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THE HEROIC JOURNEY

The hero’s journey, as defined by Joseph Campbell, is a living work-in-progress around the world. One can say it has passed into the collective commons of the repository of human wisdom. Campbell encouraged this, sensing that his body of work and legacy had far to go; it speaks to so many facets of the human experience.

Soon after we are born, and once we acquire language, the most powerful way we are able to absorb wisdom is through stories. Stories bypass the rational-logical (logos) mind and go straight to the symbolic (mythos) realm, creating a much more inspirational, engaging, and resonant experience than simply receiving information. Please note that we use the terms “myth” or “mythic” as Campbell uses them: not as something that is not real but as symbols of deeper drives at play in our psyche. We use mythology and stories instead of just science and structure because, as Campbell discovered, “Mythology is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology.”¹ Mythology is simply a very creative way to express human psychology.

Coming into Shakti Leadership requires undergoing a heroic journey with mythic and archetypal elements. When you reframe your leadership journey as a personal myth, it works below and beyond facts and rational cognition, engaging and activating universal forces within the personal and collective unconscious. This is the most inspirational and empowering way to transform your daily living into your fully embodied and self-actualized life. In this chapter, we bring to your attention some key dimensions and applications of this great body of work—dimensions and applications that are of particular relevance to leaders.

THE HEROIC JOURNEY SUMMARIZED

To cut to the core of the mythic heroic journey, we use a simple four-stage model of crisis-trauma-transformation-gift to describe the process of coming into your own fullness as a leader (Figure 4.1).

The journey begins with a crisis in your life—a crisis that shakes you out of normalcy. The crisis throws you into a different world where you experience pain, suffering, even trauma. As you’re coming to grips with this new reality, you must confront your worst fear. There comes a moment when it’s just you and your shadow, your greatest fear. In Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker goes into the forest and meets his father, Darth Vader, who represents his own shadow.

Figure 4.1—The Four-Stage Heroic Journey

There is an element of danger in crisis, but there is also a turning point built into the moment. The crisis contains the opportunity. As Robin Sharma wrote, “Behind your greatest fear lies your greatest life.” There is no avoiding or bypassing it. The only way out is through; you have to face your worst fear, which is your shadow. In that confrontation, there is great personal growth; something new shows up in your being. A new Shakti gets awakened in you as you develop new capacities and unlock new latent power. Your inherent greatness was sitting within you; you just never knew you had it. Now it’s suddenly unfolded and the effect is transformational. The fact that you are still standing after your journey means you not only survived your crisis, but in fact are more powerful and resilient for it.

After this transformation, you return to the ordinary world and your growth continues. The cycle is only complete when you share the gift of what you have learned with the world. The more we give, the more we receive. This gift is mysteriously the very thing that your “world”—your team, family, community, or organization—needs to move to the next level. Only then will you have completed the entire heroic cycle.

Essentially, the heroic journey shows that if you are faced with a problem that seems insurmountable, you first have to grow to a new level before you can find a solution to it.

Shakti Leaders Speak: On Crisis and the Journey

Sally Kempton describes the heroic journey in this way:

Once you ask for help and admit your cultural powerlessness, and start asking where the source of power is, you open yourself to the power that is not dependent on culture, position, or even skills. That essentially is how we discover Shakti. Some of us just come in fully empowered by her. But most of us discover Shakti by not knowing what to do or how to proceed. If you’re a leader and you’re just kicking ass and nothing is challenging you and you are really good at the competitive game, why would you change? There’s no incentive for the average masculinist person to look inside and find a deeper source as long as the ego-based strategies are working. The failure of personal power for most of us and for our society as a whole is really the only way that we start to turn to the feminine source. It is a crisis that triggers the journey, because now you have to go look for power in a different way. Our society is at that point; our problems are so huge and our capacity to solve them is so clearly limited that we are intuiting that we really do need some kind of miraculous connection.²

 

JOURNEYING CONSCIOUSLY

Is it possible to grow without experiencing a crisis and the subsequent suffering? Campbell’s work seems to suggest that one cannot have a heroic journey without a crisis. But why wait for a crisis? Until you come to that moment of realization, you will have to journey in the conventional way. It takes courage and self-mastery to move past the crisis mindset. Most of us who haven’t really experienced life fully yet are all too human in our fragility; we will unavoidably experience pain, trauma, or suffering. To “turn the crap into compost,” you must take your past pain and suffering and use it as fertilizer for your future growth.

