There were many indications that I needed to do it. I'd heard stories, I'd read about it. Perhaps most significantly, a tattoo covered asian mystic had visited me in a dream and told me about its power. Fasting was becoming very hard to ignore but I still managed to avoid it for a further 5 months. At Kumankaya I heard stories from the artist Coryayo about his 72 hour fasts and the potency he was finding in it spiritually. They landed but I still had not taken the step. Some part of me really wanted to avoid the discomfort, that feeling of hunger at the bottom of my belly. I wanted the hole to be filled. I believed fasting would take me out of wholeness, not closer to it. I was in a deep misapprehension.
6 weeks ago I took time in San Jose Del Pacifico to connect with plant medicine. My day and night with the mushrooms on the mountainside and in my cabin yielded a portal into the potential of fasting. The mushrooms seemed to reveal to me the quality of 'purification' or focus that is available in the fast and a new understanding was seeded. Further incidentally, I had unknowingly undertaken that journey on the first day of lent. Things lined up. For all intents and purposes, life wanted me to wake up to the fast and by showing up for the medicine I'd found a way in.
Over the course of the following sundays I began instantiating a weekly fast. Riding out the waves of hunger and overriding my body’s ‘need voice’ I began to find some new seat of conscious choice beyond my most fundamental impulses. The most important element about fasting during these Sundays has been its spiritual effect. Something in the state of fasting brings you closer to prayer and closer to god. As you pass over the little waves of distracting hunger you reach plateaus of deep focus in which all bullshit and distraction from what's important seems to fall away. It's just God, prayer and the projects that matter; you’re too hungry to focus on anything less.
As Paul Kingsnorth poignantly put in his Lent reflection, this is a season of stripping back layers. Getting clearer on my fears proved to be a big piece of this. Recognising my limitations, being humbled and putting more of my life 'on God'. From this position a kind of humbled optimism was arising. The recognition that while I can't transform things fast, I can set orientations for the long course that transform deeply. This long horizon and long term building, with God, is what I want to inform my day to day. I am not what I could be and my visionary ambitious side often outstretches my enacted capacity. I remind myself again and again that if I can just execute on the projects in front of me I will have changed a lot.
What could I achieve in 2 years If I set my course toward my fears? How much is not tackling them limiting me? What are those fears?
With exception to a (self-funded) internship at a high end westminster think tank, I never entered the corporate world. I thought I'd go into a think tank after my masters degree but despite being deeply devoted to my field, I found no traction in it. I didn't seem to be the right kind of person, think in the same way, or have the political instinct. On reflection, I’m thankful I hit this wall because it prompted me to undergo a radical life transition that led me to following my creative and spiritual path in a sustained and surprising way for 5 years. The faith, the sense of connection with my creative pulse and intuition, the capacity for insight and expansion i’ve experienced is priceless. Yet when it comes to actually putting a price on it and re-connecting with mainstream institutional contexts I feel trepidation. Despite the knowledge I have an enormous amount to offer to a large quantities of people and groups, some part of me still anticipates that I can't do it. Some niggling story lives inside that says I don’t belong there, that there’s some awful rejection awaiting me.
Now I’m experimenting with a new orientation. To patiently head in this direction. To head in the direction of all of my fears because I know there’s greatness to be found there. If I never did what I feared I wouldn’t have a romantic life, I’d have never stepped into a music studio. 12 singles later (5 released) I’m still nervously looking toward’s my first performance opportunity. What will I find there?
We live within the horizons of our fears, sometimes we know them and other times we hide them from ourselves. In either case, we all have the potential to life this lifetime confined by the limits of our fears. If we can choose to turn toward our fears and move through them, we can discover not only gifts but new horizons. What we thought was the arena of our lives dissolves into something larger and more colourful with new greater fears. Perhaps at the root of them all is death, annihilation and not being loved. Accordingly, I do believe for some people that it actually takes a deep faith conversion process, reckoning with the cross or dissolving into love on plant medicine to overcome the most seemingly small fears.
Who we can be and who we can be for the world on the other side of our own horizon is significantly more. Fasting was a fear that became a gift and a portal. There’s further to go and intend to patiently look for the next doable step in that direction.
Here's to getting clear on fears. Here’s to confounding the horizon of life.
What fears are bounding you?
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I released a new track called ‘Alchemy’ which I wrote last summer. It’s been slowly cooking and making it’s way through two producers and many delays. Pleased to release it this week! It’s the first track released under my new label Rapcclesia.