When the Hero commits himself to adventure and enters the unknown special world, there comes a time in his life when he enters his `inmost cave’. This is a place where dark secrets of his life are buried, his wounds, his deep desires, fears, compromises he made with life. They are buried in the deep chambers of his unconscious that govern most of his behaviours.
Little did I know that as I announce the public run of my personal transformation based program titled `The Hero’s Journey’, I would be thrown into my inmost cave. And here I am, all shaken and astounded looking at my shadow self, my needs that I rejected, my strategies etc not knowing what to do with myself. I was facing my truth and it was dark and ugly. Years ago, to protect myself from what life threw at me, I built a safe fortress far away in the dungeons of my mind, by burying my affiliate needs in it’s foundation, by building high walls of rationalization, bastions of edginess, all guarding the last speck of my poor self worth. Today that safe heaven is under attack of my own Hero who wants me to come out and face my truth.
With the sword of invincibility, dripping blood of my slain inner demons, in his full fury, my Hero ransacks the whole fortress and I shudder seeing my Hero after my own blood. The sword of invincibility wants to taste the blood of two other parts of me –worthless and isolate. I hold a dilemma whether to reveal them or to cover them. The sword of invincibility has never lost a war and this war would be no exception. Let’s call this take 2.
A couple of years ago while going through my Coaching for Transformation certification program, we were made to do an exercise of meeting our future self. In that exercise the future self gives us two gifts. When the instructor asked us to draw our future life, so stuck I was to the gifts, that I could only draw those two gifts. Bewildered, I wondered around trying to make sense of those gifts but forgot about them in the pell-mell.
Interestingly enough, life at one point became so strained that I took to meditation. In that period, I also read a lot about finding life’s purpose, took some coaching to clarify my purpose, meditated a lot with that question on my mind. And all these lead me to clarify a worthy cause I would like to dedicate my life to. The clarity emerged but it lacked the conviction. I was tentative and uncertain about myself. I got no real traction on my purpose. I lived this period alternating between experiencing a creative dissonance and occasional frustration. This would be Take 1.
In one of the soul searching interactions a while ago it became clear that even though the purpose was clear, the reason I got no traction was because my demons still lived within the cellars of my mind. They had to be slain. That’s the stage in the Hero’s Journey called `The Ordeal’. And that’s where the second gift from Take 1 is being used– the sword of invincibility. And I could use the sword upon myself only because I had put the first gift to good use – the Kamandalu that helped me hold this all with dispassion, as well with love and conviction.
Strange are the ways of transformation. I am happy to be on my own Hero’s Journey. I became the first participant of my own program and my joy has no bound.
