Becoming the Master of Self

The Sword in the Stone…

I’ve been thinking a bit about transformation and change lately. The other night a thought sprung into my slightly muddied mind. I had been pondering about the impending chemotherapy in a week’s time and of what will happen inside me.

A sudden vision of the duel in T.H.White’s ‘The Sword and the Stone’ popped into my conscious mind. The duel is between Merlin and Madame Mimm, he the mentor of the young and still unaware Arthur and she the Wicked Sorceress, a child stealing and thoroughly un-nice person out to eat the young boy.

The duel is all about power and the ability to change quickly, adapting to the present situation.
They metamorphose into different creatures, she a cat, he becomes a dog, each one besting the other.

It is a battle of wills and of inspiration because eventually Merlin becomes a microscopic bacterium and infects her while she is in the form of a dragon, her most powerful and intimidating form.

Very David and Goliath, if you like the biblical metaphor; because of course Merlin has won. By being very small and very clever he won the day and Arthur’s freedom.

The whole book is about the metamorphoses of a boy into a King; the journey from servant to master.

Each stage of his teaching he is ‘shape shifted’ into different animals so he may experience the world the way it is for each on in its own habitat walking a mile in the shoes of each one. Every lesson is a story and every story has wisdom dressed in metaphor.
Because he is so young perhaps, the boy accepts the magic quite happily and with each successive transformation the donning of the ‘shape’ becomes easier. The lessons are more accessible as the procedure gets into the muscle of the boy.

Eventually all the lessons will have a muscle memory, so that when the King requires an answer to a problem the muscle will flex and release the energy of the boy’s memory for that problem.

Accumulative knowledge is something we do not notice. We become good at something – it gets into the muscle of our memory and becomes an automatic process, available at our finger tips without so much as a thought process to prove itself.

It is strategy, and it is what we learn from conception onwards.

These days though sometimes we forget that we can do amazing things. Sometimes we will be reminded and if we are open enough to the idea of there being a muscle there to flex, then sometimes we will remind ourselves how to deal with the Madam Mimm’s of our lives.

We can shift our consciousness to become small and to enter within our selves and fight the dis – ease inside with all the magic we can muster.
We are learning machines; we just have to be taught a different lesson sometimes.

We all know something we do not know we know yet (Milton Erickson) and we need to be reminded occasionally.

Who knows, with the right learning and the flexing of the right muscle maybe we too can pull a sword from a stone.

To help someone pull a sword from their stone go to the just giving page and help us to help Macmillan cancer support.

Perspective

Umpire’s eye

I have no idea what to do. It seems that the more you give advice, the deeper the hole you dig. So why give advice at all?
Interesting question; advice is given normally because it is sought. Should the seeker ignore the advice and things go awry, how do they choose to heap all the blame on the giver?
How do seekers choose advisors? Do they perceive that the advisor is sorted, and has life and all it’s vagaries under their complete control? Is this what they want to emulate – a perception of control?
If this is so... seeker it may be ignored.
Why then continue to ask for advice?
Why then continue to give it?
From the lofty heights of the Umpire’s Chair great perspective can be gleaned. It’s a long way up and so things that are happening at baseline level may be missed and if you have no other recourse then the Umpire has the last word.
It is a long way up, how did the Umpire get to be there? Someone chose them for the job.
The more information we have the more choice we may have.
But, only if we ask the right and pertinent questions.