MY WEEKLY BLOG<\/p>\n
FACING THE BEAST<\/p>\n
My earliest memory is a dream I had\u00a0when I was four. I was sitting on the black and white diamond shaped kitchen\u00a0floor tiles in my childhood home, staring at my feet when I heard a growling\u00a0sound. I looked up to see a massive lion on the other side of the room. The\u00a0thick yellow and dark brown mane that encircled his powerful neck was wet with\u00a0drool that was spilling down across his huge fangs. His eyes were inky and a\u00a0tuft of thick black hair stood upright at the end of his long bushy tail.<\/p>\n
I turned around, rushed to the kitchen door and\u00a0grabbed upwards for the doorknob. It was just beyond my reach. I teetered on my\u00a0short wobbly legs, starting to panic, when I suddenly realized that I was
dreaming and I needed to wake up. I rolled my body into a tight little ball on\u00a0the floor, covered my head with my hands and waited for the beast to attack. I\u00a0heard the raspy inhale, I felt a blast of hot wind and I smelled the musky\u00a0scent as he flew into the air. A moment later, I woke up in the kitchen,\u00a0standing at the Formica table, fingering a pink plastic placemat. I had no idea\u00a0how I had gotten there but I had faced my fear, I had awakened and I had\u00a0survived.<\/p>\n
Some day in some way, every human being has to\u00a0face off with the beast. It shows up in a lot of different forms but each form\u00a0causes terror. It might be a person, an experience or a change you have to
make. And you might have more than one. No \u201cone to a customer\u201d warning. By the\u00a0way, I\u2019m not suggesting putting yourself in danger to see if you can get out of\u00a0it. I\u2019m not encouraging you to see how long you can stand on the rails until\u00a0the train comes. Or balancing at the edge of a precipice and trying not to fall\u00a0over. Our brains are biologically programmed to register those kinds of danger and
to help us do what we can to keep our bodies safe. We have to recognize and pay\u00a0attention to that. But we can train ourselves not to buckle from free floating\u00a0fear that\u2019s coming from our psychologically programmed thoughts. These are the\u00a0lions in the kitchen, the kind of fear that stops us from fully living our\u00a0lives. The kind of fear that can be recognized, endured and overcome.<\/p>\n
Whatever your\u00a0beast looks like, wherever your fear comes from, you\u2019re going to have to come\u00a0to terms with it sooner or later. When you do, the reward on the other side is The Zone, a place of peace and satisfaction and the sense that now, you can\u00a0survive anything. As a writer, my beast is the blank page and when I face it,\u00a0my reward is the Writing Zone, an airy magical place where time stops and I am\u00a0the ruler of my own private world. I make up the rules, define the boundaries,\u00a0and determine how long to stay and when to leave. I am judge and jury of my\u00a0internal reality that I create according to my imagination. I decide who is\u00a0welcome and who is not, who is guilty and who is innocent. I don’t feel lonely\u00a0there. I feel full and expectant, marveling at what I might find and content\u00a0that no one gets to add or subtract anything in my world without first getting
permission from me. How often does that occur in life, where you are the sole\u00a0creator of a reality that is yours and yours alone?<\/p>\n
The only way to tame the beast\u00a0is to face it and make friends with it. When you stop second guessing yourself\u00a0and your abilities and look the beast directly in the eye, your creative world can\u00a0be a safe haven, a place to drop into and feel welcome, an outlet to express
your emotions and an escape hatch when the world around you gets too\u00a0overwhelming.<\/p>\n
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MY WEEKLY BLOG FACING THE BEAST My earliest memory is a dream I had\u00a0when I was four. I was sitting on the black and white diamond shaped kitchen\u00a0floor tiles in my childhood home, staring at my feet when I heard a growling\u00a0sound. I looked up to see a massive lion on the other side of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2057,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2058\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}