Be the hero of your own story

The CNN Heroes special on TV just ended, with Anuradha Koirala, founder of Maiti Nepal a shelter for rescued girls sold into sex slavery and activist against human trafficking, being awarded CNN Hero of the Year.

Which is to say that, as I write this piece, I am still red-nosed and swollen-eyed from having wept throughout Demi Moore’s emotional introduction of Ms. Koirala, the video presentation of the shelter and of the rescued young girls, and the announcement that she and her cause had won the most votes/supporters from all over the world.

While heroic acts like the ones exhibited by Anuradha Koirala and the rest of the CNN Heroes are, indeed, moving, I am aware that they can also be daunting and alienating. Watching these heroes honored on our TV screens can easily feed the illusion the cop-out thinking, if you will that heroism is for others to do, that it’s for those people with exotic names shaking Anderson Cooper’s hand, that it’s not for us sitting comfortably on our living room couches. In other words, watching others do extraordinary things can oftentimes lead to the self-defeating and poisonous “That’s great … but I can’t be like them.”

That kind of thinking is real; it is, unfortunately, how a lot of people’s brains tend to be wired. Since we are what we think that is, our choices, our actions and, thus, our character are shaped by our thoughts to believe ourselves incapable of doing extraordinary things is to be exactly that.

Which makes the work of psychotherapists, life coaches, and self-development workshop facilitators people who deal with the mind nothing short of heroic. These people help us confront our thoughts especially the poisonous, self-defeating variety with the purpose of slowly transforming them. They help us expand our minds in order to make space for the idea that the qualities of that ideal character, The Hero, are present in everyone and that these are qualities we can tap into. Short of connecting us to a metallic briefcase with wires and injecting our mind with an idea that “will spread like a virus” and influence our actions, the way Leonardo Di Caprio’s character does in the film Inception.

The Carl Jung Circle Center (jungphilippines@yahoo.com), for instance, an organization founded by four Jungian psychotherapists (therapists who practice psychology precepts introduced by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung), gives an excellent seminar workshop called “Awakening the Hero Within” at the Ateneo in Rockwell, Makati. The title of the workshop implies that the extraordinary, rather fabled, character is actually lying dormant within us, simply awaiting some action from us to make it come alive.

The concept that individuals are really all heroes-in-the-making is apparently universal cutting through religious, ethnic, social, economic, and gender divisions as the American mythologist Joseph Campbell discovered. He then codified the steps towards becoming a hero known as The Hero’s Journey proposing it as a template for how to live a full life. Author Paulo Coelho calls this “the journey each and everyone of us must undertake if we want to live a life that justifies our existence.”

I learned about the Hero’s Journey sometime in my mid-20s, perhaps because it was the point where my life needed some serious justification … and my brain, some major rewiring. Rose Yenko, one of the workshop facilitators and a practicing psychotherapist, has an explanation for that. “When one keeps on just going and going in one’s life following social scripts and expectations, one can hit a stage where one asks ‘Is this all there is to life? Is this my path? Is this my destiny?’” Questions that were, admittedly, fogging my brain at that time and keeping me from coming up with the brilliant copy that my boss had promised our clients.

This, then, is the beginning of the Hero’s Journey, which is marked by three major stages/phases: The Departure, when the future hero leaves everything that is familiar to her and embarks on an adventure; The Initiation, where she begins to experience the difficulty of her chosen path and is tried to almost breaking point; The Return, when the hero starts to make her way back to the place she had left, bringing with her all the wisdom she had learned along the way and sharing it with the folks back home.

The journey, Rose Yenko says, can be outward “causes and social concerns, travel, change of residence, careers, exploration of new fields, new friends, new interests, etc.” Or it can be inward a person starts to “reflect on what really matters, becomes curious about one’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs.”

The journey’s final step called the Freedom to Live is its ultimate pay-off. “Mastery” and I am lifting this straight off Paulo Coelho’s blog because he writes it perfectly “leads to freedom from the fear of death, which in turn is the freedom to live. This is sometimes referred to as living in the moment, neither anticipating the future nor regretting the past.”

Another excellent workshop that teaches how to be a real hero how to be a person who lives in the moment is called “Ugnayan Sa Kalikasan: Awakening the Power Within,” given by InterSelf Foundation (www.interselfph.net), which is run by the husband and wife team of Frank and Riza Regis. Once again, it is a workshop that seeks to stir something lying dormant within us the very telling quality of the hero: power.

Held at the foot of mystical Mt. Banahaw “a natural power spot,” says Frank Regis in Dolores, Quezon, the weekend workshops aim to help participants answer the big, scary question “Who am I?” as it is “the key,” Riza says, “to everything in life, whether it is healing or manifestation of what one wants.” The foundation’s vision, she says, “is world transformation which happens through self-transformation.” 

Mt. Banahaw, it seems, is the perfect setting for encouraging or awakening such a transformation. “‘Ugnayan’ means connecting,” Riza says, “‘Kalikasan’ means nature connecting to the nature within and each other, and to the nature outside (air, water, wind, earth, trees, etc.). What better place to do [all that connecting] than on a mountain with rivers and waterfalls and all the elements?” Plus, Frank says, “Our programs have always emphasized learning through experience. Banahaw, truly, is an experience; and with experience comes” that other telling hero quality “true wisdom.”

In the end, “awakening the hero/power within us” means becoming those awesome, excellent, powerful, heroic people we admire so much. It is to recognize that the qualities we see in them are exactly the qualities we have in us, so that we can stop looking out there for the answers and, instead, begin to look within ourselves. It means rewriting the fairytale that would have us believe that we are powerless, helpless victims of some curse and that someone out there was galloping towards us on a white horse to rescue us, to lift the curse. It means not waiting for another Rizal, another Ninoy, another Cory or, indeed, another Pacquiao to free ourselves, to make our lives better, to make us walk with pride and dignity. It means donning the hero costume, getting on that white horse and beginning the heroic act of rescuing ourselves from, for starters, our small thinking. (Then who knows who else we will manage to rescue.)

It means watching another individual do things without fear of the future or regret for the past and never having to say, “That’s great … but I can’t be like that.”

I shall end this post-CNN Heroes TV special (and crying jag) rumination-turned-full-blown piece with a Timberland print ad copy that I read years ago and have never quite forgotten: “When we look at the statue of someone great, we think they’ve got something we don’t. We are trained to think that only a tiny percentage of us has the stuff it takes to be a hero. Not many of us will cure any diseases or slay any dragons, but every one of us, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US, is called to be a king, a queen, a hero in our ordinary lives. We don’t build statues to worship the exceptional life, we build them to remind ourselves what is POSSIBLE in our own.”