The Heroine's Journey
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It's Lunar New Year's eve.
This year, I've got the wonderful chance to spend it into the country side. On the street, every house has a firewood burning in front just before midnight.
Not only is it a beautiful scene to watch in the midnight's cool breeze, it is also a ritual to remind people to keep their fire burning from one year to another. Fire to keep their lives warm, to protect, to shine brightly.
This wish for continuity at first may seem like a contrast with what I've reading & meditating on this solemnly provocative book, A Year to Live.
What would your life be like if you only have one year to live?
A powerful question, even more so if I can bring it into a real experiment. While I've been dabbling with meditation on death since six years ago for every birthday, this book is an invitation to go deeper.
At the first thought, the one-year-to-live for many people seems about crossing off items on bucket list, going after things that we always wanted to and quitting the things that no longer serve.
But it's not only so.
What's surprising for me when I contemplate on this one year to live is that I don't have that many things to complete or try.
For me, doing is only half, and the half that can wait. The other half that cannot wait is a longing to be wholesome and present.
Most importantly, it's the longing for these two to merge, the doing and being, so that there is little difference between what we do and who we are. I don't know why in the world did that split happen, but I know for sure I want to merge such split.
Like this line from a Rumi's poem.
"Let the beauty you love be what you do"
The book A Year To Live offers a beautiful question, one to share with you as a closing thought and an invitation to keep this dual focus on both doing and being.
What is the work to be completed and the hearts to be touched?
The Heroine's Journey
The quest for intimacy
If I were to have only one year to live, one of the "work to be done" & "hearts to be touched" will be on intimate relationship, particularly experiencing it fully and thus understanding this quintessential human experience.
How to Get Rid of Him - a manual I found in a book called "The Sensuous Woman" - an interesting, somewhat perverted perspective on this topic of relationship...
My last post about the framing “relationship as a crucible for the healing of each other” has struck a few chords with people. It makes me ask a simple question: Who needs this crucible?
The answer is not everyone. Clearly, some people don’t need it or choose not to. As an extreme example, some join monastic communities since they were teens. Closer to home, my mother stayed as a widow for more than twenty years before becoming a nun.
Each of us has to ask ourselves that question too. We cannot default to the societal answer “Oh you are at this age so you need to find someone” or even the scientific answer “We are social creatures wired for bonding”. The answer has to be personal, relevant and compelling. This leads to a few other questions.
What is the role of an intimate relationship in the development of a person? What maybe the larger context? If we use the metaphor “life as a journey”, then what kind of journey is our intimate relationship?
The natural answer is the archetypal Hero’s Journey. The crucible is the underworld portion of the hero’s journey where the hero faces the dragons, mostly in his own inner psyche.
The traditional masculine version of this is often applied to life, career and even spiritual journey. Roughly speaking, after hearing the call to adventure, the hero leaves the familiar home base to enter an unknown treacherous underworld where he is tried by many challenges, meets mentors, slays the dragon to obtain an invaluable treasure. Then he returns to his familiar world to pass on the gift he has won, be it skills, wisdom or healing. The ending is a form of mastery and service.
The Buddha’s enlightenment is one such story, so is countless adventures in movies & folklore. There are many heroine women stories too such as from Mulan to the modern day women empowerment movement.
What might be the feminine version then? Jordan Peterson has an insightful answer in this podcast (minute 24). It is to some degree the story of Beauty and the Beast, where the feminine (Beauty) encounters with the monstrous masculine (the Beast), tames and civilizes it so that a joint relationship can be established. The ending is is long term intimacy, togetherness, communion, maybe a family.
Each of us, regardless of our sex, has elements of both archetypes. One example of a feminine version with a man instead of a woman as the heroine is the documentary Crumb. In this, the main character Robert faces a rather hostile and critical of men Aline, a classic example of femininity gone astray. He then has to steel up, face her continuous rejections and develop his characters until he can free Aline from the judgmental feminine archetype. This story, surprising enough, resonate with many relationships I’ve seen.
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David Richo’s How To Be An Adult in Relationship offers a beautiful synthesis. Despite the silly sounding title, it is packed with insights and compassion for the heroine journey ahead.
This is what I wish someone could tell me at the beginning of my young adult life: “Dear son, love is indeed a journey from aloneness through closeness and opposition into communion.” Because many of the challenges in adult relationships come from family experiences, our parents are often inapt to tell us such.
“Relationships likewise begin by leaving the family, the familiar; passing through a series of conflicts in unknown territory; and returning to one’s full self, but this time within a committed partnership.” Since childhood needs turn out to be the same needs we have in adult intimacy, the journey takes us back to where we began, but without the fear of loneliness that initially drove us to leave home.
