GET YOUR GUIDING MYTH * 
by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D. , www.schooloftantra.net

(Excerpt from Heighten Your Holos: Get More From Grof's Holotropic Breathwork)

Process pain to its uplifting inner myth. Perceive the patterns pain pinpoints for you to improve. Pain, processed, propels progress--yours and humanity's.

Grasp the bigger picture; rise above the particulars you experienced. Pain punctures your complacency so you can prune your patterns. Let wounding waken you.

In the rite below, tell the tale of your torment like a legend. Symbols and metaphors turn trauma to transformation. Sacred saga stimulates spiritual ascent.

Relive major emotional hurts in your life, how you suffered from conception till now. 

Recall when the womb, birth, illness or accident hurt you. 

Review times someone invaded, abused, raped, tortured or robbed you. 

Feel again when you lost trust, job, home, status, fortune, marriage, family, sanity, self-esteem, loved ones.

See the effects--good and bad--of each injury. 

What did you want in each situation? Find the motifs threaded through them.

Retell the history of your hurts again as a hero-myth (see chart below).

Instead of saying "I," speak of a mystical child, god, animal, plant, another person or being on another planet. 

Include a call to adventure, guides, ordeal, reward, maturity-gain. Start with, "Once upon a time ..."

Forgive the people and forces who hurt or betrayed you.

Resolve the story in way that helps the hero and the world.

Fathom the moral of the fable, the purpose of the pain.

Next time you hurt, make it epic. Evoke an archetypal pattern that gives your personal loss meaning: growth for you, your group and the globe.

* Houston, J., The Search for the Beloved, Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1987.
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