by Dr. Alberto Villoldo: The last and often most challenging step of the hero’s journey is bringing home your healing gifts, your ultimate boon…
You have journeyed far and long, have been tested and found worthy. You arrive home with your gifts, brimming with enthusiasm and ready to save the world. You know in your heart you have so much to give but find the world you returned to, the ordinary world you left behind, to be lackluster and seemingly unresponsive. What do you do?
Your first impulse may be to want to master your return and push and battle to have your gifts accepted. Holding on tightly to our new knowledge, we can become possessive and controlling. Once invested in an outcome, our egoic self takes over and can’t understand why we don’t have more client’s or why friends and family don’t seem to want to listen to us. We become frustrated and easily slip into feelings of hopelessness or unworthiness. This is the time to step back, take a deep breath, find your internal reference point, and act not from your ego, but your divinity.
Practicing non-attachment helps us to stop clinging to any outcome and surrender to the process. Rather than forcing our gifts on anyone, we allow them to grow and mature deep within us. Allowing our gifts to grow and mature, we let go and process all we have experienced on our journey. Instead of struggling and feeling frustrated, we allow ourselves to relax and explore our new and tender heart spaces. As we grow inwardly, refusing to be pulled into familiar patterns and dramas, our new state of being is reflected outwardly. Instead of seeking out others, we find we are the ones being sought.
It takes a leap of faith to wait with great patience for the next steps to be revealed. Perhaps we have had a lifetime of believing we are in charge. Instead of making things happen, we are being asked to cultivate and fertilize our inner garden. Rather than manipulating our outward circumstances we are asked to immerse ourselves in the flow of the universe and nurture the tender shoots of our new medicine. Waiting for opportunities to arrive is an embodiment of the practice of non-doing.
Non-doing means we chose to live in the light of love, creativity and possibility allowing things to unfold. We learn to surrender to the intelligence of the universe, trusting in its benevolence and abundance. We no longer are tempted to micromanage our lives because we know, at our very core, that we are in the hands of Spirit and that what is truly for us, will appear. We can be gentle with ourselves, believing in our own worth. We no longer need to shine the light, realizing that we are the light. What are you cultivating in your inner garden?
