“Power”
“Power” - created July 7th, 2021
THE MANDALA PROJECT - How it came to life
If you know someone whose day would be brightened by this Mandala, please pass it along! Even more magical, with a love note from you!
The Mandala Project: #33
There’s a mountain bike trail I’ve been tangling with for a long time. It started out as a nemesis and eventually transformed into an ally in my quest to claim power back from fear.
I had ridden it two or three times over the years, including an ankle-spraining 8-foot fall off the side of a technical feature. Just enough to know that it scared the shit out of me and I wanted nothing to do with it. A friend of mine would check in every couple of months, “Hey, wanna go ride Topp Notch?”
Without missing a beat I’d respond, “Nope.” And that’d be the end of it.
Then while in a Shamanic training a couple of years ago, we were given instructions to journey and ask our Helping Spirits:
1) Is there any relationship, circumstance or entity that I’m enmeshed with? (meaning I lose my clear connection with self and my sense of agency when it’s present) and if so…
2) Please suggest a ritual that will support me in disentangling from it.
The answer that came back to the first question was ‘Fear’. Seemed right.
When I followed the second instruction and asked for a ritual, they pitched in a hard ball:
“Go ride the things that scare you. And keep riding them until you are more connected with trust than fear. That’s when the ritual will be complete.”
Wasn’t expecting that.
It’s worth mentioning that my avoidance of technical challenges wasn’t based on not having the skills, it was in not trusting the skills I’d spent years acquiring. I HATED the feeling of vulnerability that comes with committing to something far enough in that there’s no backing out—that scary place where I can’t guarantee or control the outcome. I wasn’t sure I (or life) could be trusted when the stakes were high.
But I also know my spirit guides don’t mess around, so I agreed to take it on.
APPRENTICING TO FEAR
On my first ride to embark on this ritual—which ultimately spanned two summers and close to 100 rides on Topp Notch—I thought I should just double-check:
“You SURE this is it?”
“Yup”.
“Okay…”
In the beginning, the wisdom of the whole undertaking seemed questionable. I felt wildly uncomfortable riding 40% of the trail. I didn’t know then that I was setting out on an incredible journey to meet my fear again and again to become intimate not only with it, but also with an abundance of mischievous, mysterious and unbelievably supportive spiritual allies. They showed up consistently, guiding me all the way through.
Sometimes I chose trust and sometimes I chickened out, but I kept accepting their invitation to stay on the quest until eventually I came to love the trail and was able to ride 100% of it with precision, playfulness and confidence.
The ritual came to a clear completion in my final two rides on Topp Notch this past October.
The first one involved a spectacular crash on the feature that had always scared me the most, one I thought I had finally won over having successfully ridden it 40+ times.
That ride set up the next one—a mission to go back in and meet the Dragon that the crash had re-activated.
I can ride all the features on Topp Notch (there are about extra 15 tricky ones) but it’s rare to make every single one over the course of the 40 minute ride. On this day I cleaned it, rode every single feature.
There are some wild threads reaching all the way back to adolescence woven into the story, but for now I’ll just say that at the end of that ride, this epic year-and-a-half-long ritual came to a deeply transformative, sacred and magical conclusion.
TALISMAN OF THE QUEST
On every ride into Topp Notch, I would ask 5 or 6 significant and beloved Helping Spirits to accompany me.
One was always my Dad, and on many occasions as I rode out of the bottom of the trail, I’d look down and find a heart-shaped rock lying somewhere near my front tire. It was a wink and a smile from him, confirmation that he was there, offering encouragement, picking me up and dusting me off, and cheering on my progress.
On one of those days I found the tiny heart at the centre of this image. I tucked it in my pocket and set off for home, and along the way rolled right into the path of a sage-disguised-as-a-storm-drain-cover. This Mandala called me right to it.
Yes to meeting fear head on. Yes to allies, to courage, to trust.
And yes to the Power of Love.
We live in a culture that supports and encourages the ideal of self-sufficiency, and most of us spend our lives striving for it. It’s a myth, and believing it comes with a steep price.