allanhunter.net Blog

I was having an email exchange with one of the people who was at one of my presentations. We were looking at the idea of how the Warrior-Lover gets to be in that space, and why big business seems to want executives who are Warrior-Lovers but only in the sense of them loving to make money and being willing to fight for that cause. That, of course, has a tendency to slip into mere Orphan thinking. The consolations of money and prestige are insidious, and they are consolations for the weak ego.

So here’s a thought. The task of the Pilgrim is to explore the wound she has. We all have a wound or two, and for some it’s obvious, for others less so. Some of us were abused as children. Others were hurt in far less obvious ways, but we were still hurt.

The challenge is to see what that damaged part of the psyche is and to heal it, turning the damage into strength. For example, some of my students at Curry College want to be grade school teachers. Fairly often they say to me that they had such horrendous experiences as children in school (not being understood, not being heard, feeling dis-empowered) that they have now determined they will go into education so that no one will ever again have to suffer as they did. It’s a big claim. What I love about it is that their woundedness has become the source of their ambitions. Where they have been hurt they will be strong. Every day they’ll go to work knowing exactly why they do it and why it’s important to them and to others. Every day they’ll be choosing a healthy response to past misfortunes. Each and every one of those days, therefore, they’ll be acting on the impulse to be healthy, and to stay healthy, and to live their healed selves out loud, proudly.

Healing is not just something that happens out of the public eye, or in a hospital ward, tucked away. Healing is what we choose every day. We earn it every day, over and over, when we choose not to go into that place of damaged ego.

We can also do the opposite and choose our woundedness every day. That leads to helplessness. I don’t recommend it.

Put another way: if I fall down my front steps I can choose to spend the rest of my life complaining about the steps, the fall, and the bruises I suffered. I’ll give my mind over to the fall. Perhaps I’ll write to my insurance company about it and spend a lot of time doing that. Yet I can also decide to repair my front steps, make them safe for everyone and anyone, install a hand rail, and each day I leave the house I can walk down those front steps with pride, saying to myself that I’ve got a much better set up now. I’ll devote the same amount of mind-space to the topic as before, except this time I’ll feel good about it. The exact same amount of energy is involved, with an entirely different result.

You choose.