So last week I was out in Colorado at a wake-up festival in the Rockies that was sponsored

by Sounds True and I did a talk on shame and unworthiness and then I followed that with

three workshops on fear. So I contributed to a festival, you know, real upbeat kind of curriculum.

But actually it did have its upbeat side. Some of you might know that in Asian art the shadow

emotions are presented as animal-headed deities in the mandalas as you enter into sacred space

you have to go through the deities and in a similar way at the temples to enter the temple

you go through these wrathful deities, the fearsome ones, the passionate ones, the jealous ones,

the angry ones to get into sacred space. And the teaching is that really it's by engaging with

the shadow side, engaging with these deities that we actually become infused with the pure

enlightened energy that runs through them that's not available until we're actually not resisting

and with them. A more simple way of saying that is on a bracelet that I saw on a friend and says

no mud, no lotus. Okay, so you get the idea. If you look under what is most difficult, if you look

under depression or judgment or obsessive thought or addictive behavior, you'll find fear.

And even when we're not in difficult circumstances, if you take the time to pause and I'm sure many of

you have noticed this, just stop doing and then check into your body and you'll find there's this

background home of anxiety. You might show up as restlessness or unease but there's something wired

in that keeps us vigilant and not totally relaxed. So we're often not aware of it and as a result,

we don't realize how many of our thoughts and our behaviors are actually being driven by this

kind of hum of fear in our nervous system. So in a way, I think of fear as kind of the black

hole of the shadow deities. It's the one that every other expression of difficulty and challenge

emanates from. And in these workshops, the basic understanding was that if we want to awaken to

a kind of wholeness of being, it requires a real intentionality. It takes intentionality or

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