One can experience the journey with more ease and grace by becoming more conscious of the deeper processes and elements involved, and reframing them. The conscious heroic journey proceeds along four stages: the evolutionary impulse, followed by dissolution, evolution, and resolution (Figure 4.2).

Evolutionary Impulse

This planet was once water and lava, and then, one day, a plant arrived. After several thousand millennia, an animal then arrived. The plant didn’t say, “I shall evolve.” The grander intelligence of nature, prakriti, evolved it. Eventually, humans showed up. We alone have the ability to discern the evolutionary impulse of nature and say, “Can I partner with it? Can I now consciously evolve and help nature along? I, too, am part of nature; I am nature become conscious.”

Figure 4.2—Journeying Consciously

Inside each of us is the true meaning and purpose of our existence. It is the seed of your life and your being, and carries its own evolutionary drive and impulse. It’s already programmed to fire and unfold regularly from time to time. However, many of us do not heed this call to evolutionary adventure. Some people have let their conditioning stifle them and go against their evolutionary impulse. Think of it this way: the whole universe is built, structured, and programmed to evolve you, whether you like it or not. If you don’t choose to evolve consciously, it’s going to wake you up through a crisis anyway.

Shakti Leaders Speak: On Evolution’s Purpose

There is a growing acceptance of the idea that evolution has a purpose, and that we humans are agents of advancing the realization of that purpose. One of the best-known thinkers in this realm is Steve McIntosh, who writes:

Leading theorists are coming to realize that the cosmological evolution of stars and planets, the biological evolution of organisms, and the cultural evolution of human history are all part of a universal process of becoming that has been continuously unfolding since the beginning of our universe with the Big Bang. The advance of evolution encompasses much more than the development of biological species. Indeed, evolution is not just something that is occurring within the universe; evolution itself is what the universe actually is—a grand panoply of micro and macro development that affects everything, and ultimately connects everything.

Once we accept that all forms of evolution—cosmological, biological, and cultural—are part of the same overarching process, despite their significant differences and discontinuities, this leads to a deeper recognition of evolution’s meaning and value. And as we begin to discover the underlying meaning and value of evolution, this reveals evolution’s purpose. . . . Evolution is not random, accidental, or otherwise meaningless. On the contrary, its progressive advance reveals the presence of purpose—not an entirely preplanned or externally controlled type of purpose, but rather a creative generation of value that has been continually building upon itself for billions of years.

We increasingly recognize how fundamental values such as beauty, truth, and goodness influence evolution at every level of its unfolding. By coming to understand the “gravitational pull” of values on the process of evolution, we can more clearly see why and how cultural evolution has been achieved in some places and why it has stagnated or regressed in other places. . . . This new understanding of evolution reveals how both our personal progress as individuals and our collective progress as a society are directly connected to the creative unfolding of the universe as a whole.³

 

Life is never stagnant; it is constantly evolving. Just when you think you have reached a comfortable equilibrium, you will experience some kind of an evolutionary nudge. You think you’ll rest a while, but boredom or emptiness will soon set in. Then the call to adventure crashes upon you. Something changes in your actual state or your ideal state. You face a new challenge that wasn’t there before, or you sense a dawning awareness that the way things are isn’t the way they could or should be. Either way, it is a call to journey, to embark on a fresh adventure of discovery and growth. Learn to recognize that evolutionary impulse and know that it will come. When it does, you will be prepared.

How can you identify false signals? The only way is to apply your best discernment and presence each signal fully. Wait with equipoise, neither moving toward it or away from it. Invoke your Shakti and its wisdom to impel and guide you. Once you wait out the confusion, you will get the clarity of the right choice. Act on it and surrender the outcome to your higher self. Release the hold of the egoic “me” and slip into the flow of Shakti. Trust that even if the original signal appeared to be false, it may now be revealed as true.

Dissolution

A dissolution—some kind of sacrifice or surrender—is going to be asked of you. When you freely and fully submit to it, you don’t need to experience pain or trauma.

