my heart or the calling of my life so progressively I just seemed to get more and more intuitive and less and less analytical until it was like an eclipse like just turn turn turn and then it was like okay oh there goes the analytical now turning toward the intuitive and then more and more you just you actually realize it you can be 100% intuitive actually you don't need to rely on past learning for anything but it just takes practice