Warring Within: Making Peace With Your Fears
by Ask a Healer
I don't know anyone fully engaged in human life who doesn't face a personal demon here and there. Most of us face a lot of them. It certainly takes spiritual fortitude to face your fears and battle your demons but is warring the best way to victory? How do we vanquish our fears and fight our personal demons successfully? Should we fight them at all?
Whether you believe in literal demons who breathe fire from hades or not, you most likely face personal demons that seem just as formidable as if they were in third-dimensional form.
Among those energies / collective thought form entities that can appear overwhelming and bigger than we are stands fear, doubt, worry, shame, guilt and rage.
I've learned I can almost gauge my ability to transmute and evolve as a spiritual being on any level, by how often I am facing personal demons.
How you choose to approach fighting demons says a lot about the path you are choosing as spiritual being as well. Though it may feel as if there really is only one way to victory, there are different ways of healing and transforming.
One of the most overlooked ways to work through our fears is through those who challenge us. Those who push our buttons the most may also prove to be our best spiritual teachers.
Acceptance as a Warrior Approach:
Another way of fighting our demons without fighting lies in the way of accepting what is and releasing resistance to the present moment. Note that, initially, starting with nonresistance and acceptance was not my way! Accepting my reality, when that reality was painful and undesirable seemed the last thing I'd ever do, for a long time.
Acceptance and non-resistance as a way to overcome fears and face personal demons seemed to be admitting that a wrong situation was ok. It took a while for me to realize that wasn't the message, in embracing the present moment with self-responsibility. For me at that time, the very idea of accepting the presence of a situation within which I was suffering or accepting the presence of a person whose actions resulted in pain for me, seemed to be a type of defeat that would leave me helpless and forever vulnerable.
Seeking to avoid feeling weak and vulnerable, I fought against this idea of surrender into what is. I fought it for a long, long, tedious time. In other words, I fought against not fighting my personal demons. The need to resist them was stronger than my ability to see another way; the fear of not resisting them was stronger than the faith of having support to walk thru them.
I guess I may have kept fighting except for a situation that so completely slammed me that I had nothing left with which to battle anything. I collapsed, because I had no choice. I surrendered out of lack of energy to do anything else.
In the stillness that followed, nothing happened for what seemed an eternity but was only 3 months in linear time. I was not yet surrendered completely; my mind had gone numb as a defense mechanism of the ego. When my soul decided that's enough of that, the situation and pain and person came rushing back into awareness and I had a choice to make.
This time, I did something different - nothing.
Instead of raising back up to do battle, I simply recognized that I owned this situation. I had called these people to me and chosen to co-create this situation. Realizing this, I realized something else ....
I had to stand and fight in the only way that really ever works. I had to let the situation be what it was, let each person be who they were, and still be who I was, in it.
At that moment, I finally understood that the only way to stop this situation from recurring was to fully get it. Know my part in it. Be with the effects of it til I realized what it was in me that drew it.
I realized that fighting demons outside myself would never work. The reality was that my personal demons originated with me and could only really be conquered on the inner ground of my consciousness.
About Hecate: A Greek Goddess with three heads, Hecate has a reputation for evil but has also chosen to rescue those less fortunate at times. Her three heads, that of a horse, a dog and a snake will have deeper significance to those who work with totem animals. All three are very powerful medicines but quite at odds in some ways too. A lot to manage on one body!
It's interesting to me that Hecate did not start out this way. She originally only had one head, for example, and was considered a mother goddess. learn more about Hecate here