Journeying begins with a dissonance of the existing equilibrium. The whole journey process is a spiral that’s ever expanding upward into higher and higher capacities and levels of consciousness. It always begins with dissonance; something has to disturb the existing equilibrium in order for a new, higher one to be evolved.

As human beings we cling to life, fearing and denying the idea of death. One of the reasons we should make this journey is to remove the negative charge associated with the idea of death. Death is an inescapable part of life. We have to go through it and allow it, for it has many wonderful gifts to give us. We need to let ourselves die to one way of being in order to experience the next and the new possibilities awaiting us.

Anticipate dissolution and allow for the old self or old ways to die, much as a caterpillar has to “die” for a butterfly to emerge. This is a psychological death that you need to go through. Give in to it. Submit to thanatos (the death drive) willingly so it does not come upon you as a destructive breakdown. When you can die to your old self and ways, you come to the place where the next energy to be awakened lies. Detach from the ordinary existence and allow yourself to move into the special world.

Evolution

The evolution stage is where you engage your unrealized potential, your latent Shakti. It’s as though there are unused batteries inside you: you’ve used or experienced one set and are journeying to the next. You find energy ready to be unleashed inside you. In this evolution, you develop new gifts and capacities and discover things you never knew.

Resolution

As Sri Aurobindo said, “All the world’s possibilities in Man are waiting as the tree waits in its seed.” The resolution stage is where you share your new gifts. With your new capacities, you are now equipped to face challenges and transform your world in some way—whether it’s your family, your relationship, your team, or your company.

Even at journey’s end, you must remain present and fully alive to the potential that exists in every moment. Instead of being on autopilot and reacting to the churn of the forces, recognize that you’ve just emerged from a journey and are resting for a while. Anticipate that the lull won’t last and change will come again. When that happens, submit yourself to dissolution and allow yourself to die in some way in order to engage once again in something new and different.

Remember that not every journey need be a life-transforming one; many small journeys may come between big journeys. In this way, you evolve and develop other capacities. Those capacities can bring resolution to whatever it is your world is challenged by.

Most of us go through life largely unconscious. Swami Sivananda put it succinctly: “Eating, sleeping, drinking, a little laughter, much weeping: is that all? Don’t die here like a worm! Wake up!” Many of us have died like worms many times. That’s what gives rise to the yogic idea, also present in other traditions, of the cycle of birth and rebirth. This cycle can also happen while we are still alive in this lifetime. We can be reborn again and again into the same darkness until the light of consciousness starts unfurling and awakening. Then we experience conscious evolution.

THE ONLY WAY OUT IS IN

The very point of the hero’s journey is to embrace every challenge as a call to adventure. Change your mental makeup and set forth. Do not surrender to your fear and revulsion; try to see the journey as something of great value, as a gift—an opportunity to become a better version of who you are—and be grateful for it.

Leadership requires knowing how to journey within, knowing how to come into your own. You can’t lead anyone or anything if you don’t know what’s leading you. Your biological and psychological drives direct your personal power until you reclaim it. What are you in charge of if you don’t know what’s leading you? You’ve got to know who’s “driving your car.” You think you’re the master of your own life, you think you’re going where you’re going. But in reality, all these underlying forces are controlling you and you’re not even aware of it.

How can we become more aware as leaders? For that, we have to know our inner space and understand our drives. What are our belief systems? Where did we pick them up? Were they ours in the first place? What motivates us? What values are we unconsciously embodying? What’s causing our healthy and unhealthy behaviors? What is it in us that causes our outer conflicts and recurring patterns? What within us needs to die or be released? What is seeking to emerge?

Heed the ancient Greek aphorism: “Know thyself.”

The hero’s journey starts with becoming more self-aware: understanding who you are and what’s actually going on in your life. The only way out is in; the only way to answer the call to adventure is to go deep into yourself, because no one else can do this for you. The power, the resources—everything you need to make the journey—are to be found inside you and nowhere else.

The yogic idea of karma suggests that this inner work (for which our outer work and world is just an expression or field, referred to as karma bhoomi) is something you chose to do (or were assigned to do) in this lifetime. You must go through and process particular experiences in this lifetime to evolve and grow in the ways you most need to.

THE DANCE OF THE FIVE ELEMENTS

Yogic wisdom sees all of creation as the divine interplay of the five elements from which it is made: earth, water, fire, air, and space. Each of these elements has its unique movement, emotion, quality, and nature. All systems continuously cycle through these elemental energetic states.

