When is the New Year? By
our calendar, it's January 1. Back before
we had calendars, it was the first day of
Spring. According to the Chinese calendar,
however, it is in February. And since last
February 5, we have been moving through the Year
of the White Metal Dragon, the first in over
sixty years. Any Dragon year is intense.
It can be full of change and potential strife as
we are challenged to release material things as
well as concepts and even emotional baggage
which no longer serve our ultimate potential as
human beings. It is yang (masculine in our
culture), fiery and confrontational. As we
wind down this dragon year during the month of
January, we can feel the shakedown if we are
attuned to it. And as with all of life's
cycles, we can flow along with the changes it
facilitates or we can resist.
Mythologically speaking,
dragons are fire breathers. Fire is an
alchemical element and one which brings
transformation. It is lively and quick and
leaves very little in its wake. Even in a
more traditional sense, the Bible's last
book of Revelations warns us that fire will come
at about this time in history to cleanse and
restructure the world as we know it.
Though some might perceive this as a physical
threat such as The Flood, I am one of those who
feels it moving instead through our
consciousness. Fire is an etheric
element (corresponding to air or space) and the
mental realm corresponds to air in Western
astrology, for one. We have evolved from a
survival-driven species to one which largely
takes home and hearth for granted and instead
focuses on mental pursuits. Technology is the
crowned achievement of such mind power. As
technology continues to transform the way we
live, it might make sense that we are also
challenged by this elemental (fire) to use it
wisely.
In her book The Hero
Within, Dr. Carol Pearson states,
"Heroes take journeys, confront dragons, and
discover the treasure of their true selves ...
People who are discouraged from slaying dragons
internalize the urge and slay themselves."
She believes the fiery Warrior is an important
facet of the Hero, but that it has been
distorted in our culture. Usually reserved
for (white) men, this distorted Warrior has cast
women in the role of "witches to be slain" or
"princesses who ... serve as the hero's reward."
This has damaged men who become trapped in the
myth and fail to develop their more caring,
compassionate nature. It has immobilized
women who do not speak their truth for fear of
castigation. We all want to be loved.
We all want acceptance. Yet there comes a
time in all our lives when we are faced with a
decision: do we continue along as we have been
taught, or do we embrace the innate gifts and
challenges that are uniquely our own? Do
we remain immobilized by our fear of rejection,
or do we take the Hero's journey? And if we
decide to embark, how do we go about it?
There are many resources
available to guide us into personal
transformation, these days. From Mary Murray
Shelton's new book Guidance From the
Darkness to an old standby, Dan
Millman's Way of the Peaceful Warrior;
Louise Hay's You Can Heal Your Life
to Mehl-Madrona's Coyote Medicine,
we can explore different ways of looking at our
world. Heidegger's philosophical look at
how we are shaped by our culture can provide
insights and J.T.F. Bugental's S earch for
Authenticity can give us a humanistic as
well as academically-based foundation for our
journey. And though many books will face
us with questions, few in this genre are
designed at converting anyone to a particular
belief system. Instead, they are meant to
augment and enhance what we already know about
ourselves and our relationship to others and our
world.
While it is perhaps human
to fear change, we never stop growing. It
takes great courage to face the fire of
transformation. To look honestly at
ourselves and dare to discover what lies beneath
the conditioning and hype of our existence can
be daunting. Others around us can feel
threatened by our explorations and emergent
voices and, when confronted in this way with
their own fallibility, might seek to discredit
us. We are constantly challenged to ferret
out what is real for us, and to stand by it. And
one of the challenges here is to apply
our knowledge rather than to fall into merely
spewing rhetoric. What this means is that
we may tend to clutter our heads with
information (remember the mental/air realm
we have spoken of) yet fail to make time for
integration (i.e. daily practice and self
encounter/examination to determine if we are
succeeding with our own personal
transformation).
It is easy to enter into
encounters with others with an air of
competition, making who is right more
important than the sharing of new insights and
concepts. Again, this competitive striving
is innate to the Individualist culture we have
been raised in, versus the Collectivist culture
of, say, the Native Americans. Most of us
have been raised to look for a leader rather
than to acknowledge and share our own inner
sense of power. When we practice daily prayer
and/or meditation along with allowing ourselves
to embrace the fiery process of transformation,
we combine our intentions with an
openness and willingness to understand one
another better. Thus we begin to enter into
right relationship with the element of fire, a
most powerful teacher.
