Ann Reflects: Fear
Share on FacebookMy first profound hoop experience did not even take place inside my hoop. In the Hoop Path, when the hoop is spinning around our core, we talk of “being Within”: a protected place, surrounded by the hoop’s lulling, circular rhythm. Within the hoop’s motion, a column of energy opens up, leading us—if we are patient and fortunate—through a portal into a new field of experience.
However, the mere exposure to this phenomenon can also begin to open up life outside the hoop. Gaining access to this portal wakes you up to the fact that such portals exist—and if they exist in one place, who’s to say they do not exist everywhere, anywhere you might imagine or be?
Such was my first life-altering experience with the hoop. In retelling it I notice the actual facts of the tale at times can seem outrageous, fantastical. This does not bother me. My life with the hoop has become something I never could have imagined, and because of this all things now seem more possible, or at least less impossible. My Ivy League education pointed the concerns of my intellect squarely away from parallel universes and phenomena of the imagination. But when experience opens the world to you in a particular way, sometimes the only thing to do is to listen.
It was September of 2006. I had been hooping in a serious, applied way for about two and a half months. Baxter, Kimowan, & I had just begun our year of daily shared hoop practice. We were just getting into our groove. Kimowan had been one of my closest friends for several years, Kimowan & Baxter had known each other through the art department and had a growing and deepening friendship, and Baxter & I were in the first days of falling in love. It was a magical time, full of possibility. Our daily post-practice hoop talks were exhaustively articulated and uniquely contextualized by our collective understanding of fine art, literature, music, dance, and a wide range of intellectual traditions, including the academy, rave counterculture, the street, and thousands of years of Cree Indian life. How I wish we had somehow recorded those conversations.
It was the evening after a hard day’s hoop practice. Baxter had the night off from bartending. We decided to have a fire, just the three of us. The larger Hoop Path group had been holding ceremonial fires each change of season for the last year, but I had not yet attended. This fire was to be an extension of the rhythm the three of us had just started together—pleasantly unhurried, occasionally tightened by debate, ranging ever wider around our shared dance.
Easy to start a fire in the early fall in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. There is rarely much rain in September, and the wood is nice and dry from the long days of hot summer sun. Our fire crackled to life and Baxter and Kimo picked up their hoops. I was tired from the afternoon’s hooping, and sat for a while, staring at Baxter. I was still very much in awe of his handling of the hoop. It looked like magic to me. I couldn’t tell him from the hoop, the hoop from him. It was all one amazingly complicated and beautiful knot.
However mesmerized I was, though, by this beauty, I was also suffused with love’s first flush and, by definition, a random but sometimes immobilizing self-consciousness. I had been building a stronger connection to my own hoop over the last couple of weeks and hadn’t noticed Baxter quite as much, or compared my skill level to his. This night, though, I was simply stunned by the distance that still remained between where I was and where he was in our respective hoop journeys. How could I even think that he could be with me? I could barely hoop! I couldn’t hoop on the shoulders, really, not for an extended time—the hoop knocked around me as though it were a perfect square instead of a circle. I definitely couldn’t hoop on my legs–at all–and I despaired of ever being able to.
These thoughts began to pull on my guts as I sat watching. I felt as though I were surrounded by thousands of impossibly light and swarming insects. “I’ll never be as good as he is. Never.” These thoughts were pointless and pointlessly tortuous, I knew, yet I could not seem to stop them. With every passing second I felt more and more sickened. Baxter could never be with me. I was pathetic, ridiculous. A hooping joke. There was no way…no way…
A diligent Hoop Path student from the very first, I already knew that the one thing I could do to deal with this wave of feelings was to pick up my hoop. Yes. Perfect. I’ll get my hoop. I’ll start that protective circle going and I will find my center again. I’ll get in my rhythm and these bad feelings will go away, and I’ll feel good again, the way I always do when I go Within.