The heroic journey maps onto the cycle as well. The crisis is akin to leaving the familiar groundedness and engagement of earth, to get swept into the fluidity and uncertainty of a state of water. Meeting your greatest fear and experiencing death is like having to go through fire. Emerging out of that, like a phoenix reborn, you can fly free and easy in the element of air. All this takes place within the holding element or emptiness of space, which is the state of presence.

As we know, energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it just transforms from one elemental state to the next. The freedom and ease of a stable being state like air or earth—last until it is time to evolve and journey again—to be taken over by water and fire, again and again.

Recognizing these archetypal elemental energies that are at play at any given time and aligning with their formidable Shakti helps us maintain a state of dynamic equilibrium. We can leverage them to change and evolve without experiencing burnout or missing opportunities for growth.

Some elements are more masculine while others more feminine—think of fire and water. How do we dance through them instead of canceling them out?

Working with the organic nature of the five-elements cycle is also a powerful way to achieve harmonious growth as a company or organization. It serves to balance the drive for scale and numbers-driven growth that is characteristic of most companies. The key is to sense the “music” of the moment and align with its elemental energy. As leaders, we sometimes need to change the music or play another element, while noticing the dissonance we may be causing.

Check in and gauge the energy of your own company. Does it remain exclusively in one element, or does it flow through different elements in a balanced way? The company has its own soul; it is a being in its own right. Each company’s elemental energy reflects its life stage. Startups tend to have a lot of fire energy while mature companies have more earth or space energy. Culture is a union and dance of the energy of the leader and the soul of the company. The founder’s energy is in some way the company’s energy. When the founder leaves and another leader comes in, how they dance that dissonance is very important. Over time, the company develops its own strong culture; a leader who doesn’t know how to dance with that energy will be ineffective and rejected by the culture.

Each of us may have a preference for a particular elemental expression in our own energy and leadership style. It’s important to retain the ability to be yourself even as you cycle through the different elements. Remaining self-aware and staying present is key. Presence helps you dance with and through the cycle of change that journeying entails, in a way that renews and realigns you instead of depleting and stressing you.

JOURNEYING DIFFERENTLY

Men and women journey differently. While the broad strokes are similar, the nuance and the kshetras (domains or fields of action) are different. Joseph Campbell only talked about the hero’s journey, and his examples were mainly about men.⁴ Maureen Murdock, a follower of Campbell’s work, interviewed him to understand how the journey relates to women and their development as individuals. He told her that women don’t need to make the journey, that “in the whole mythological tradition the woman is there. All she has to do is to realize that she is the place that people are trying to get to. When a woman realizes what her wonderful character is, she’s not going to get messed up with the notion of being pseudo-male.”⁵

Murdock was dissatisfied with that answer because her personal experience was different. She did her own research and wrote a book called The Heroine’s Journey.⁶ Many other such books on women’s process of individuation and growth exist today (Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Descent to the Goddess by Sylvia Brinton Perera are particularly compelling).⁷

Let’s look at how the journeys differ for men and women.

The Hero’s Journey

The hero’s journey is a quest for power. Somewhere deep inside, the man is not in touch with his own power. In the quest for that power, he attains meaning and understanding. He also quests for wisdom because wisdom gains him power. It’s a thought- and mind-based journey. His greatest fear is failure—not being able to accomplish what he set out to do. The resources the hero has available to him are freedom, direction, logic, reason, focus, integrity, stability, passion, independence, discipline, confidence, awareness, authenticity, and strength—traditionally considered masculine resources.⁸

HERO’S JOURNEY	HEROINE’S JOURNEY
• Quests for power	• Quests for love
• Gains meaning	• Gains freedom
• Task and adventure	• Relationships and romance
• Fear: Failure	• Fear: Violation
• Resources: Freedom, direction, logic, reason, focus, integrity, stability, passion, independence, discipline, confidence, awareness, authenticity, strength	• Resources: Surrender, receptivity, emotion, intuition, radiance, flow, sensuality, nurturing, affection, sharing gentleness, patience, vulnerability

 

Source (for lists of resources): Jason Fonceca, http://ryzeonline.com/feminine-masculine-traits/.

