“The mythology of ancient China and many pre-historic wisdom traditions provide a different “way” to relate to our dragons. In this “way” we ride the dragon, instead of slaying the dragon. We embrace the dragon! ”
A dominant Western mythology that re-emerged and fully evolved in medieval times, is slaying the dragon. This myth is the essential component of the hero’s quest, which to this day deeply impacts our modern psyche and culture. It is said and believed, that as we travel the world (inner or outer) we will meet dragons. When confronted with a dragon, to become a hero, we must slay it. If we flee the dragon we have some how failed or perhaps “survived” to fight another day. When we are immersed in this myth within our interior world, our emotional experiences such as anger or fear are perceived as dragons to be defeated.
The mythology of ancient China and many pre-historic wisdom traditions provide a different "way" to relate to our dragons. In this “way” we ride the dragon, instead of slaying the dragon. We embrace the dragon! This was in part due to the way time was embraced and experienced in these cultures. When we experience time cyclically as opposed to linearly we must ask ourselves "what time is it when the dragon appears?' Dragon time! When the dragon shows up and the dragon is the anger dragon, it’s dragon time! It’s anger-dragon time. So we've got to get on and go for the ride. When we embrace time this way we qualitatively learn how to live in that time, as opposed to trying to slay it all the time. So here we all are with so much time spent in anger time, we should all be pretty damn good at it. But we’ve been busy, utilizing tremendous amounts of energy, trying to slay anger or flee anger, instead of learning to ride it.
When we become fearful, we encounter the fear-dragon. We are taught to "overcome our fears" to metaphorically slay our fear dragons. If you lay this out in a linear time experience it plays out as “now I’m fearful and I don’t want to be fearful, what can I do to overcome and defeat this fear so that a half-hour from now or an hour from now or two days from now I may not be fearful.” As opposed to, “at this moment in time I’m in fearful-time.” It would be a completely different kind of experience, a different "time".
If you can embrace the fear, express and process the fear, ride the fear-dragon, dance with the fear , you will learn how to do fear-time. If you are constantly battling fear time, you never learned how to ride the fear-dragon.
We tend to think about fear in its extreme pathological sense because we put it into this straight time line. Fear is not just about being excessively fearful or terrified. Fear is a beautiful, wonderful thing. It’s a very, very important survival mechanism. Without fear we couldn’t survive. What you’re talking about is excess fear. And when we say excess we don’t necessarily mean quantitatively excess but qualitatively excess. Crude fear instead of misty, crystal fear. The kind of fear that’s delicious and nourishes us, that enables us to go deep within and contemplate and make good decisions. The fear that connects us deeply to the universal vibration. That can be fear time as well. But we’ve been living our lives with a superimposed and calcified linear timeframe. We’ve all ingested and manifest a worldview that tells us to "slay the fear dragon" or run from it as fast as possible. But some thing else is possible. We can climb aboard this mythic dragon as well. We can ride the “slay the dragon” myth that lives within us and see where that beautiful ride will take us.