Warriors, here is an important lesson:
I want you to take your swords and place them horizontally on the ground before you.
Looking at your sword, you will notice both above and below the blade, there is space.
These spaces represent the dichotomy of how people live their lives. They are either living and behaving above the blade, or they are living and behaving below the blade.
If above the blade, they are open to learning. Are curious. Humble. Selfless. They take responsibility for their lives and are accountable for their behaviour.
If living below the blade, they are defensive, closed minded. They care more about being right, looking good, and protecting their ego. When things go wrong, they blame outside entities.
Look at where you are currently standing: below the blade.
This is normal. In fact it is far more natural to be below the blade, than above. Almost every human spends the majority of their time below the blade. Very few warriors consciously step over the blade to stand in the space above. This is because it feels safer to be in the space below where you can see your sword in front of you, knowing you can pick it up if need be.
The need to feel safe is deeply wired within us. We cannot avoid it. As us humans evolved, we developed a really good ability to pick up on threats. To put it briefly: cave dwelling ancestors who paid attention to threats, avoided them, stayed safe, and survived. They then passed their threat detection skills onto their progeny. We will delve more into this at a later stage, but to understand why in modern times we stand more often below the blade, it is important to remember: our brains evolved to be negatively biased to see threats (whether real or not) to protect us, and keep us safe.
But this is not limited to our physical being. Today, survival and threat avoidance often comes down to protecting the ego. If you read our earlier article on human needs, you will recall we all have a deep seated need for esteem.
If we start to sense we are somehow not measuring up to our peers, that we are somehow wrong, or will look bad in front of others, we react as though a threat has been detected. For our ancestors, being wrong could easily equate to death. Not being accepted by the tribe, and being kicked out, also guaranteed death. Thus, to survive modern life, we work very hard to look ‘right’ and can often become very defensive in our positions to prove we are right. (Admission of a mistake places us in a position of vulnerability, which again for our cave dwelling ancestors, was not a good thing).
We are often in the space below the blade (defensive, closed minded, not open to being proven wrong, not willing to look bad, distributing blame outside ourselves), because we are attempting to keep our ego safe. We are not conscious we are doing this, it is a subconscious attempt to protect ourselves; however, (and this is another important point): whilst we have these instinctual drivers in our primitive brain that place us below the blade, we also have a rational brain that enables us to reflect, to think about our behaviour, and question how we can shift to being above the blade. We can develop self-awareness to recognise when we are standing below the blade. We can shift from being closed minded to being open. From being defensive to curious. From wanting to be right, and protecting our ego, to wanting to learn.
Join us for Lesson 2 where we will look at how to make the shift, and why we want to be above the blade.
The Warrior-Womxn's Guild 