Happy New Year: Let’s talk “Riding the Dragon”
Today is the Lunar New Year, aka Chinese New Year and it is, in the Chinese Zodiac, the Year of the Dragon. While the Dragon of the Zodiac carries its own symbolic meanings (good luck, power, prosperity to name a very few) the benevolent dragon appears early and often throughout the tales and myths of ancient China.
This stands in contrast to the dominant Western dragon myth that re-emerged and fully evolved in medieval times. This is the myth of “slaying the dragon”. This myth is an essential component of the hero’s quest, its own myth, which to this day deeply impacts our modern psyche and culture. It is said and believed, that as we travel the world (inner or outer) we will meet dragons. When confronted with a dragon, to become a hero, we must slay it. If we flee the dragon we have somehow failed or perhaps “survived” to fight another day. When we are immersed in this myth within our interior world, our emotional experiences such as anger or fear are perceived as dragons to be defeated.
The mythology of ancient China and many pre-historic wisdom traditions provide a different "way" to relate to our dragons. In this “way,” we ride the dragon, instead of slaying the dragon. This is in part due to the way time is experienced in these cultures. When we experience time cyclically as opposed to linearly a question appears, "What time is it when the dragon appears?' Dragon time! When the dragon shows up and the dragon is the anger dragon, it’s anger dragon time! To ride our anger dragon we get on and go for the ride. When we embrace time this way we qualitatively learn how to live in that time, as opposed to trying to slay it all the time. With all the time we spend in anger time, we should all be pretty damn good at it! But we’ve been busy, utilizing tremendous amounts of energy, trying to slay anger or flee anger, instead of learning to ride it.
When we become fearful, we encounter the fear dragon. We are taught to "overcome our fears" to metaphorically slay our fear dragons. If you lay this out in a linear time experience it plays out as “Now I’m fearful and I don’t want to be fearful, what can I do to overcome and defeat this fear so that a half-hour from now or an hour from now or two days from now I may not be fearful.” As opposed to, “At this moment in time, I’m in fearful time.” It would be a completely different kind of experience, a different "time".
When we embrace fear, express and process our fear, and ride the fear dragon, we learn how to do fear-time. If we constantly battle fear time, we never learn how to ride the fear dragon.
We tend to think about fear in its extreme pathological sense because we put it into this straight timeline. Fear is not just about being excessively fearful or terrified. Fear is a beautiful, wonderful thing. It’s a very, very important survival mechanism. Without fear, we couldn’t survive. Generally when we are experiencing fear we are experiencing excess fear. And when we say excess we don’t necessarily mean quantitatively excess but qualitatively excess. Crude fear instead of misty, crystal fear. The kind of fear that’s delicious and nourishes us, that enables us to go deep within and contemplate and make good decisions. The fear that connects us deeply to the universal vibration. That can be fear time as well. But we’ve been living our lives with a superimposed and calcified linear timeframe. We’ve all ingested and manifested a worldview that tells us to "slay the fear dragon" or run from it as fast as possible. But something else is possible. We can climb aboard this mythic dragon as well. We can ride the “slay the dragon” myth that lives within us and see where that beautiful ride will take us.
Whatever the emotional “dragon” one is dealing with there are specific practices that one can engage in to “ride the dragon”. These cultivation practices allow us to identify the habituated patterns of response that we manifest as we move through the world and have the world move through us. Once identified these responses, when tended to with a kind curiosity, begin to dissolve and liberate us from the self-imposed shackles of mind and body.
The simple act of changing the language from ‘slaying’ to ‘riding’ the dragon changes the entire experience. Killing or being killed is worlds away from riding the landscape together in a shared journey. As I read this, I realized how deeply ingrained is the idea that I had to conquer my fear or anger when the truth is more (and less) complicated. Invite it to the party, ask those feelings to dance with us rather than doubling down on internal conflict.
:)