In Shamanism, we all have a story and we also always have four virtues the story should comply with as best as possible. The virtues are linked to the four cardinal directions in the compass:
- East = Wisdom: This is solely based on your personal life experiences
- South = Courage: This is the courage to admit you may be wrong
- West = Harmony: Choosing to live and be happy with enough (no more, no less)
- North = Justice: All events and situations are justified because of the previous three virtues
It is easy to adopt a victim role in your story. Who you are today may be the result of something that happened long ago because someone did you wrong. You may have been promised an outcome and they never came through. Maybe an unexpected situation (usually tragic) happened and it completely derailed the perfect life you were meant to have. I could go on and on. The point for me as a Shaman is that when I hear this in any story, the main character, lacks courage.
This doesn’t mean you are a coward, although I have used that word in the past. It means, your power across time and space has been granted to something or someone else. It doesn’t matter what happened, the moment you assume complete ownership of the outcome and re-write the story, your full soul power activates for you to forge on. It takes great courage to admit that a few decades back you were lazy, disorganized, ungrateful, greedy, jealous, weak, selfish, scared, conniving, arrogant, immature, inconsiderate, etc. I have yet to meet someone that hasn’t been one of the above or a variation of one at some point in their life. We shamans, don’t see courage as something related to a hero. It’s far more familiar to us, we see it as an intrinsic component of everyday healthy living.
In our aggressively global society the word “failure” is such a taboo. Just think of world leaders when they make a mistake and the admirable creative rhetoric they go through to avoid this word or its undeniable factuality (sadly in their fields of existence, the lack of courage is still tolerated). For the evolved human admitting failure represents great courage, expansion and clarity. It immediately, frees you from an imaginary external power and at the same time it disarms energetic bonds from the past and possible ones in the future.
An amazing thing happens when you edit your story with failures included in them. As time progresses, those difficult moments from the past become allies that provide you amazing wisdom and harmony in your purpose. With time, not only do you learn to love your story but you develop the wisdom to recognize when you can avoid a pitfall or are in the middle of one and how to deal with it. The sense of helplessness in no longer there and is fully replaced by a sense of courage, empowerment and even adventure!
Shaman Flavio 