As we move through life on our great big spiritual journeys we’ll come up against moments of self-initiation. Those juicy moments when we must chose to break on through to the other side by harnessing our inner warrior. Those moments when we must face our greatest fears and allow the older versions of self to die so a new updated version can be born, one which is more group oriented. We often try everything in our power to resist these passages because let’s face it, who wants to feel the Hot Burning Flames of Kali reducing what feels like our humanly flesh and bones into ashes?
We know we will rise up once again, just as the mythical Phoenix did but the self-initiated fire burns a holy hotness that feels like mortal death is eminent and the process resisted in a great fury of cognitive dissonance. Unless, unless, you’ve gained a few badges along the way by having courageously walked through fires of previous self-initiations. In which case, you’ve learned to embrace the pain because that pain has given you a deeper understanding of why the process takes place and how it relates to the bigger picture of your’s and humanity’s spiritual evolutionary destiny.
The Holy Hot Fire of Courage
If you haven’t taken any real enthusiastic leaps into the holy hot fire yet, now is your time. Your first few jumps will likely feel like an end time event of catastrophic proportions, but it’s absolutely amazing how quickly humans adapt to change once they’ve tasted the benefits of allowing change to occur. Once you’ve got into the swing of letting things move through you from a higher place of knowing, your flexibility becomes robust, an ultimate shield to those solar plexus and heart grinding fears associated with the burning phase.
You now use the pain of rebirth to accelerate and deepen your soul’s expansion. It quickly turns the poison of metaphorical death into medicine, as you sit above your own bullshit and learn to cheer yourself on, even while it hurts. Consolidating your being towards the group’s best interests, whilst those annoying lower aspects of self continue to tug away at you and do everything in their power to trick you into staying right where you are.
Slaying the Dragon
Let’s define what the ‘dragon’ represents. Metaphorically it represents the ‘villain’ in your drama. It’s usually a self-imagined villain, such as the idea that something or someone is responsible for holding you back, from mental freedom, inner peace or a sense of personal justice. Our tricky minds often think the dragon is really a person outside of ourselves, like our mother, lover, boss, government agency, teacher or friend gone foe, but in reality, the true villain is almost always our lack of self-understanding (trust), lack of personal boundaries (self-awareness), lack of courage (will power), lack of self-respect (self-love) and lack of personal power to make the necessary changes we wish to see in our lives and the world.
Even when the villain is real, such as a selfish boss, a disrespectful friend, an abusive lover or an unjust agency, the dragon can only be tamed (slayed)—alchemized from villain into personal power—once confronted literally during the initial phases of harnessing the power of your inner spiritual warrior.
Until you understand why you should adjust your behaviour or how to adjust your behaviour in order to change a situation from a place of wisdom, you’ll continue to see the dragon as an external force being imposing upon you. You’ll continue to feel like something is happening to you from an outside source, as if someone is imposing their will upon you, one that is beyond your control.
More than often, you will feel them instinctually as a predator in your story and seek to hurt them. The villain in your story might be your perception of fate working against you and a wrathful hand of god coming down to create life situations that are moving against you instead of with you.
Taming the Dragon Within
Before you can tame the dragons within and graduate to a more seasoned spiritual warrior, to tackle the real issues in the world through conscious action, it’s almost always the way that we must first face the perceived external villain in our stories, those who we feel have power over us. It teaches us that we can transform our situations through asserting our will power to make the necessary changes we feel need to be made, in order to gain a stronger sense of personal integrity and a more defined sense of identity in the world.
It might mean having to authentically share your feelings with a friend, lover or group, despite possibly losing or changing the dynamics of the relationship. It might mean having to write a letter to a family member expressing your side of a situation, when you know shit will hit the fan, simply because you have never voiced up before and it won’t be received easily. It might mean publicly sharing your opinions about institutions or government agencies you feel are doing harm to you or your community despite the possible judgement of your peers.
Once you’ve gained enough personal power by slaying the metaphorical dragons you perceived without, your perception of where power truly lies begins to switch. You move out of victimhood long enough to see your own core motives and behavioural patterns, the ones that made you feel locked into a certain way of interacting with and perceiving the outside world.
By first asserting your will power onto the perceived villains in your personal stories you slowly evolve to the point where you feel empowered enough to tame the dragons within. The inner dragons, are those parts of self that have created the feelings of helplessness to begin with. It’s in those deep recesses within where the real juicy transformative work takes place.
It’s an initiation exactly because you take the steps to overcome the need to change something externally in order to perceive your power as being internal. You assume more power of influence (magic) over your life by first applying that power of influence to the self. You do this by adjusting your inner attitudes, pre-dispositions and increasing your self-awareness by spending time self-reflecting, integrating and learning how to alchemize conflicting emotional and mental states.
Inviting the Dragon To Tea
The more we learn to trust ourselves and make healthier life decisions for ourselves, the less Dragons we project and perceive outwardly. We feel less emotionally disrupted by others’ behaviours and perceive there to be less villains in the outside world, instead we perceive real issues in society that we need to focus our attention on. Situations and people transition from the villain to things that we can consciously and compassionately negotiate with in order to generate better outcomes for a greater cause.
What will catch your spiritual warrior’s eye will be the most fundamental issues needing to be addressed in the world, no longer relating to your personal wounds and those personal preferences and dispositions created from them, but those real issues brought to your attention through a higher cosmic understanding of the interconnectedness of all living things.
From this place we no longer act out of fear and identity crisis, we act from a place of inner-trust and soft conviction. Never responding in ways that are detrimental to our health or the wellbeing of the group. Such as perceiving injustices in ways that leave our nervous system blown, our lives a mess and our energy levels too low to carry on with our soul mission.
Our awareness that we must slay the inner dragons first before contending with the outer dragons second, comes with maturity and experience. A necessary realization for any successful warrior protesting and imposing their influence onto the world stage negotiating for healthy global changes.
The consequence of slaying our inner dragons first, allows us to become adept at wisely choosing which outer Dragons in society we should negotiate with, for best outcome, understanding how to match our knowledge, wisdom, gifts and abilities to the right causes.
As a seasoned warrior, having done the inner work first, our self-liberated, objective and compassionate approach to the global issues we face will incite greater freedom for everyone because every dragon can then be seen as a part of the self, not someone or something which holds power over us. Our focus is no longer about ridding the other or taking down an opponent as we would from a victim like mentality.
Our true warrioring power comes from having tamed our inner dragons first which fuels as a constant reminder that we certainly do have the ability to influence the outside world from a place of inner stability, health, peace, wisdom and grace. It dismantles the competitive mindset, teaches us how to swallow petty differences and graduates us from being the victim of our personal stories to seasoned warriors united on the front lines for a greater cause.
Blasting Love!!!
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Holy Hot Fire
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