Life Happens Where the Spears Clash

Most dreams vanish by breakfast. Others mysteriously linger.  An image that stayed with me for the last eighteen months was one of two Japanese warriors in traditional “Shogun” style armor jousting, one facing me wearing all white and holding a spear and lunging while throwing it at another warrior wearing all black.

It is curious that my imagination would take me to a culture very foreign to my own, yet one that displays myriad characteristics I find very appealing. The refined and understated aesthetics, the reverence for rituals, order, courage and mastery. The constant integration of mind, body and spirit imbued in every action. These are values that resonate across cultural and language barriers. This matters a great deal. Archetypes are universal. They live in every beating human heart and are not the purview of one specific culture.

As someone who values privacy, I am aware of how I have taken it to such heights that I have become hard to know. And hard to see too. What I carefully kept away from prying eyes is not all dark, but some of it is. A lot of it has to do with measuring up against perceived societal standards, or rather failing to measure up to these perceived societal standards. With that comes shame, because this is what it is, even if passing for its close cousin called perfectionism. 

The white samurai is calling time on the practice of hiding, forcing in the open this idea that the path forward, the path of the warrior, is exposure of what I called life.

The stark contrast between a white-clad warrior goading the one cloaked in black out of the shadow with his spear came to represent a part of me that was being forced into the open. The white warrior’s constant provoking forced the black one to engage and show its hand. As someone who deeply values privacy, I became aware of what this image was showing me.

The true focus of the image was not the shining white fighter, but the black one. The surprising realization that the treasure is not necessarily the "Light" but the "Shadow", that life and growth take place at the point of contact where their lances clash, pushing hard questions into the open.

My lived experience, warts, shame and all, is the curriculum. The black warrior is the teaching, the white warrior is the master. Neither of them is good nor bad. Both are necessary. They will butt heads at times. That too is necessary for growth. We call this disruption. The clash of the spears is the inescapable crucible we call life. Without engaging with it, we run the risk of either collapsing under the weight of the disruption or hardening us into unrecognizable versions of ourselves.

Coming to terms with revealing my struggles has been a turning point in my developmental journey towards wholeness, towards agency, towards inner authority reclaimed from outer authority. It led me to accept that the treasure is in the struggle, the seemingly mundane daily travails that follow the bigger shocks.

The battered warrior that I have become is more intentional today about her habits, rituals, routines, cadences. No grand gestures, no grand projects meant to dazzle. Simply leaning into my interests, what truly matters to me, and creating something of my own from it, fixed outcomes be damned. Yet having faith that somewhere, there is a tribe who will resonate and to whom I can be of service. Resonance replaces size as the defining metric.

Brené Brown said that the most potent antidote to shame is exposure. I understand that now, but it took a long time. Shame, hiding, the myriad of ways we hide our feelings, our ideas, our creativity, our genius, our authority in service of duty, responsibility, conformity, playing it safe, protection, approval and control.

These quandaries show up in our lives as unpleasant paradoxes. For that reason alone, we wish to keep them out of sight, a foolish attempt to make them go away, if only they would. The jousting white samurai forced them into the light, my first clue to seriously  revisit them with a more detached eye. An important relationship is a project. Failing at it does not make the parties failures. Failing at getting a coveted position, or being fired from one, even with cause is a failure. Being diagnosed with a chronic condition is a failure, of some sort. But here’s the key distinction: what we’re talking about is a failure of the system we came to rely upon. Systems are put in place to serve identities. When a system fails, the identity it supports takes a drubbing. Sometimes it never recovers, a sign that its time has come and passed because that no longer serves who we are becoming. By no means this makes us failures ever, but it demands that we ask ourselves hard questions. 

The Black Samurai does not have the answers to this question yet. But answering them demands a willingness to be seen. The reclusive warrior is reluctantly forced to bring them in the open for detached examination. I believe that the Black Samurai is not afraid of going to battle. It is afraid of being seen, not just for her shortcomings but mainly for her genius, no matter how presumptuous it may sound and unconventional it may be. This is the purpose of this dream. It started the arduous process of self-inquiry.

Who I was becoming demanded that, and slowly, I began to realize that perceived failures are identity-shattering events, necessary on the path of becoming.

This is what matters. This is what makes them unpleasant. The roles we cling to long after they've reached their expiration date. Title, role, partner, parent, daughter. Once stripped of our role, we are forced to engage in constructing new ones, more aligned with who our inner authority is shaping us into.

The answers don't necessarily appear when or where we would like to. It may be years before they do, and sometimes we need to actively inquire.

Other times, we need to just sit still and wait. I was fortunate to share my confused state with a mentor at the time, who gave me a priceless gem. He advised me to read, Eckert Tolle’s book Stillness Speaks. More importantly, he suggested that I sit still and do nothing for a month. The black samurai was still, the white was not. The black samurai was receiving, waiting, watching. The white samurai was busy, active, triggering, doing. The latter symbolized conscious intention, discipline and the force that demands growth. The former represented a more unconscious, unlived hidden and patient wisdom that cannot be rushed. The clash between the two was not about good and evil, but rather between two necessary modes of becoming.

This dual image marked a turning point in the direction of my self-inquiry and ultimately my life. One that led to turning my entire approach on its head asking:  “What if?” 

Every one of us carries two warriors inside. So I would like to leave you with fundamental questions to ponder at your own pace: 

What becomes possible once these cherished roles have disintegrated?

Which new ones could I try?

Who would I become in the process?

What kind of warrior am I now?

How does this manifest in my life?