Romance, conflict and commitment — three phases of the journey
David Richo goes into details of each phase in the book.
Romance is no doubt one of the highlights of the human experience. The saying “Love is blind” is quintessential romance. However blind, we are being seen in our full potential for lovableness. It’s as real as the sunset, and just as temporary.
Romance is the real heroine’s call to adventure in progressively riskier self-disclosure, which is a bit more than putting attractive profile pictures on Tinder.
It’s quite telling to realize that romance hasn’t been my thing, despite the occasional flings here and there. Maybe I’ve ignored or refused the call to adventure. Maybe I’m afraid to fall. Or maybe it’s conscious choosing. To use a crude analogy, experiencing erection doesn’t mean having to release…
Struggle & conflict is the part is of most interest for people, since we often only look for help when we aren’t doing well. At this struggle phase, the closeness resulting from the irresistible romance now reveals its flip side as well: conflict and opposition.
A lot of self- and other-understanding work is needed here, as plenty of ugly shadows we didn’t know about ourselves and the other person now presently themselves squarely in our faces. We learn about our ego and what drives it crazy, about our style of relating, our unique fears, deficiencies and also potentials. Issues with insecurity, jealousy, infidelity are also dealt with.
There comes the inevitable question, one that all of us will or have already faced: the ending.
There seems to be no better way to learn what a relationship is really about than to see how it ends and how we are in the ending. All relationships end — some with separation, some with divorce, some with death. This means that in entering a relationship we implicitly accept that the other will leave us or we will leave him.
This reminds me of a my first “real” relationship I had in high school, which lasted for three months. Back then, I was consumed with this question that sounded both silly and valid: “What’s the point of being in a relationship if it leads to nowhere?” I was too serious, but my younger self did have a point.
The relationship ended somewhat painfully with me withdrawing from partly feeling suffocated and mostly pointless. The precious lesson is that being too obsessed with the ending is a recipe for disaster. On another hand, ignoring it to “just love” is also too reckless. The question then is “How might we stay aware of the inevitable ending and learn to appreciate the present moment?” Pretty darn Zen for an exhausted high school boy, I know.
It’s not easy. All the relating skills, psychological insights and even mindfulness practices we do may not be able to help us during the thick madness of things. What’s wrong with them
All bets are off when someone has hurt us. In such utter bereftness the ego confronts its true face: frustrated, scared, caught in a painful attachment, powerless to alter what others may be doing to us. The hero arriving at such a threshold can only say, “This must be the place [where I’ll die]!”
What happens here then? Is breaking up a failed hero’s journey?
No. It’s part of it. David Richo again:
The risky move is also the only reasonable option for us: to let go completely. This requires enormous discipline because the ego wants to assert itself and regain its power. We now see why breaking up is part of the struggle phase of the heroic journey.
What’s on the way is the way. Nearing the end of previous relationship, I noticed how much my ego was clinging for a happy future of friendship, an outcome that was out of its control. Yet behind that clinging was a genuine aspiration: the ending could be a beautiful invitation for us to become more wholesome, aware and loving person.
The hardest thing is to do what needs to be done while both holding onto that aspiration and letting go of a specific outcome. Let the chips fall where they may, and keep the remaining pieces as building blocks for whatever comes next.
Together, we came to a conclusion that the best course of action is one that allows both of us to bring forth love, kindness and compassion. It helps, especially in ugly moments of rupture, to take a bird eyes’ perspective on what is happening and witness the two people genuinely leaning in and struggling together as part of the heroine’s journey. If we can reframe the question from “What’s wrong with you, with me and with us?” to “How might we make sense of what’s happening?”, we can bring much dignity and tenderness to this otherwise disruptive process.
For a ego like mine that was so used to giving in, the lesson it needed to learn was to take charge, to stand assertively while still staying connected with the other person. Sometimes the struggle ends not with a committed partnership with another person but only a more wholesome sense of self.
The ego is shaken, perhaps broken and re-assembled into a proper alignment. It’s no longer a slave nor a master but a good friend and supportive partner of the larger Self — the innate eternal goodness we are all born with.
Read the full post here on Medium.
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Quotes I'm contemplating this week
"Once you see what the heart really needs, it doesn't matter if you are going to live or die, the work is always the same" - Stephen Levine in A Year To Live
The work is always the same - let the beauty we love be what we do indeed.
"Fear will not mean “stop,” but only “proceed with pluck and with support from others.” - David Richo, in How to be an Adult in Relationship
Great, gentle reframing, much better than the macho "let's be fearless" ethos.
Lastly..
My new temporary colleague who flies on the desk. It's always good to befriend this creature :-)
Khuyen
P/s: Let's have a conversations about life if you are feeling stuck. I'd love to be helpful.