The Heroine’s Journey

A woman’s journey often starts as a “descent into the dark,” triggered by a profound betrayal of love, violation, loss, or death (of her innocent, untested girlhood). She has to grieve fully and lay her old self to rest before she can be resurrected into her empowered womanhood.

The heroine’s journey is a quest for love. The domain of her work and her journey is not tasks and adventures as it is for the man, but relationships and romance. When the heroine seeks and finds the love she seeks within her own self, she becomes psychologically and truly free. She sheds the illusion that some external love/r can complete her. Sensing their bondage to the inner and outer patriarch, women want to be the sovereign master of their own lives; they want freedom. When a woman quests and comes into her own inner source of love, she gains that freedom for herself.

While this may seem rather stereotypical, and our feminist readers may roll their eyes, we ask that you bear with us and let the fullness of the narrative unfold. To give you a reassuring précis: to come into our full, lived potential, both men and women embark on three great journeys, or “mythic quests,” over time: for adventure, for romance, and for enlightenment.⁹

A woman’s greatest fear is violation—the primal fear that she can be violated anywhere she goes. This is what makes her vulnerable. Yet ultimately, it is this very vulnerability that is her greatest strength, as she discovers it is also the opening to self-transcendence, true power, and the great prize of unity consciousness—consciousness that ultimately makes her inviolable.

The resources available to the heroine for her quest are surrender, receptivity, emotion, intuition, radiance, flow, sensuality, nurturing, affection, sharing, gentleness, patience, and vulnerability—traditionally considered feminine resources.¹⁰

Check in with your own body-mind to see if you’re in touch with these energies. Many women today feel as though they don’t have these traits anymore because they’ve had to “man up” in a man’s world, especially in corporate jobs. The hero’s resources have been valued; the heroine’s resources are typically left at home or worse, dismissed as unimportant (“simply what our mothers did”) and of no value in the workplace.

Woman can journey for power, too. As hinted at earlier, the archetypal hero’s and heroine’s journeys speak more to the masculine and feminine within us than to our gender. Men will journey for love as well—and both men and women eventually journey for enlightened embodiment.

THE HEROINE’S JOURNEY SIMPLIFIED

A woman can journey consciously or unconsciously. Let’s first take a look at what an unconscious or unenlightened journey looks like (Figure 4.3).¹¹ It begins with a crisis, which could be experienced as a loss of power, violation, or betrayal.

Figure 4.3—The Four-Stage Heroine’s Journey

There is a loss of power due to the violation, which is a profound psychological crisis for a woman’s body-mind. She experiences intense pain and trauma and is forced to come to grips with her limiting beliefs. Numerous falsehoods have been programmed into her by the patriarchy—falsehoods that she didn’t even recognize as false. Now she suddenly wakes up to realize that she’s been had. She starts to come to grips with a deeply ingrained and disempowering belief system—one that she didn’t even realize was controlling her.

Here the heroine has to slay the dragon of feminine inferiority, the three falsehoods about women that she has been fed by the patriarchy: that women are inferior to men, that women are dependent on men, and that women are incomplete without men.¹² These falsehoods have been fed into women’s collective consciousness around the world and have created in them a deep sense of insecurity. A woman journeys to destroy these myths and uncover the truth. She must slay those dragons in order to come through her crisis and her pain. As Murdock puts it, “The dragons that jealously guard the myth of dependency, the myth of female inferiority, and the myth of romantic love are fearsome opponents. This is not a journey for cowards; it takes enormous courage to plumb one’s depths.”¹³

By facing the ordeal and slaying the dragons, the heroine grows immensely and undergoes a profound transformation. She discovers the necessary qualities and power (Shakti) within her own self, not through the men in her life. She then comes to healing, where she finds her true freedom and sense of belonging and is able to gift that to her new tribe. The whole journey is ultimately about belonging, love and nurturing, keeping the fabric of society together.

When the heroine comes out of the journey, she suddenly discovers other women like herself from all walks of life: the tribe of “happy-to-be-women.”¹⁴ It is a tribe of other empowered women who will be able to hold her and support her through her journey in a conscious way. These women are no longer dependent on the masculine and the male parts of society to validate who they are.

