Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. to the podcast, and the place where I simply talk to a microphone, where we do still believe that another world is possible, and that if all eight billion of us, or at least a reasonable critical mass of that number, could all get together and unite behind a vision, or a set of values, or a concept, or a belief, or an embodied beingness,
of what it would feel like to not be sitting in a bus that is being driven towards the edge of a cliff, then there is still time to create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. So today, this is not a podcast. I am recording pretty much at the moment where Saturn conjuncts Neptune at zero degrees of Aries.
And I'm well aware that many of you listening to the Accidental Gods podcast and to me are not necessarily into astrology. And probably about this time last year, I was barely interested in astrology. I have been going to see a psychic astrologer since my 30th birthday, which was a very long time ago.
And at that point, she said, remember, you're a writer who is making a living being a vet, not a vet who has writing as your hobby. And within a decade, I was writing full-time and had started the Boudicca Dreaming series.
Chapter 2: How does astrology influence our understanding of fear?
So I listen to people who give me good advice and advice that feels like it settles into my being. And about a year ago, someone that I trust said, you need to be watching what's happening. And today, 20th of February, at around 3 o'clock UK time, Saturn conjuncts Neptune at zero degrees of Aries, which is the start of the zodiac.
And apparently, this has not happened since 4,631 years before the start of the Common Era. Almost every astrologer I know considers this to be a total reset. And there's a lot of other stuff happening around it, which we are definitely not going to go into. However, I don't know about you, but the world feels to me as if it is balancing on a knife edge.
Somebody a long time in my attempt at dressage riding past, and yes, I do know now that that's not something I particularly should have been doing or definitely want to do now, however... They said, riding a dressage horse is like sitting on an unexploded keg of dynamite balanced on a knife edge. And this is true.
Chapter 3: What insights were gained from the online gathering on fear?
My trainer once put me on her extremely advanced horse and it was very much like that. which is one of the many reasons why I really don't buy into the idea that the woman we know of as Jeanne d'Arc, Joan of Arc, was a peasant girl who happened to be able to ride into battle. It just doesn't work.
However, leaving that completely aside, I feel that we're on the powder keg, balanced on a knife edge moment, whatever is behind it. And that having the resources internally to navigate this moment is really important.
And just over a week ago, I taught the online gathering called Honouring Fear as Your Mentor and was really impressed with the courage and the willingness to be vulnerable and to take risks of the people who turned up. It was the first time that I had taught this particular gathering and I came away from it with ideas that I ought to do a follow-up.
And in thinking about that, I've decided to make this, which is the follow-up, stretch wider so that those of you who did not come to the gathering will still have benefit. Those of you who did come can go deeper.
Chapter 4: How can we navigate our internal resources to handle fear?
Because this seems to me one of the single most useful things that anybody could learn as we sit on the unexploded powder keg balanced on a knife edge. We are pretty much universally in our culture afraid of being afraid, and we need not to be. We need, I believe, to reach a place where energy flows through us, where our feelings flow through unimpeded, where we can feel
grief or fear or rage or despair or joy or awe or love or any particular feeling and let it move through its cyclical pattern and let something else come in its place. And instead, we have a tendency to get locked in old patterns. And some of these patterns are not even ours.
If you read the book Releasing Our Burdens by Richard Schwartz and Thomas Hubel, which I mentioned in my roundup of books at the end of last year, I'll put a link in the show notes, They and other people whom I respect deeply are coming to understand that a lot of the fears that we are experiencing and finding blocking the flow of energy within us are inherited.
And speaking as a shamanic practitioner, I would say they're inherited both down the bloodline and down the spirit line.
Chapter 5: What role does inherited trauma play in our fears?
And this is not an ancestor teaching. If you work with me, you know that that is year six of a cycle that technically lasts 11 years, and actually the only person who's done it in less than 16 years is Lou, and we fast-tracked her because she's my apprentice. So we're not going deep into exploring ancestor work here, but we are really going to look deeply at what fear does to us when it's locked.
