Recently, KW Norton in one of her substack posts wrote, “We can almost feel the fear mongering which we are subjected to on a moment-by-moment basis these days. Many of us have taken to facing our fears and understanding that fear is our greatest limiting factor” And continuing, “When we are no longer influenced by fear we are more able to engage our intellect in choosing what we are going to let ourselves be affected by. Courage is contagious but so is fear. Learning to defuse our own fear is a good first step to making better decisions.”
I have written about the Medicine Wheel in previous posts. The medicine wheel is a sacred symbol used by many Indigenous peoples that represents the interconnectedness of life and is often used for healing, teaching, and spiritual guidance. When we find ourselves caught in a pattern of fear, the Luminous Warrior and Jaguar can help us bring to death our fear stories and move beyond fear into forgiveness and gratitude which as KW suggests is a “good first step in making better decisions.”
The Luminous Warrior is the archetype of fearlessness. He is fearless because he has no enemies. The Luminous Warrior has no enemies because he has come to understand that what he sees as an enemy is really an unhealed part of himself. When we find ourselves seeing someone or some situation as our enemy, the Luminous Warrior asks, “what part of you does that person or situation represent that needs healing?” What is it about that person or situation that upsets you so much, that makes you so angry? We often project the parts of us that we have rejected, split off, repressed and made “bad” or “unacceptable” onto others and then see them as enemies or someone to be feared. Carl Jung called this the shadow—the parts of us that we split off because they are unacceptable or incompatible with the image we hold of ourselves. This is where the Luminous Warrior can help us. He can bring light, clarity and understanding to the enemy by exploring these dark, repressed and unconscious places in us and bring light or consciousness to them. That is why he is called the Luminous Warrior. He brings an end to conflict not by raising the sword but by bringing light to the darkness and consciousness to what is often an unconscious dynamic playing out between our egos and what we judge as an enemy. Now, don’t get me wrong. There is evil in the world, absolutely, evil that we must fight against! But when we fight from a place of fear that is fueled by unhealed places in ourselves, we are fighting our projections rather than the real enemy. We are fighting ourselves in the other.
The animal companion of the Luminous Warrior is the jaguar. The jaguar is at the top of the food chain in the rainforest. She has no enemies. The jaguar is also a great tracker and sees in the dark. Therefore, she can track into our dark places, where we carry hidden, repressed, split off and wounded parts of ourselves. She can help us discover our shadows—those hidden and unconscious places that we project onto others, turning them into our enemies. Jaguar teaches us to leap beyond fear and violence and release the myths and stories that keep us bound to the same patterns that both we and our ancestors have been repeating because of our unhealed stories.
Recently, a client began to express how angry, even rageful he felt toward a certain employee and colleague. In the session, he began to rage at all the things he couldn’t stand about this person—how “weird he was, how odd he was, how he just didn’t fit in, how he couldn’t stand him and at times wanted to “punch him” and yet felt sorry for him.” Others thought he should fire him, but for some reason, my client hadn’t been able to.
I accessed my jaguar energy and began to track the anger. I invited the client to allow his anger and rage to come up and then to follow it back through his life and to see where it took him. In the shamanic tradition I am trained in, when we activate the jaguar and give it a direction she will track to find the source, tracking back through the dark and unconscious places in our psychic world and locate the original events that need healing. The client began to see himself at age 5, facing his mother, his brother and a cousin. As we explored the experiences of this five-year-old boy, he expressed how his brother and cousin would bully him, beat him up and hit him and how he had restrained himself, not fighting back. He talked about how his mother, being very impatient with him when he was upset and angry caused him to restrain himself and repress his feeling even further. All this made the five-year-old feel odd, weird, out of place, like he didn’t fit in, like something was wrong with him. The five-year-old had remained frozen in fear, unable to act on his anger and emotions. The client began to see how this colleague reminded him of that five-year-old.
I continued to work energetically with the five-year-old boy, helping him release the fear and repressed anger and rage that was frozen in him. In doing trauma work, we now know that it is important to move the energy that is frozen by the event. I invited the client to activate that five-year-old part by fighting back, even punching the images of his brother and cousin that he had internalized and continued to keep him frozen in fear. I then reset his fight-flight-freeze response, setting that part of him free to relax, to feel safe so he could face that part of himself and welcome him into his heart.
After the session, the client said, “In a way I feel that I have been carrying my colleague because he represents that part of me that felt unadjusted and out of place. So even though I don’t really like him, I feel I ‘must’ carry him, even though it’s obvious to many on the ‘outside’ that he doesn’t really ‘fit.’ Perhaps my anger is telling me I don’t need to continue to carry him. I no longer need to carry that memory of myself as weird or unadjusted. Perhaps now I can ‘let go’ of that memory and my anger.” From this place, my client is now free to make the best decision regarding this situation.
Under most of our emotions—anger, rage, guilt, shame, etc. is fear. Ultimately, it is the ego’s fear of annihilation, of not existing, of losing its power, and of death. The path of the Luminous Warrior and her companion jaguar is back to forgiveness, gratitude compassion and love. Love dissolves our fear. We come to love through forgiveness and gratitude. The Luminous Warrior understands that things don’t happen to us and they happen for us. When we can look at the person who wounded and hurt us and say, “I forgive you” and then thank Spirit for the lessons learned we can move forward in our lives from a place of compassion and understanding toward those who in this current life might be in an adversarial position.
The Luminous Warrior distinguishes between an enemy and an adversary. An adversary has ideas and beliefs quite opposite to ours. We may have conflicts when we don’t’ see eye to eye on some issue. An enemy, on the other hand, is a much more malignant term. A person who is an enemy is not opposed to our belief system. They are opposed to our existence. An enemy wants to harm us. An adversary is someone who may put up roadblocks to hamper our happiness or from pursuing a particular path. The enemy would put up a landmine to crush us. From the consciousness of the Luminous Warrior, we can co-exist with an adversary because the Luminous Warrior recognizes that at any other time that person might have been a brother, a sister, a neighbor or be sitting next to them around a campfire as a fellow soldier exchanging stories. But in this moment in history, they turned out to be adversaries.
To determine who or what is truly an enemy or simply an adversary, we must do our inner work and heal the parts of us that we have repressed and split off—the parts of us that we project onto others, turning them into the darkness, shame, anger and self-hatred that that we carry within.
As we bring light and consciousness to these dark and hidden places in us and let go of the fear that holds them hostage, we are no longer influenced by fear. As KW Norton pointed out, “we are more able to engage our intellect in choosing what we are going to let ourselves be affected by.”
This is a great essay on the subject of methods for overcoming our fears so we can be capable of taking the action we desire to take in our lives.
Thank you so much for quoting my work and for expanding on a highly important topic to us all!
I hope that people take the time to understand and work through this valuable resource.