Fear.  I danced intimately with it in the middle of the night.  Held it close to the chambers of my heart, felt it pulsing its dark blood in my veins.  Poison.  It accelerated the beating of my heart, screaming at it to quicken its pace.  Its energy pervaded my peace, left me feeling consumed and out of its control.  Racking sobs sprang forth, pulled from somewhere so very far away from my normal consciousness.  Yet they were there -- it was there -- deep in my cells and down in the unreachable places in my very own soul.

Helpless  to control its arrival, I succombed to its power.  My otherwise creative mind was being devoured by its presence.  For a while it felt crazed, as a wild and rabid creature.  I just wanted out of its grasp.

Desperate, I reached.  For a teaching, a voice of consolation.  For my out-of-control, 3am-gripped-in terror-mind was unable to give me peace or equanamity.  Yet, somewhere I heard a small piece of awareness -- find that place, within yourself, that place of knowingness.  Allow it in, pay attention.

An inner voice, a guiding  awareness, spoke.  Inner soul uttered its presence:  asking, What does your inner self need to care for yourself?  What do I need to know, in just this moment?

I need confidence, I replied.  I need to find that place -- the one lost long ago.  That  place,  the one that knows how to take care of myself.  That place of knowingness -- deep, deep, within.  The knowingness that constitutes the entirety of my being.  The one of which I was aware before I externalized every need for security and looked  to romantic relationships to provide for my survival and comfort, before I naively stepped into the arms of exploitation and allowed a dark soul to steal my innocence in exchange for his love at an age before I knew  better.  Before I capitulated to the dance of compromise to soothe the anxieties of others in trade for their love.  I know I'm in there, somewhere.

So I went with it.  Drowned, for a while, in the waves of terror.  Tossed about -- back in the Lamar River, fighting for my life, counseling myself through.   Feeling every impact of this dark pain, feeling its texture grating on the walls of my heart.  Feeling its temperature, searing hot, piercing its way into my being.  Threatening to take sanity away down the gushing river I once pulled myself out of.  And then it turned.

 Like the riverside boulders I found along the banks of the Lamar, I pulled myself to safety.  Stopping my psyche from being tossed about as my body once was, I asked the helplessness to show itself: Could I save myself, once again?  And what was more, could I care for myself -- and all the animal lives I now took on?  Breathing, exhausted -- but resolved -- my spirit responded -- YES. 

One more wave of teaching to come my way, one more demon to face in this remaking of my life.  A demon I've come to know intimately -- because this demon, this darkest fear of survival and helplessness, was  dwelling within my psyche and darkening my spirit for all my days I could remember.  And it was time to dissolve its energy and allow something else to  replace it.  It was time, to let it  burn away, allowing its smouldering ashes to meld with the warmth of my own inner light.