Thomas Hubel says that trauma is a moment frozen in time. I have an internal metaphor of two concave mirrors, like the dishes that we used to have on our roofs for getting signal, facing each other. And the flow of our energy is like a beam of light. It could be a laser beam, it could be moonlight, it could be sunlight, but it's got trapped between these two and it's bouncing back and forth.
Do the thing, don't do the thing. Be the thing, don't be the thing.
Chapter 6: How can we practice grounding and breathing techniques?
Say the thing, don't say the thing. Fear this thing, don't fear this thing. Fear is frightening. We get locked back and forth and we don't know how to let it go. We don't know how to let those discs melt away or let the frozen part thaw. And if we're going to get through the pinch point that is coming, which is in itself a source of fear, we need to be in flow.
Because we need to be connected to the web of life. I've said that so often on this podcast that I'm sure you can all recite it in your sleep. But we can't connect to the web of life if we are locked in our fear patterns. If the little bits inside are busy trying to make stuff happen because we're afraid we don't know the answers.
Chapter 7: What are effective strategies for dealing with small fears?
That doesn't work. That can't work. So what we're here for today is to work out how we might thaw those moments frozen in time. How we might just get rid of the opposing discs. How we might step up to being everything that we can be, offering ourselves in service to life.
And I want at this point to offer you a few words from Drew Dellinger, who wrote, It's 3.23 in the morning and I can't sleep because my great-great-grandchildren ask me in dreams, what did you do while the earth was unravelling? I open the gathering with this and I want to offer it again here because for me it's an incentive to do work that can be hard,
that can hit up against parts that would really rather not have to address whatever issue is their issue. And I do think it's not negotiable. And it helps me to remember that the earth is unravelling, and I do have a part to play in this, and that the single most important thing I can do, and I know I keep saying this, but it is true, is to do the inner work.
Chapter 8: How can we transform fear into a mentor for personal growth?
One of the things that we do focus on when we're doing the shamanic training is how to step into a place where we are full-hearted, open-hearted, clear-hearted and strong-hearted. And I would like to widen that to the entire population of the planet. So whether the part frozen in time is ours or whether we've inherited it and it's traveled down for the past 10,000 years,
from whatever was the traumatic event that split our culture off from the web of life, it doesn't really matter. All that matters is that this is our work to do, and we can do it now. So in doing it, really basic safety things. We're in the realm of fear and trauma, and this is not therapy.
We are quite therapy adjacent, but if you have fear or traumas that are potentially overwhelming, that are potentially incapacitating, that could potentially knock you off balance so that you can't move through the world, then please find an individual or a community that can help you to work with them in person. This is not what this is for.
What I want to do here is explore ideas and open the space for you to work with the smaller traumas, the little blips of fear that come through every day that really aren't going to knock you off balance if you work with them. so that your system gets used to the idea that this can happen. Thawing is a thing.
The fact that we've had a fear all of our lives doesn't mean we have to keep carrying it. Getting used to this means we can then gradually, slowly, in moments when we're feeling very resourced, begin to work with the bigger things. I hope that's really clear. If you need to go back and listen to that again, please do.
And then as an adjunct to that, we have some really basic safety practices that will help you come back into balance if you feel that you are beginning to topple. So the first is your breath. Deep, slow, rhythmic breathing is almost impossible if we are juddered.
And conversely, if we are breathing deeply and slowly right down into our abdomens and at a rate where the in-breath is half the length of the out-breath, this in itself sends signals to the rest of our nervous system that things are okay. So within our group, we work with five, 10, 20 breathing.
which is in for a count of five and then pause, out for a slow count of 10 and then pause, and do this 20 times, which if you are counting at roughly a second per count, means that you'll be doing it for five minutes.
So it would be in two, three, four, five, pause, Out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Pause.
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