Integrating Peace

Being a spiritual worker involves a lot of personal learning. Aside from learning recipes or how to assist during parties for the spirits, or things about the spirits, or how to impart messages, you are also presented with the opportunity to improve yourself. You can resist those lessons, but it tends to be self-punishing.

The lesson ahead of me is integrating the peace which my work has given me.

I am often peaceful—not passive, nor spineless, nor incapable of harm, but peaceful. I don’t feel the need to get excited about much, I don’t stay excited, and I don’t tend to obsess over much. I don’t worry about much, and the list is getting shorter all the time.

My problem is lingering expectations, the product of a lifetime of fighting and struggling for survival. I expect things to go badly. I don’t think of myself as peaceful. I expect to need to struggle. I expect people to react badly, all based on experience.

Of course, the past no longer exists and in fact never did, the way I think of it. All I have are memories and expectations, which I’m projecting into the future. It is as if there are two voices: a repeating, nagging motif on the topic of my shit luck, and the voiceless experience of things going well.

I recognize that nagging motif. It’s fear.

Isn’t it funny to recognize that you’re afraid of things going well? Fear of change. Fear, waiting for the other shoe to drop and things to turn to shit.

Fear says “hold on to the expectation that things will go badly. Brace yourself for failure, just in case.”

No. No, I don’t think I will. I can look at my own behavior and see that I don’t need to worry about it, that I don’t need to be walking around ready to deal with disaster.

The past is an illusion, and projecting it onto the future is delusion.

I am what I appear to be, and I do not need to fear.