Becoming A Warrior For Love
Making positive impact from trust, openness, and animistic relationship with the Earth
Embody Your Light is a newsletter written by Brooks Barron exploring how to come fully alive and build a more beautiful world from a place of alignment, presence and peace. Join the adventure:
The title of this post was inspired by my friend and colleague Rebecca Wildbear, whose phenomenal new book Wild Yoga ends with a chapter titled Become A Love Warrior For The Earth.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been deeply motivated to make a positive impact. During early childhood, I remember my father sharing with me his wise and aspirational philosophy of life: Find and follow the intersection between what you love and what the world needs. I took those words to heart — and then some.
My favorite book as a kid, Miss Rumphius, delivered this same message. After adventuring and traveling around the world, Miss Rumphius returns to her hometown and spreads the seeds of lupine. Lupine has always been one of my favorite flowers — during summers in the Colorado high country, my siblings and I would gleefully play a game we called “leaping through the lupine.” You can imagine what that looked like!
Miss Rumphius’ efforts are so successful that before long, her whole town is covered in lupine. She is beloved for this, earning the affectionate nickname “The Lupine Lady.” The moral of the story is the message that Miss Rumphius inherited from her grandfather and then passes along to the young kids in the village as an elder: “You must do something to make the world a little more beautiful.”
I love that message. It hits something deep in my heart — some innate knowing that, as human beings, our souls are each called to this life to offer some unique contribution to the creation of a more beautiful world.
I also drove myself into intense suffering in pursuit of that vision for the first decade or so of my adult life.
Making Impact from Above vs Below the Line
The source of that suffering was not the vision itself. It was the state of consciousness from which I was pursuing the vision.
This became clear to me when, a few years into my healing journey that began as a result of that very suffering and burnout, I found my way to the Conscious Leadership Group (CLG).
The central model of Conscious Leadership, which the founders of CLG inherited from their mentors Gay and Katie Hendricks, is the idea that at any given moment and in regards to any given situation, we humans will be in either one of two states: Above or Below the Line.
When we’re below the line, we’re in a state of threat. We’re closed off, defensive, and committed to being right. Our energetic experience is dominated by blockage and contraction.
When we’re above the line, we’re in a state of trust. We’re open, curious, and more interested in learning than being right. Our energetic experience is marked by expansion, flow, and love.
The revolutionary aspect of this model is the choice to switch your focus from content (the details of whatever is happening) to context (how you are relating to what’s happening). Focusing on context means addressing your state of consciousness first. Where are you? Above or below the line?
Playing this game means developing a masterful practice of awareness (Where am I?) and acceptance (When I’m below the line, can I accept myself for being scared?). It means taking radical responsibility for your own experience and becoming adept at shifting from threat into trust. Ultimately, it means committing to taking action from above the line. When you notice you’re below the line, you stop and address that first before moving forward.
When I started my coaches training with CLG, I was living the vast majority of my life from below the line — including, and perhaps especially, my activist orientation toward making the world a better place. My desire to improve the world was coming from an intense experience of threat.
This was the case for many very understandable reasons! As a young man coming of age in the early 21st century, there was no shortage of terrifying and disturbing problems to tie myself in knots around. Climate change was at the top of the list. Having developed a deep and powerful love for nature as a child, I was horrified to learn about the state of our planet’s predicament, our responsibility as a species for creating it, and our apparent lack of willingness to do anything meaningful to address it.
The inequity of the world was another issue I tied myself in knots around. I became excruciatingly aware of my privilege — all the markers of my social identity and personal circumstances that put me at the top of our culture’s hierarchy of power. Adding insult to injury, my privileged lifestyle put me in the category of the world’s worst offenders when it came to my personal carbon footprint.
My internal narrative at the time sounded something like this:
It’s not fair that I have been given so much opportunity and abundance, while others suffer greatly under oppressive systems. Not only are those systems benefiting me and hurting others, they are also destroying the environment and threatening the future of life on this planet. I am the problem! My best opportunity for redemption is by fixing all these issues, so I’d better get to work.
