copyright Bela Johnson, published in The Maine Eagle, January 2001

When is the New Year? By our calendar, it's January 1. Back before we had calendars, it was the first day of Spring. According to the Chinese calendar, however, it is in February. And since last February 5, we have been moving through the Year of the White Metal Dragon, the first in over sixty years. Any Dragon year is intense. It can be full of change and potential strife as we are challenged to release material things as well as concepts and even emotional baggage which no longer serve our ultimate potential as human beings. It is yang (masculine in our culture), fiery and confrontational. As we wind down this dragon year during the month of January, we can feel the shakedown if we are attuned to it. And as with all of life's cycles, we can flow along with the changes it facilitates or we can resist.

In her book THE HERO WITHIN, Dr. Carol Pearson states, "Heroes take journeys, confront dragons, and discover the treasure of their true selves ... People who are discouraged from slaying dragons internalize the urge and slay themselves." She believes the fiery Warrior is an important facet of the Hero, but that it has been distorted in our culture. Usually reserved for (white) men, this distorted Warrior has cast women in the role of "witches to be slain" or "princesses who ... serve as the hero's reward." This has damaged men who become trapped in the myth and fail to develop their more caring, compassionate nature. It has immobilized women who do not speak their truth for fear of castigation. We all want to be loved. We all want acceptance. Yet there comes a time in all our lives when we are faced with a decision: do we continue along as we have been taught, or do we embrace the innate gifts and challenges that are uniquely our own? Do we remain immobilized by our fear of rejection, or do we take the Hero's journey? And if we decide to embark, how do we go about it?

There are many resources available to guide us into personal transformation, these days. From Mary Murray Shelton's GUIDANCE FROM THE DARKNESS to an old standby, Dan Millman's WAY OF THE PEACEFUL WARRIOR; Louise Hay's YOU CAN HEAL YOUR LIFE to Mehl-Madrona's COYOTE MEDICINE, we can explore different ways of looking at our world. Heidegger's philosophical look at how we are shaped by our culture can provide insights and J.T.F. Bugental's SEARCH FOR AUTHENTICITY can give us a humanistic as well as academically sound foundation for our journey. And though many books will face us with questions, few in this genre are designed at converting anyone to a particular belief system. Instead, they are meant to augment and enhance what we already know about ourselves and our relationship to others and our world.

While it is perhaps human to fear change, we never stop growing. It takes great courage to face the fire of transformation. To look honestly at ourselves and dare to discover what lies beneath the conditioning and hype of our existence can be daunting. Others around us can feel threatened by our explorations and emergent voices and, when confronted in this way with their own fallibility, might seek to discredit us. We are constantly challenged to ferret out what is real for us, and to stand by it. And one of the challenges here is to APPLY our knowledge rather than to fall into merely spewing rhetoric. What this means is that we may tend to clutter our heads with INFORMATION yet fail to make time for INTEGRATION (i.e. daily practice and self encounter/examination to determine if we are succeeding with our own personal transformation). It is easy to enter into encounters with others with an air of competition, making who is RIGHT more important than the sharing of new insights and concepts. Again, this competitive striving is innate to the individualist culture we have been raised in, versus the collectivist culture of, say, the Native Americans. Most of us have been raised to look for a leader rather than to acknowledge and share our own inner sense of power. When we practice daily prayer and/or meditation along with allowing ourselves to embrace the fiery process of transformation, we combine our INTENTIONS with an openness and willingness to understand one another better. Thus we begin to enter into right relationship with the element of fire, a most powerful teacher.