Posts Tagged ‘warrior’

A recollection from the past

Monday, July 18th, 2011

Do you believe in reincarnation/past lives? Well I started my spiritual path studying Buddhism so was exposed to reincarnation from the beginning. Since then my practices have widened to includes many other ways of connecting and working with spirit but my belief in reincarnation has never wavered. It seemed to just makes sense to me at a deep level. I never really felt the need to question it although I did study the subject in some detail. However it wasn’t till last year that it got taken to a much deeper level. I was going through a particularly rough period which included being really really broke and not even having a stable place to live. I was pretty much crashing with friends for several months with stressful times in between places. I just couldn’t get it together and this was part of a larger process of letting go of my identity and awakening into a new more expanded life which was a painful process to say the least. Toward the end of this period I was going to stay with a friend and since I didn’t have a car I took the bus which dropped me off at the bottom of the hill where their house was. I started walking up the hill (about a mile) carrying a backpack, a suitcase and a sleeping bag. It was a very hot day, in the 90s and I started to lose it. I felt like just breaking down and giving up on life, I felt worthless and powerless, like I couldn’t go on.
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Walking our own path

Saturday, February 19th, 2011

As I sit here beginning a week long retreat I embrace the unknown within before I step deeper into the unknown on an outer level. I’m struck by how much there is to let go of in order to truly walk the path of freedom. As human beings we’re conditioned to engage life by holding onto or clinging to ‘things’ (things being anything that can be conceptualized such as relationship, career, money, beliefs, opinions, validation from others, places, community, material things). There is a great cosmic joke in this however since life is a constantly changing flow with nothing to hold onto. Thus you have the suffering of the human condition. Most people who engage some form of spiritual path are familiar with the act of letting go and have probably even put it into practice to some degree. However to walk in freedom requires a complete letting go or the act of letting go in every moment of every concept. Letting go becomes way of directly engaging existence itself and restores life to its natural flow but only when it becomes our primary focus.
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The trap of self importance

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A bird will fall frozen dead from the bow of a ship without ever having felt sorry for itself. ~D.H. Lawrence

In Buddhist terms the root of human suffering is our belief and investment in a non-existent self. We take ourselves to be solid, real and substantial even the center of our individual universe yet the reality of what we are is fluid, changing, insubstantial and interconnected with everything else. We work very hard to maintain this sense of self and suffering results because we can never fully secure this fragile illusion since it is in conflict with reality. We become obsessed with this self which requires so much work to maintain. It always seems to be threatened by something which makes the world seem incredibly cruel and dangerous leading to self pity, our poor self can never seem to get a break and even when it does it doesn’t seem to last.
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Fear and Power

Saturday, January 8th, 2011

We’ve all felt fear many times in our lives and its one of the most powerful emotions. It can cause us to take the most extreme actions and it can paralyze us leaving us unable to act at all. The usual response to fear is to flee, whether its running away from a dangerous situation or avoiding an activity which brings up fear in us. While it makes sense to flee from a truly dangerous situation in the moment, most of our fear does not have to do with any real or immediate danger. Most of the fear we experience is entirely in the mind. Running away from or avoiding this kind of fear leads to one of the most common and most destructive states a human being can be in, disempowerment.
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Breaking open the wound, becoming a warrior

Thursday, December 30th, 2010

I recently had an intense insight into the core of my process of feeling like a worthless and undeserving human being. We had a holiday gathering where many members of our community came together to celebrate and infuse some light into the field. As the evening progressed we moved from socializing and partying into a dream circle, a place to share and get reflection on our processes which is part of what our community is based on. I was really enjoying the evening with my dear friends and had no intention of sharing or getting to anything in particular, was just flowing with the moment.
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Becoming the Peaceful Warrior

Friday, February 5th, 2010

I’ve written about the warrior archetype and the way it is played out in a destructive way in our society today (See “The Warrior Archetype and the Reemergence of the Goddess“). Lately I’ve become more aware of the importance of this powerful archetype both for myself and the collective. You see for much of my life I’ve embodied the negative warrior both within and without. In my view, the negative warrior is characterized by aggression,  defensiveness and destructiveness. Underlying this is vulnerability and fear, a soft underbelly that needs to be protected at all costs. The negative warrior feels isolated and separate and at war with the world as well as in a constant state of inner conflict. Aggression and defensiveness are the weapons of the negative warrior as he fights to protect an inner core of painful vulnerable feeling from anything that would threaten to expose it fearing that would bring his destruction. This inner core of feeling may have been created early in life by trauma that was never healed or by the experience of being punished for openly expressing emotion causing it to be repressed out of fear of that punishment as is so common in our culture.

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The Warrior Archetype and the Reemergence of the Goddess

Sunday, July 26th, 2009

For the past few thousand years we have lived in a patriarchal paradigm where the masculine has been over emphasized at the expense of the feminine. This has produced not only the oppression of women, constant war and violence but also inner conflict for both men and women as each struggles to be whole human beings in a world where an imbalanced ideal is cherished. The result of the over emphasis on the masculine has resulted in it taking a negative form as the feminine is devalued and even systematically repressed. This negative masculine form is cut off from its feminine side and so is out of balance and taken to an extreme in a futile attempt to compensate for the lack of grounding in the feminine. This is symbolized by two archetypal patterns in particular, that of the Negative Father and the Warrior. The Negative Father is the authoritarian head of the household who rules the family and is often the source of abuse, sexual misconduct and control. This pattern is also seen in the authoritarian governments that have become the norm where the government represents the ultimate controlling punitive father figure for its citizens. This isn’t to say all fathers fall into this pattern but it is symbolic of a key aspect of patriarchal power. As a counselor I see many clients who have a figure in their lives in the role of the Negative Father and much of their work in counseling involves working through trauma associated with that as well as reclaiming their power from that figure and this includes men and women.
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