The Hero’s Journey Is Written In Your Habits
The blindspot humans love to avoid, is that the use of themselves, how they think and move is at the root of their problems. The systems we live by are justifiably crumbling, and addressing the pains of that evidence is everywhere, in process. Routinely, I see health articles omitting the responsibility of each person looking to see what they are doing and thinking and how that is creating the dysfunction. We are the creators, is the elephant in the cosmos.
Why we don’t want to look at ourselves and personally investigate, and persist in looking outside of one’s self for answers, seems to be the joke in the very nature of this reality. We have two eyes and therefore look at others, and to others for answers. No doubt it resides in how we come into the world, how we are mothered and nurtured, or not nurtured with love and security. The vast diversity make up the societies we live in, and the matching distortions to proportional degree, create the pains and problems each person suffers from.
It takes years of healing, understanding and detachment to see the grand experiment at a distance of perception, to see it at its wholeness and have compassion for the process. Zoom into one person’s myopic reality and you have a representation of the whole, at war with itself. If one is really looking to solve a problem, say of one experiencing physical or emotional pain, one looks at what they are feeling, thinking, and how they are moving and behaving.
What is one doing to ones’ self? We don’t do this. We look outside of ourselves and point the finger to who is doing it to us. Reasonably distracted by that stimulus in infancy, a response is nearly instantaneous, and depending on others around them, their response is either solidified, ignored or allowed to continue with the immediate perception. And a pattern begins its life, and the one living it doesn’t know it yet, while the pattern becomes so set as to be an identifying marker.
Undoing those patterns, is a dis-covery process, allowed by looking at how one moves and thinks. Uncovering the source of my back pain, and the emotional making of my scoliosis, has been the basis for my thirty one year career in the Healing Arts. I have lived it, you could say. And having lived it, that knowledge is mine, and I accept both responsibility for the whole of it, and enjoy the rewards of it.
FM Alexander looked into his question and the Alexander Technique was formed from that inquiry. Teachers and students of that inquiry today, all over the world, benefit with every moment they leave themselves alone, and allow the nervous system to accept the thought or voiced directions, to ‘allow their necks to be free, to allow the head to go forward and up.’
It’s a statement in action. It’s an action that makes a statement: “I am taking the reins of my own betterment. I am ready to release this pain. I recognize it is my solidified habits and conditioning that has me experiencing the pains, which I want to release. I realize I am solely responsible for my actions and the consequences of my actions, based on the the default habits, I was conditioned by my family, my culture, and systems of society.”
Change and/or relieving one’s own pain doesn’t come from hurting others, it comes from looking within one’s self. Taking the time to investigate and question one’s default habits, is like finding a golden key to a vault filled with riches. Do I have your attention now? You’re thinking money or gold right? Or items of value that will improve your life? Let me tell you, even the millionaires that seek to fill that unquenchable Void, are poorer than those delve into self study. The habit of ‘it’s never enough’ is still in play even in billionaires, or so admits Warren Buffett.
It’s like any hero’s journey demonstrated in e v e r y story that literature and film presents — how will the hero deal with the situation? Whether it’s fantasy super heroes or an individual human faced with situation or problem, it’s the choices they make that leads the story and calls into being the allies and villains that aid and confront them with their fears on their journey. Characters driving the stories make the choices that reveal they’re the ‘villain’ or the ‘hero’, or mostly struggling somewhere in between.
To this line of thinking, my work is the ally that meets the hero somewhere in their story, where they have met a roadblock, pain or who has the means of leading them to answering the question they hold. ‘The teacher will appear when the student is ready’, as they say. My experience and the methods used to guide the hero to self discovery, gives them them the evidence, experience and strength to let the old story go. Storytelling is, at every level, as a means of understanding ourselves. What we tell ourselves, becomes our reality, becomes our body — this is not a rehearsal.
For example: my mind and body was twisted by stimuli from my family dynamic over years in my childhood, which would have continued, corkscrew-like, unless I took the actions I did at fourteen to offset it and eventually heal and reverse the pattern (over 3 decades). I encountered many allies along my journey, teachers and healers of many modalities, calling in more monsters along the way, revealing deeper connections, and like an oil drill, pumping out the pain — it filled enough drums to rival OPEC!
When the hero doesn’t accept the call to action, (and it often takes several episodes), to accept the new direction they are confronted with, and the situation worsens until the hero remembers what the ally said or did may have been correct, and they make the choice to heed the ally’s advice, and a new level of the journey is set into motion. The novel or movie just isn’t interesting without this turnabout. Scores of writers grapple with how to keep an audience hooked in the story every day! And it doesn’t happen without a transformation.
It’s the soul’s food we’re meant to look for! Not the pride in obstinance. Not the glorification of stubbornness. Not the persistence of ignoring the pain that keeps telling you you’re dragging a lifetime’s baggage with your every thought and movement, saying ‘this is who I am’. It’s not. It’s what you’ve made yourself to be from the influence of family, gender conditioning, culture, etc. (What and who you truly are, is for your discovery, no spoiler alerts here.)
My father used to like to quote the bible that supported his patriarchal beliefs, but one he oft repeated was actually helpful: ‘With all thy getting, get understanding.’ (Prov.4–7) Understanding doesn’t come without experience, and taking that next step in the hero’s journey, is the happening which is transformation. You can’t make it happen, (that’s what ‘getting in the way’ is), you can put yourself in the position of allowing it to happen.
In an Alexander Technique lesson, one puts one’s self in the process of inhibiting a habit, and allowing the teacher to take one through space, with the chair behind you and you bend at the hips, knees, and ankles. You think about allowing your spine to lengthen and your back to widen. Your focus is being redirected. The ally is showing you the new way, the way to transformation.
The way to the story getting more interesting is the hero leaving behind the narrow mentality and going to the big city, for example, to pursue their dreams. Who have you cast as the monsters in your story that you encounter in pursuit of the dream? We don’t get to where we want to go without paying attention to the allies that cross your path. A method that broadens one’s awareness and perceptions is a talisman you want in your pouch of skills. As in computer games and VR, you can’t get to the next level unless you vanquish the monster and to do that you have to have the appropriate weapon or means to accomplish it.
Also, if the hero refuses the challenge, or the entrance into the new world, they become the very character(s) they are trying to escape. The hero becomes ‘shadow ally’, warning the next hero that is, what he will become if he doesn’t accept the challenge — the hero has become the cautionary tale.
Redemption stories are what give us hope, every ‘prophet’ has been through their own journey of redemption. The hero has to face their faults to advance the story, otherwise, the audience loses interest; boy loses girl, boy slays dragon to save girl, boy finally gets girl, then realizes, he wants to be the girl! Now it’s a new story, expectations are broken on the part of the hero and the audience — you didn’t see that coming! You’re intrigued, whatever the transformation is, it has touched something inside you, you want to keep watching. Your awareness has expanded, change happened.
It’s always about transformation, small or large, whatever twists and turns the writer creates, the inner stimulus is always calling. Will you become the cautionary tale, the villain, or accept the ally’s help to advance the story? Curiosity asks, “will you answer the call?”
