Becoming the Peaceful Warrior February 5, 2010
Posted by bodhidude in : Spirituality, divine masculine , 1 comment so far
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.
The Warrior Archetype and the Reemergence of the Goddess July 26, 2009
Posted by bodhidude in : Divine Feminine, Psychology, Spirituality, articles, divine masculine , 4comments
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.
(more…)