Should We Slay Our Inner-Dragon?

I had fun colouring this mandala today as I was listening to Pema Chodron's CD "Walk the Walk". She was talking about learning to be gentle and kind with ourselves, because so many of us have such a harsh inner-critic inside. Sound familiar? She was also mentioning how important it is to learn to be alone with ourselves, to be still, so that we can observe our ego-mind, and see how it's at the root of our unhappiness and suffering. Now that I think about it, the colours I picked for the mandala remind me of a fire-spitting dragon, and from now on, I think that's how I'll picture the ego.

Most of us do just about anything we can to keep ourselves busy and distracted from our inner-tyrant. For many, sitting alone in stillness is pretty much the equivalent of torture. Why is that? Why is it so difficult and painful to face ourselves? Because we've become completely identified with our thoughts (which are predominantly negative) and our emotions. We believe that we ARE what we're thinking, we ARE what we're feeling, therefore when we sit there, and our dark, compulsive thoughts and feelings start to make our heads spin, we conclude that we must be bad, or very screwed up people.

Fundamentally, we're not bad or screwed up, we're just confused about our true identity. We're not the dragon, it just happens to have set up camp in our psyche. The way out of this nightmare is to face that dragon and to shed the light of consciousness onto it. We'll never be able to completely kill it off, but we can domesticate him. We can learn to observe it fearlessly, and it will gradually lose its power over us.

We're experts at either tip toeing around the dragon so that we don't wake him up, or keeping ourselves as far away from him as possible. In other words, we avoid our pain. It's understandable because our hectic, largely unconscious society encourages us to suppress a lot painful emotions in order to appear "functional" on the outside. Unfortunately, suppressed thoughts and emotions don't just vanish into thin air, they remain in our bodies and resurface over and over again until we are ready and able to heal them. When all our outside distractions dissolve, we are faced once again with our dragon, and these painful signals suddenly emerge from the core of our being.

A profound transformation happens when we realize that the dragon we were so terrified of was our friend, all along. He was simply trying to get our attention so that we could heal our wounds. He knew from the start that any pain we allow ourselves to feel (whether physical or emotional) is an indication of a part of us that wants to heal into consciousness. It takes great courage to face that pain, but if we can embrace it, understand it, love it and release it, we will break free from its shackles.

Warmly,

Lise
Health Coach / Reiki Master
www.lisevilleneuve.com