Don't Ever Say Never...

So yesterdays or actually the day before's love fortune was I love your sense of adventure...This makes me think of the Helen Keller quote "Life is a daring adventure or nothing at all."  And lets face it this is a woman who was given some challenges at birth being deaf, blind and mute...so everything was an adventure...and maybe everything is an adventure and we refuse to acknowledge it because we're jaded.  It goes back to looking at life as a child and everything being fresh then life always is an adventure.  Although now my motto is never say never...as I never expected my life to be filled with the from white water rafting in Glacier National Park to shamanic ceremony in the jungles of Peru to being called someones G at at hip hop club the other week (I have to admit I may have sense of adventure, I'm a pop culture nerd and  I had to google that on an online hip hop dictionary.)  Life has become like russian roulette...round and round she goes but where she goes, no one knows.  OK maybe I'm exaggerating.

Although I do take a little pride in getting this acknowledgement in my love fortune as I was a very fearful child and even teen.  More afraid of shame than danger, but fear none the less.  I love the an acronym that Fear is False Expectations Appearing Real.  And what I really loved is this little find from Facebook

I love this for many reasons.  One  is that it shows that everything is a choice in how we face fear.  Remember courage is not absence of fear, it's acknowledging the fear and doing it any way. I also love that they put it on dice (or do you see boggle cubes).  Dice because life is a chance and you never know how they roll.

Although there are lots of stories that exude this I'm going to share too.  One is the one that probably more formative for me in using fear to my advantage.  A new friend had asked me to go rock climbing. Central Park had a wall and was offering a class.  I was intrigued and didn't actually have fear as I saw it more as an exercise adventure.  But the first time we did this I got to a point and then fear set in.  I yelled down at the instructor that I think this is as high as I'm going to go.  He says to me you only have more step to hit the top.  I said really, o.k., and I took it.  I remember the adrenaline rushing a bit and the sense of thrill.  How many times are we just one step from reaching the top and we give up...

So that was the conscious sense of fear actually being a guide that I'm pushing my edge of comfortablity and how pushing it can stretch me in a profound way.  Another experience and it was conscious fear is that I got the idea that I should go to a town called Inferno in the Amazon of Peru by myself to spend a week, well 5 days, with an ayahuascaro that I hadn't met.  Ayahuasca is a visionary plant medicine and an amazing teacher.  I hadn't met but I knew my teacher and friends respected him highly so I wasn't that brave.  But I did know that I'd be sleeping in a sleeping bag, bathing in the river that you had to trudge up and down hill through mud which mad it hard to stay clean, and go to the bathroom in an outhouse that had some rotted planks and was amazed that I didn't wind up in the bottom.  So that certainly stretched my NYC princess gene.  Also the ayahuascero only spoke spanish and actually is was more like a spanish/quechua blend and my spanish is broken at best.  I was speaking to my teacher since I knew he would see the ayahuascero a few weeks earlier as he was bringing a group down.  I told him to put in a word for me and let him know who I was.  During my conversation with my teacher, he turns to me and says "do you know what your doing Lulu.  Your going to Inferno.  You know what Inferno means, Lulu.  It means Hell.  Your going to Hell."  And there is metaphor here as many people have some dark experiences on ayahuasca.  It is called the vine of death.  However, my few light experiences with it were not dark in the least and I was convinced I needed to understand my relationship with this plant teacher.  

I turned to my teacher and say, "I know what your doing.  Your trying to scare me.  And don't worry I'm already scared and I'm doing it anyway."  There was a glimmer in his eye, he smailed and we changed to another topic of conversation. 

I was going to end it hear but just in case your curious, it was an amazing experience.  There were some challenges, some purging and some deep aha's.  I'm glad I faced the fear.  The first night I defnitely had some of those, "Who the fuck do you think you are Lulu, your so brave and now look" and in the end it was great.  And each time I do that, I learn to trust myself and trust what life puts in front of me.

This was never on my bucket list.  Hell if you had asked me 5 years earlier, I couldn't have even told you what a shaman or ayahuascero was...never the less put it on a wish list.    Don't get me wrong, I don't say yes to everything I do but I don't ever say never.