So this is the heroine’s journey: descent, initiation, and coming into her own power. It’s quite different from the hero’s journey; death is a critical part of the woman’s journey. The woman experiences a kind of death and she has to be able to grieve the loss. These are deep psychological experiences that we have to honor. But that which is true never dies because it is indestructible. Only that which is ready to be dissolved and discarded will die: her surface identity or personality.

Women know how to die. (In a sense, women die every month and are born again through their menstrual cycle.) In the yogic tradition, there is a goddess who takes you to that place when the time comes to die. Named Dhumavati, the great widow, the inauspicious one, she is “the crone goddess of disappointment and letting go.”¹⁵ Only when you pass through her do you submit to that complete annihilation, acknowledging, “Yes, I died. I have nothing left.” On the other side of the black widowhood—of becoming nothing, so to speak—is the new life.

The Conscious Heroine’s Journey: Submitting to the Evolutionary Impulse

The conscious heroine journeys for a great prize: reunion with her inner “holy family” (Figure 4.4). By becoming her own mother and her own beloved, she finds the true and lasting love and freedom for which she has longed and quested.

The conscious woman is attuned to the evolutionary impulse; she lives in the world of feeling and sensing. She senses an aridity, a barrenness to her life, a blocking of the life force and Shakti. She recognizes that it is time to submit to death.

For a woman to mature, something has to die—something precious has to be sacrificed on the altar of death. The good news is that in the grand scheme of things, nothing ever truly dies. However, she doesn’t know that when she takes the journey. She has to simply allow, giving up that comfort zone and security and safety of the known. When she allows the death of her childhood, she must presence her shame, her grief, her rage—all that was part of that childhood. Typically, this is triggered by some kind of betrayal or loss of power. She has to presence it, accept it, and see it for what it is, then allow it to process through her: “Yes, I am feeling grief,” “Yes, I am feeling shame,” or “Yes, I am feeling mighty rage.” The fire that’s eating her up is the death of her childhood. Finally, she comes to a place where she can say, “I accept it. I can lay my loss to rest.”

Figure 4.4—The Conscious Woman’s Journey

Psychoanalyst and author Clarissa Pinkola Estes has developed a very interesting exercise around this idea.¹⁶ She makes her students look at their lifeline and remember a point in their journey where something died—like a river that was going somewhere and was full of life, then suddenly ended, never reaching the ocean. That is a death. Your life energy can get stuck in that moment. For you to really live again, in a new way, you’ve got to lay your loss to rest and grieve it wholly.

On the other side of death is new life. When you lay your childhood to rest, you have your resurrection into womanhood. You now become a mother to your own child-self. You’re not waiting for anyone else to save you, nurture you, or take care of you; you are now taking care of yourself. Just like you would never let anyone violate your child, you will never let anyone violate you again. (We are referring to psychological strength, not to physical strength, which may be overpowered by an aggressor who has more.) That is what it means to become your own mother.

Imaginal Cells and Humanity’s Test

Imaginal cells carry the higher evolutionary potential of a species in the body of individuals in that species.¹⁷ Nature is not concerned with whether one individual lives or dies, but continually probes for the overall resilience of an entire species. If a species meets the test, it is resilient enough to survive and thrive and to go on in its evolution. When the time comes for a species to be tested in order to establish its place in the evolving ecosystem of nature, the imaginal cells create enough of a critical mass to unfold the new capacity that gives it the resilience needed, to stay on and thrive and contribute to the rest of the ecosystem.

Today, humanity’s consciousness is being tested. Are we ready to go from being psychologically immature, infantile children, to becoming mature beings of the species—both as men and women?

FROM LOVE AND WAR OF THE SEXES TO RECONCILIATION WITHIN

What is going on in the collective consciousness of men that there is such misogyny? What impels so many men to violate women? What is this really about? It is commonplace in many companies for the boss to shout and be abusive. This is how many behave in so-called civilized society; scratch the surface and we’re not civilized at all. We have no choice but to evolve; we will be eaten by this tiger unless we tame it. This is the grand journey of the human right now.

Humanity is evolving, but for us to evolve we have to become masters of our own power. That power is the libido, with its dual expressions as a sex or life drive (eros) and aggression or death drive (thanatos). Unless we can master it and learn how to harness and channel it correctly, we are at its mercy; it can be an energy that rules and drives us.

