The Accidental Shaman: Journeys with Plant Teachers and Other Spirit Allies - Howard G. Charing 2017

The Soul Warrior
Energy Medicine: Exploring the Human Energy Field

A soul warrior is any man or woman who has come to the realization that the conflict between heart and mind, between happiness and misery, lies within. Soul warriors do not project their inner turmoil onto the outer world or onto others. They know that it is from our dreams, our conscious or unconscious beliefs, that we create the world “out there.” Many of us linguistically associate the term warrior with fighting or a soldier in battles and wars. For a shaman, the term has a totally different meaning.

Warriors are fully engaged with life and give their 100 percent maximum best, and then if they do not succeed, they are at peace with this outcome; they have done their best. They neither delude nor betray themselves with half-hearted actions or choices.

Warriors are at peace with ambiguity; they know that clarity is the enemy of wisdom and that confusion is a higher form of consciousness, a place where change must happen.

Warriors have learned never to judge another, as they know this says more about the warrior than about the one who is being judged.

Warriors knows that there is no such thing as an objective sacred. Either everything is sacred or nothing is sacred.

Warriors are ultimately creators, not destroyers.

Warriors accept responsibility for their actions and do not blame others for failure.

Warriors know that all of life is a rite of passage.

Warriors know that if they have to say they are warriors, then they are not.

Warriors do not ask, “Who am I?” They know that this is completely irrelevant. The question they may ask is “Where am I?”

The Dalai Lama remains an ever-present inspirational force in my life and an embodiment of the qualities of forgiveness, compassion, and peace. He is in effect a true soul warrior. At the end of a talk he gave in Los Angeles a few years ago, someone from the audience asked him, “Why didn’t you fight back against the Chinese?”

The Dalai Lama looked down, swung his feet just a bit, then looked back up at us and said with a gentle smile, “Well, war is obsolete you know.” Then, after a few moments, his face grave, he said, “Of course the mind can rationalize fighting back . . . but the heart, the heart would never understand. Then you would be divided in yourself, the heart and the mind, and the war would be inside you.”

We hear or read of anecdotal stories in which people “feel” the presence of another person with them, or for some reason become obsessed with someone, or are unable to shake off the feeling of being watched or pursued. Some of you may have also had such experiences, and it is difficult to share them with friends or family for fear of ridicule or of having your feelings dismissed.

These situations are perceivable within the human energy body. In my experience, two reasons may be the cause.

When someone’s emotions, such as anger, have been suppressed, these feelings are not expressed but are still present. The person may be unwilling or unable to cope with the pain or grief, or may harbor anger, hurt, and resentment for a husband, wife, parent, or partner. Intense, passionate, unexpressed emotions from the human energy field detach and can take on a life of their own. The frequency of this subfield resonates with a similar frequency, and this generates the link to another’s field. When this occurs a person can sense a presence around him or her.

This autonomous subfield can have a malignant influence on people, and although they may not be consciously aware of it, it may leak out in some way. You may know people who on the surface are amiable but on occasion and seemingly out of character utter vicious, hurtful, and spiteful comments and act unpleasantly. Sometimes people’s awareness becomes chronically detached from their dark feelings, and the autonomous subfield feels sinister and threatening. People may perceive this as an external entity, a psychic attack, or an evil spirit. When I see clients who have detached from their unacceptable feelings and experience themselves under pressure from this external force, it is critical to bring them into an awareness that they are sensing their own emotions. By going back to the source, that is, the event where this separation happened, they find the opportunity for acceptance, without self-judgment, and for eventual integration and healing.

From time to time I experience a variant of this, when people deny their inner darkness, or shadow, and adopt a spiritual persona as a way to evade their shadow. These “spiritual” individuals can make quite unpleasant comments, and when challenged, the fallback response is along the lines of “How could I do that? I have dedicated my entire life to the light.” This is a sort of guru disengagement strategy. Do you know anyone like this?

Back in the days before the World Wide Web, I used to read old-fashioned newsletters printed on paper delivered in the mail. In such a newsletter from an organization of lightworkers, the first page was about their aspirations to spread light, love, and compassion on Earth as a spiritual sacred mission. However, on the second page, their virtuous tone dramatically changed as they ripped into, admonished, and ferociously castigated a different organization of lightworkers for the offense . . . wait for it . . . “of using the wrong type of light”!

To quote Jung on the concept of the shadow: “Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”¹

I know it’s a silly idea and will never take off and fly, but maybe for the fun of it we should turn the notion around and consider calling those striving to reach an enlightened state of consciousness not light-workers, but darkworkers.