As children we loved to be scared. We played games about the boogeyman and told each other ghost stories. If brain scientists studied this, they might conclude that there was value in this. It exercised our fear control centers and prepared us for reacting to threats. Halloween allows us to face all those fears by becoming creatures of the night like vampires, witches, ghosts and any other thing our imagination can dream up.
Yet how do we learn to separate the fun of being scared from the reality of our much more mundane life? How do we stop scaring ourselves?
Meditation
I will celebrate fear in the funhouse of my imagination and shake hands with the boogeyman. Then I will embrace my reality and take responsibility for the boogey men I create in my own mind. My fears and anxieties are no more than the gift of imagination over used.
