Honoring the (Benevolent) Warrior Within

Oct. 15, 2010 — -- I have a Warrior to thank. An inner warrior with a benevolent intention.

Near the beginning of my journey of awakening, I recognized that my challenge in this lifetime was to stretch my way of being beyond its aggressive comfort zone. Throughout childhood and beyond, I had relied on my Warrior spirit to deal with the world before me. That spirit permeated my adaptations and disguises, my daily interactions and love relationships, my call to become a criminal trial lawyer. War was my habitual range of emotion. Conflict was all I knew.

But then something happened. After an extraordinary apprenticeship with a brilliant criminal lawyer, I went to Turkey on a last vacation before opening my own law practice. There, I was awakened to other pathways of possibility, other versions of Jeff longing to take up space inside of me, pushing at my soul seams.

I came home to a spiritual emergingcy -- the state of confusion that one experiences when a spiritual path is pushing its way into consciousness, prior to its full emergence and integration. I stepped back from trial law. Over time, I recognized that my challenge in this lifetime was to make a radical transformation in my soul consciousness. After many lifetimes as the archetypal Warrior (the call to arms) the scripture in this lifetime was to stretch into a more surrendered way of being (the call to disarm). A new Soulshape, one with a white flag at its center.

As part of the journey home, I disdained the Warrior within me at every turn. I disparaged his driven nature, his narrow-minded focus, his macho ways of being. I saw his armor as my primary obstacle, an anger encrusted distraction from true-path. In my efforts to embody a more heartfelt way of being, I needed to distance myself from the battlefields I knew best.

But I missed the point. Toward the end of writing my book "Soulshaping," I recognized that I had misunderstood the nature of this process. Familiar archetypal patterns don't fade away. They just get pushed aside as the new forms come into being. When the new form concretizes, the old patterns rise back into awareness. Where before the Warrior and Healer archetypes appeared to be flowing in disparate directions, they were actually revealed as inextricable branches of the same waterway. On the River of Essence, everything flows in the same direction -- toward the Ocean of Wholeness.

Since then, my respect for the Warrior within has deepened. After all, who pushed me to overcome my miserable childhood? Who pushed me to sell windows door-to-door to pay for university? Who motivated me to clear my emotional debris and excavate my callings? Who got me through the writing of "Soulshaping" amid tremendous economic pressure? Who is energizing me to write this inspiration?