When we are below the line, we make our external circumstances mean something about ourselves. It’s a form of victim consciousness in which we are at the effect of that which is outside our control. We get trapped in the experience of the small, separate self and try to fight our way out from that same identity. Generally speaking, it doesn’t work. At best, we create temporary relief but fail to actually shift the underlying patterns that created the issue in the first place.
In my case, my threatened ego made up the story that I was not inherently worthy of love and belonging, so I needed to prove my worthiness through my actions and accomplishments. From that unconscious story, I compulsively pursued the biggest, most quantifiable, and most impressive positive impact I could possibly imagine. In the process, I burned myself out and thoroughly stifled my authentic creativity, genius and gifts.
As I started to build awareness and acceptance around those deeper patterns, things began to shift. I recognized that many of the core needs of my ego actually had nothing to do with my external circumstances, and everything to do with my state of consciousness and relationship with myself. As I developed self love, my ego’s need to win love from outside myself greatly diminished. I questioned my stories, developed a healthier relationship with my fear of the unknown, cultivated a sense of trust and reverence for the greater intelligence of the Universe. I learned to follow the wisdom of my intuition through my body and emotions, and chose to prioritize my own aliveness.
All this helped me begin to create a life experience characterized by love, wonder, agency, stability and freedom. I stepped off the fear treadmill and let go of the need to justify my own existence. Somewhat ironically, that spaciousness was exactly what I needed to begin explicitly cultivating and expressing my unique gifts — that which might actually help me contribute to a more beautiful world in a meaningful and authentic way.
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” ― Rumi
Shifting above the line means stepping from victim to creator consciousness and choosing to take radical responsibility for our own experience. It means transcending the small, separate ego identity — not by vanquishing it like an enemy in battle, but by meeting its actual core needs and drenching it in love. Through that process, we can relax into the greater truth of who we really are and begin to unlock our true potential. When we let go of drama and allow ourselves to be guided by that which is greater than ourselves, we begin to awaken the truly magical, beautiful, world-changing opportunity that exists within our soul.
Collaborating With The Earth
For me, a huge part of this healing journey came through direct connection and relationship with Mother Nature.
I remember being out on a solo day wander in the Colorado high country, preparing to embark on my first vision quest. I was fasting, so I was tired. I sat down next to a creek and looked up at the mountain towering above me. Tears welled up in my eyes. “I’m so sorry,” I told the mountain. “I’m sorry for all the terrible destruction and harm that my people are causing this planet.”
There was a pause. Then, to my surprise, the mountain laughed at me. Laughed at me! A big, full-bellied, hearty mountain laugh. It radiated love and compassion. I was rapt, immediately sensing that I was in the presence of a being much wiser than myself.
I couldn’t help but smile, somewhat bewildered.
“You are very sweet,” bellowed the mountain. “I genuinely appreciate your care and concern. Truly, I do. It would be great if more humans felt such care. But you don’t need to worry so much. We’ll be OK. We’ve weathered worse than this in the grand unfolding drama of the cosmos. Life always finds a way!”
I felt a wave of universal relief. By sharing its point of view, the mountain brought me back to my humility. Yes, we humans are powerful - even more than we realize. But we are also very small. We like to think we are important, but it’s exactly through that pride that we get in our own way.
The more-than-human world carries immense and life-changing wisdom that is available to us whenever we are willing to hear it. The brief anecdote above is one of countless encounters with nature I’ve had in the past decade that has stopped me in my tracks and created an immediate, profound and lasting shift in my perspective.
As a guide, I’ve witnessed dozens of individuals — from very diverse backgrounds and in a huge variety of different situations — open themselves up to the wisdom of the wild world and receive exactly what they needed. The capacity of Mother Earth, the Mystery, and the more-than-human world to read us like a book and mirror back exactly what we need — but would likely never have come up with on our own — never ceases to amaze me. Every time I witness the stories that unfold during a wilderness solo enacted from a ceremonial consciousness, I am deeply humbled, profoundly inspired, and absolutely blown away.