For humanity to come into its power and maturation as a species and not remain stuck in a state of “juvenile delinquency” requires us to recognize that we have been swinging between love and the war of the sexes. On the one hand, man and woman are deeply drawn to each other; the masculine energy and the feminine energy in each is magnetized to the other’s. On the other hand exists a need to consume each other. That need, in an unconscious way, can feel like a battle to destroy each other. These are two sides of the same coin; these energies churn us so we can find reconciliation within as to who we can become as sexually mature beings. The woman, through her womb and what goes on in her cycles, holds the evolutionary journey of libido. Making the libido conscious is the heroine’s journey—women’s work. The man holds the evolutionary journey of logos (meaning) and making that more conscious. That’s why so many men are into the wisdom quest.

Where is the woman going with all this? She is looking to the awakening of the Shakti and reclaiming her power, holding the physical space of the body while the man holds more of the psychological space of mind.

As represented by the equal and opposite centrifugal and centripetal forces—which keep entire systems from atoms to galaxies in their structures—that which unifies is the yin force and that which separates is the yang force. Together, they achieve the dynamic equilibrium in which the multiplicity of the Creation can be held even as it evolves. As a carrier of the unifying yin force on behalf of humanity, a woman’s journey to self-mastery is really about becoming a woman who masters two worlds: the outer and the inner, the collective and the personal, the masculine and the feminine. She knows how to unite both and through that release the force of creation.

As a carrier of the separating or individuating yang force on behalf of humanity, a man’s journey to self-mastery is similar, but complements the woman’s by guiding the released forces of creation toward greater and more complex forms of individuated being.

It can be said that the former leads to unity or inclusion, while the latter leads to diversity. Together they are evolving the manifold possibilities of this universe.

The whole journey is about expanding and evolving from your “mini-self” to this great grand self, which contains all these energies in balance through the idea of presence. If you are located in your presence, you can allow these drives to churn you without being at their mercy. You become more of who you can be by recovering all the parts of your self that you have lost. The more you regain those parts, the more whole you’ll become and the more whole you become, the more you are able to reclaim power and access it in your leadership.

THE ONLY WAY OUT IS THROUGH

There are times when we choose to journey and times when we choose not to. For every journey we take, there may be several that we don’t. What makes us choose certain journeys and not others?

The answers could be different for each of us. It could be fear or inertia or a certain payoff you may stand to lose if you disturb the status quo, or it could be a deeper knowing that you are not yet ripe or ready for such a challenge to a fragile ego; you may come unhinged, mentally and even physically.

There eventually comes a time—a choice-point, a moment of reckoning—when the journey cannot be put off any longer. The only way out is through, which is to say: Not journeying is not an option.

Consider the heroic journey of the wildebeest, often captured in African nature documentaries. There comes a time when they must cross a great river infested with crocodiles. The wildebeest have to do it; they have no choice. They plunge into the river and many of them die. But the crocodiles don’t stop them from making the journey. The human soul’s journey is similar, when it shows up here in this life. Not living is not an option. Not evolving is not an option either. We must grow or die.

Exercise: Where Are You on the Heroic Journey?

Quite possibly, you may be in the midst of a heroic journey right now. Use the following questions to assess where you are and what you can expect:

• What stage are you at? Evolutionary impulse, dissolution, evolution, or resolution?

• Have you heeded the call? If not, why not?

• Have you explored the new world, with all its possibilities?

• What is your deepest fear? What inner demon do you need to slay?

• What is your unrealized potential (your gift/greatness)?

• When you find your elixir, how will you offer it to the world?

• As you explore these questions, what are you learning about yourself?

 

THE RISING TIDE OF SHAKTI AS SHAKTI’S OWN JOURNEY

Shakti is a universal force, not just an individual force. Whatever happens in your individual life—on your personal heroic journey—is a reflection of a universal evolution of the collective feminine, responding to the overdeveloped collective masculine consciousness of humanity. The whole system is seeking rebalance; the system has become so hypermasculine that Shakti is going to rise at a collective universal level without us even recognizing it as such.

We’re poised for a shift in consciousness; humanity is evolving out of a “power over each other” kind of duality to a harmonized internal wholeness and unity. It will be a rising tide that lifts all boats.

In the next chapter, we take a closer look at the idea of wholeness.