“Explorers need to know how to be lost comfortably. The adventure of the spirit begins when we stop pretending and performing and accept our confusion and insecurity.”
Sam Keen
So many of us know our way.
We cut through the trials and obstacles that are put in front of us and expected for us to achieve the life they tell us we want. When the map is in our hands and the path is clear, we are able to engage the warrior ethos, put our shield up, our shoulders down and forge ahead through pain, challenge and grueling tedious action.
We keep wielding the sword with varying levels of efficacy and we cut through the brush of the certain trails that our world tells us will lead us to the goals, targets, rewards and finish lines that are made to look so gratifying.
We go to school, play sports, join boy scouts, learn what women want so we can date according to heteronormativity and patriarchal psychology, conquer via binge drinking, learn the dance of inauthenticity for a “robust” social life, we master suppression of feeling to “keep our shit together”, some of us learn to dominate and control our bodies, while some of us learn to dominate and control our minds. We “man up” and fight through academia, the corporate battle field and eventually the challenges of love, family and community. Often denying any access to our own experience so we can simply forge the path of the certain warrior. Like good boys and “great men”.
We learn to win. We harden. We disconnect from ourselves and even in a world that gives us all the privilege…we suffer. We feel powerless as we know our only power is in following an external script for life. We suffer the experience of doing exactly what the map showed us we needed to do, while still feeling so empty inside.
We start going through the motions. We pretend everything is okay or even great. We ignore the questions in our hearts and we keep saying “I’m successful. I’m happy.” Meanwhile, if we let any other human into our lives in a way that they can truly see us, we cower in the shame of the mirror that shows us a projection of a lie.
We start to believe that “they” are the problem.
“My ungrateful family.”
“My incompetent boss.”
“My bullshit religious upbringing.”
“My wife who doesn’t fuck me anymore.”
“My parents who neglected or abused me.”
“The liberals.”
“The Republicans.”
“That incompetent asshole president.”
“The shitty company culture.”
“This fucking power hungry city.”
“Those god damn baby boomers.”
“Those lazy fucking millennials.”
Resentments build and in some ways are justified. For anger is a gift that the warrior can learn to use when engaged consciously, maturely and with competence. But conscious, competent and mature use of our anger isn’t taught to us. So we suffer more by attaching to the belief that we are not the problem nor do we contain the solutions inside ourselves.
Some of us can choose to stay on the uncomfortable battlefield of complacency, external blame and private shame for life. We suffer immensely, but at least we know where we are and where we are going.
While others buckle under the strain and find an opening. A painful crack where the light finally gets in. Your girlfriend cheats, you get laid off, you’ve outgrown your friends and wake up lonely, you recognize the disdain for your religious belief system, your business falls apart, your wife takes the kids and moves out of the house, you have an illness or injury that shows you how fucking vulnerable your life really is.
You’ve believed all this time in the certainty of a narrow path. You put so much life energy and will into cutting through the obstacles, denying your own desires, numbing your experience and you see that you aren’t where they promised you’d arrive. You wake up to the universal lie of the modern world.
Now you know…
that you don’t fucking know…
anymore.
That’s when the real journey begins. You have a long path ahead to reclaim the love, connection, freedom, peace, aliveness, emotion, intuition and desire that you gave up before you ever had enough consciousness to choose.
This path though, will require the real warrior. The mature, alive, discerning warrior. The warrior of trust, love, passion and insight. The warrior of embodiment, intuition and spirit.
This path, requires a relaxing into the mystery of the world while taking more courageous action and consistent steps into the darkness of the unknown. Resistance is real, fear is far greater than before. Your true tests are yet to come. While the rewards and gifts are so much more powerful, fulfilling and enlivening than the certain path, the chance of failing is far greater but the price of failure doesn’t exist…not in this new reality. There is no failure when you forge your own path, only growth, expansion, deepening spirit and connection to our real powers as a warrior.
How do you face uncertainty?
Show me a warrior who has made that mysterious a muse, an ally, a sidekick, a secret weapon and a trusted advisor. I’ll show you a warrior who will escape the shackles of a prescribed life and find what we all are here to find.
Joseph Campbell said, “I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.”
Ask the hard questions of yourself and others. Not to have certain answers but to live in the inquiry of the true warrior. Live life as a series of uncomfortable moments that shine a light on your power and how much you don’t know. Hold the questions in higher regard than the answers. You won’t find THE way…you will find YOUR way. The experience of being alive knows no other path.
Use your warriors sword to cut through the paths of uncertainty and you will experience that true gifts that our world has to offer you. It’s not always comfortable but it’s where love, creation, power and fulfillment truly live. I’m not sure about you, but that is the battle field that I want my warrior wielding his steel upon.