If you’ve read this blog through from the beginning, you’ll know that the core healing process has 3 organic phases. Riding the lightning is the second phase, having fear as it’s emotional focus. Because of the years of sexual violation I went through as a boy, (Getting Started Posts) I had an amazing amount of fear, anxiety, and terror stored within me. It didn’t matter where I was or what I was doing, a foundational, baseline state of fear and anxiety was always there. It was such the air I breathed that I didn’t really realize how much of it there was, or how strongly it drove me. Before I worked my way into Phase II and healed through and resolved my fear, I couldn’t really keep still unless I had run myself into the ground. I was always doing something, always needing to run until I dropped. There was no peace to this, yet it was all I knew.
Riding the lightning is an old phrase referring to the experience of being electrocuted in the electric chair. I’ve hijacked the phrase in a tongue in cheek way to describe the process that one needs to go through to progressively release the powerful buildup of fear, anxiety, terror, and panic that’s stored inside us as a part of our debilitated cores. Experiencing fear is a normal and even necessary part of life. The problem is that we never learn to handle and release it in this culture because we’re so averse to the process of emotional evacuation in general. This leaves us to store this turbulent, electric emotion inside us.
As our fear gets stored over time, its strength builds and intensifies until the suppressed, ignored, and covered over emotion demands to be expressed in the same way that built up pressure demands to be diffused from a pressure cooker. This fear drives us to run around in circles mentally, as well as physically. It drives us into compulsive behavior, into panic attacks, into sleep disorders, or into a chronic state of anxiety. It demands we either keep at a distance from life, or that we dive in and run over or try to control what we’re a part of. This all usually happens without being able to connect the dots to how the backlogs that we’re disconnected from are causing our troubles.
My journey into this part of my healing process was built on the foundation of my training phase. I had been struggling from the negative effects of having so much fear, anxiety, and terror inside me for years. By creating enough success with my training phase, I reached the ability to meet my fear skillfully so I could actually help it heal. At first, I met my fear with song because I didn’t know how else to engage with it. In time, my system became strong enough to start evacuating my fear by doing something called emotional yawning, which is a repetitive type of yawning that has nothing to do with being tired.
As I learned how fear release worked, I came to see how critical connection work was within this part of my healing process. Handling fear is an electric and jolting experience, especially as you work deeper into your backlog. By using connection work to tangibly connect to something greater than myself, I was able to stay grounded as I handled the building intensity of my fear, allowing me to move deeper and deeper into and through my backlog.
“Connection work involves spending guided time with the natural world, ideally close to home, so you can learn to reach out to and connect with Life as you heal your way into such an experience internally.”
Eventually, I figured out that I could use on-the-ground challenges to skillfully apply pressure to my backlog of fear, allowing me to regulate how it surfaced. This was where I really learned to bring together the 3 main pillars of my approach—emotional release work, connection work, and on-the-ground work—into a rehabilitative approach that efficiently allowed me to work through my backlog of negative emotion and do my part to heal at a core level.
I found the ideal setting for me to challenge myself during this phase was while I was practicing primitive earth skills in the backcountry, and so many of my posts will be shared from that setting. Primitive earth skills are the types of skills Native Americans used to bring forth the shelter, fire, water, food, and clothing they needed in their lives. I had been practicing these skills for many years by the time I started Phase II, which allowed me to bring them into extended trips into the backcountry.
Most think of primitive skills in terms of survival, which usually orients towards not dying, and inevitably involves plenty of suffering. My challenges were set up to be quite demanding, but I didn’t use them so I could just suffer. Instead, I used my functional skills to learn how to live with the earth. In so doing, when I was successful with the challenges that I stepped into in the backcountry, my skills became doorways to establish intimate connections with Creation. This set up the ideal setting for my Phase II work because the situations I put myself in always pressured my backlog of fear, but did it in a way so I could heal through the emotion while spending my time being deeply supported by the earth. As I healed through my backlog, and succeeded with my on-the-ground challenges, I was left feeling and being safe and OK as I found myself held within the welcoming embrace of my mother, the earth.
It wasn’t until I really started healing into this phase that I realized how deeply buried in fear I had been. My journey took many years, and in the end, I did something most would say was impossible for someone who grew up with the level of abuse that I went through. I reclaimed the right to feel and be safe and OK in my life at the deepest emotional level. The results I achieved were extraordinary. This part of my core was now awake and alive, yet I didn’t feel any fear within my baseline. Not even when I was placed under serious challenge.
By the end of this part of my journey, I had learned that we are meant to learn how to dance with fear, anxiety, and even terror so we can claim our right to feel safe, hopeful, and courageous in life at a core level. That’s the state of wholeness we are meant to inhabit as we live our lives, yet no one in this culture accomplishes this because we never learn to engage with our emotions.
My journey through this phase was very demanding, and as usual it took much longer to navigate than it now does for the clients I help. But it was well worth the effort, for there’s nothing that can replace the experience of reclaiming your right to feel and be safe in the world.
Let’s get started with this part of my journey so I can share what it entails.