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Learn to recognize and protect yourself from the People Who Play God.
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Text and Artwork:
Copyright © 2007 Beth E Peterson. All rights reserved.
Hero-hood is something we all have innately; it is how we see ourselves in relationship to the rest of the world, even when we feel like a hero beleaguered. Even so, we almost never have consciously thought of ourselves as heroes. When we do, however, magic can happen.
When we become conscious of ourselves as heroes, we can open doors into our own — and other people's — behavior. Suddenly, we can see how our drive toward our own individual form of hero-hood impacts us. We can bring that drive into full awareness. We can now plan how we want to fulfill our needs in the best way possible.
The first step is to figure out what kind of hero you are. Think over the last week or month. What did you do or accomplish that made you feel really good about yourself — that boosted your sense of self-worth? Write down everything that comes to mind. Now, let's go toward the same point from a different direction. Think about when you were in conflict with someone and how you usually react when in conflict. What do you end up telling yourself about the other person? Do you mutter inside yourself that they are dumb, or perhaps that they are mean, or maybe you stew on what a whimp they are.
These are all leads to help you track down what you build your own sense of self-worth on... what you base your own type of hero-hood upon. Do you mainly fit within the archetypes of the Strongman? The Scholar? The Saint? Are you a combination hero, such as the Paladin, who bases their hero-hood and self-worth on being the good (Saint) protector (Strongman) of those in need?
Find out more about the the different types of Heroes here. Which one are you?
As you discover what the fundament of your self-worth and hero-hood are based on, you can also begin to branch outward, discovering who you are as an emotional being, an imaginative one, a thoughtful one, how you process and perceive your memories, what motivates you into action, how you express yourself to others, and how your physical body affects the rest of you.
As you discover more and bring it into your awareness, you will become much more aware of yourself. You will discover what it is that gives life meaning to you. You will be able to slow and hopefully stop the habits we all fall into without knowing it that disrupt our own needs, as well as the needs of others around us. And as an added bonus, the more we understand about all the aspects of ourself, the better equipped we become to understand others.
Becoming conscious of ourselves — knowing the "who" of who we are — is also the key to truly being able to be self-determined. Without such in-depth and intimate knowledge and understanding of ourself, we will often end up doing things and making decisions, sometimes life-changing ones, that are not really what we want or need. Without such self-knowledge, we are also much more easily swayed by other people's influence and, yes, manipulation.
The Conscious Hero makes a choice. They choose to enter the darkest cavern, delve to the deepest depths, explore each nook and cranny (even the unpleasant ones), until they are firmly the lord of their realm, King or Queen of their domain. This actually is what the myth cycles of the Hero's Journey are all about. We just never realized that we, each and every one of us, is the Hero and our lives are the Journey. We can either stumble our way through, as some unfortunate heroes of myth have done, or we can heed that we are on a Path and deliberately decide on our next steps.