This is why Rebecca Wildbear and I, when we guide vision quests together, remind all the participants that we are only the supporting guides. The true guides, those who really carry the real wisdom and power to transform our lives, are the Earth, the Mystery, and the more-than-human world.
It takes skill and dedication to develop a relationship with those guides and to learn how to follow their guidance. It’s like learning a new language, and it helps to get support from other humans who already speak it. When we’re new to the practice, it’s easy to feel lost, embarrassed or overwhelmed. But when we stick with it and apply our inner devotion, reverence and curiosity, the results are truly incredible.
As human beings, every one of us is inherently capable of doing this. It’s our birthright. That’s part of what makes it such a profoundly special and empowering experience — we get to come home to our natural place of deep belonging in the infinite family of life.
Creating a More Beautiful World
If we want to create a more beautiful world, we need to learn to live above the line and cultivate an animistic relationship with the Earth.
When we’re below the line, we are cut off from our true creator power. We’re seeing the world through the fog of our threatened ego identity, and therefore detached from the bigger picture of reality. Our energy is contracted and blocked. In this state, we tend to perpetuate the current reality much more than we actually change it. While we might get some small wins here or there, the bigger picture of our results tells a different story. We stay in the same basic predicament of creating a reality that we say we don’t want.
When we’re above the line, we take 100% responsibility for creating our own reality while accepting things exactly the way they are right now. But that doesn’t mean disengagement or apathy — on the contrary. We still feel creative tension and connect with a vision for a more beautiful future. The key difference is that the fact that the vision and the present aren’t already the same isn’t a problem. Instead it feels exciting! We get turned on by that and drawn in to play. We get inspired to pursue our vision because we can, because it’s fun, and because it brings us fully alive. We get to follow our calling and create the most exquisite life experience we can imagine.
In my experience, creating from above the line is not only more fun and fulfilling, but also far more effective. We get to live in our zone of genius, let things be easy, and cultivate and hone our unique gifts. Our passion for the issues we care about (such as climate change and inequality) doesn’t go away — but we get to collaborate with life in pursuit of those passions instead of fighting against reality. When it comes to achieving truly lasting and transformative change, I believe that shift makes all the difference.
While we’re at it, we’d be silly not to take advantage of the incredible power and wisdom of the more-than-human world. As we saddle up for the ride of our lives and get really big and ambitious around our dreams of what’s possible, why wouldn’t we want to enlist the whole planet — or the whole cosmos, for that matter — as mysterious and magical allies in our journey?
I don’t know about you, but I think life sounds a whole lot less fun without that dimension of reality turned on. And when it comes to the complexity and scale of the challenges we face as a species, I’d rather not handicap ourselves. As clever, innovative and resourceful as we humans can be on our own, that capacity still pales in comparison to the power of the greater whole.
I’d even go so far as to suggest that maybe — just maybe — we are unconsciously creating all of these current predicaments for the precise purpose of waking ourselves up to the truth of who we really are and coming home to our natural place as active, awake, and devoted members of the broader family of life.
Now that sounds like my kind of adventure.
Care to join me? ;)
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Embody Your Light is a newsletter written by Brooks Barron exploring how to come fully alive and build a more beautiful world from a place of alignment, presence and peace. Join the adventure:
I love this, Brooks! Have been on a very similar path over the last decade navigating cycles of burnout as a climate entrepreneur, slowly untangling my own activist identity from inherited trauma and workaholism, shifting relations with an animistic Earth towards being with, not doing to or apart from - which is a self healing journey. This past year especially is an inwards one. I can relate to mountain smiling at me and placing my anxieties in perspective (in my case, Mt Shasta almost exactly a year ago). When moving on rock time or even tree time, things get so much clearer.
Thank you for writing this!