Except, that wasn’t what happened. I did pick up my hoop, and I started a gentle core rhythm. Except that with literally every revolution the hoop made, I felt one thousand times worse. Whatever wave of feeling was coming over me had no intention of pausing, stopping, or going away. It was on me like a tsunami. It was everywhere. “It’s everywhere…” I could not stop it. “I can’t stop it.” I wanted, needed to, had to make it stop. “I’ve got to get away from this.” Swish, swish, swish, the hoop went around me. Crash, crash, crash, went the waves of awfulness against me, over me, through me—until I jerked the hoop to a stop and it fell to the ground. Without saying a word to Baxter or Kimo, I ran to the back door of the house and inside.
My vision was like the camera in a horror movie. As I lurched through the little labyrinth of doors and hallways in Baxter’s dilapidated rental house, I could not seem to stay on keel. I was aware of terrible feelings that seemed to be actually, physically pursuing me through the house. What the hell?!? I couldn’t grasp what was happening. I was being chased by…by what? By this thing, this horrible, horrible feeling. I was being swallowed by dread. But, why?
I staggered into the living room and collapsed, trembling, onto a couch. What was happening? This was completely bizarre. I still felt certain that something—some thing was pursuing me through the house, even though I knew that nothing of the sort was true. I was keenly aware of a violent, menacing, malevolent presence that somehow had no form at all. For those few moments I had the sincere feeling that I would rather die than feel this terror. I felt like I might die of it, itself. Even though I knew this thought was utterly unreasonable.
Somewhere within this maelstrom I became aware that I needed to formulate a plan to deal with the experience I was having. Even though I felt mortal terror in every corner of my body for no reason whatsoever, I felt I had to make a decision to acknowledge it or meet it, somehow—simply because I became aware of it. The miniscule amount of perspective that squeaked through the edges of this outlandish experience afforded me the chance to see that I had perspective; I had some small amount of distance between my own conscious mind and whatever was overtaking me. In the same moments I realized that, in the face of no real danger, the most reasonable choice available to me was to open myself to the terror I was feeling.
I have absolutely no idea why this seemed like the best plan to me in that moment. Looking back, I see I could have just as easily decided that the only thing to do was to talk myself out of it, or deny it, force it away somehow. But something was telling me that what I needed to do was to stop resisting it. In the tiny cracks that had opened between my Self—the center of experience, the knowing that sits at the heart of our memories, our understandings, our feelings—and this event that had overtaken me, just enough rays of essential light shone through to illuminate the fact that I had choice in that moment. The thing overtaking me was not me. It could not harm me. It was real—it was important to acknowledge this—it was real, but it could not harm me. And so, I inhaled deeply, relaxed every muscle, and let it come over me completely.
The sensation of true, raw, unadulterated fear is something so terrible, so unbearable, that reason loses its coveted place in the mind. I did feel that I might die. For those moments when I allowed fear to possess me entirely, there were no internal arguments, no rationales, no stories, and no comfort. I was just a mute witness to the heart-stopping Power of emotion coursing through the human form.
And then…peace. The analogy of the storm is the cliché for which there is no better point of comparison. Exactly as a wild tropical storm passes, leaving nothing but a whisper as the echoes of thunder still pulse in the pit of the stomach, the Fear simply moved on. I suddenly noticed a silence. But…had there been any sound? It was over. I had allowed the Fear in. Immediately I recognized that the feeling I was accustomed to calling “fear” was actually the sensation of resisting fear. This resistance is unpleasant, to be sure, no walk in the park, but compared to fear, it was like a scrape or a bruise next to open-heart surgery. Suddenly I understood my own role in the perpetuation of anxiety, stress, fidgety discomfort, rumination, obsessing—these were all simply techniques for resisting fear. Not allowing the magnificently awful sensation of raw, real fear to pass through me. It was all resistance. And this was the kind of knowledge I could use.
I got up, shaky on my feet. How long had it been? Baxter walked in, having just realized that I’d been gone maybe a little bit longer than I should have. I could hardly walk and felt drunk and giddy, almost like I wanted to explode with laughter. The relief. The simplicity. My people, here with me. Everything we resist and try to pretend isn’t there. How silly we are. And yet…my heart full of compassion, finally understanding how massive, how ghastly and terrifying, real Fear actually is. Laughter, and compassion, and my beloved companions, wrapped around me like a blanket, and I rested, finally, on a still, small island of safety within the harrowing ride of being embodied on this earth.