Basic Training for Shambala Warriors
A Three-part Soul Integration Protocol
Friends, bison, countryfolk,
As numerous historians and experts, such as Chris Hedges, Rebecca Solnit, Chris Armitage, Heather Cox-Richardson, and Timothy Snyder have confirmed, we’ve lost our government. Johns Hopkins resistance historian Tad Stoermer says it best in this video. It’s time to hospice the old and birth the new.
As we explored last week, the Constitution is nullified and we need a new one ASAP. As we explored the week before, the whole culture and political-economy is complicit, so we have to stop feeding it and uninstall it entirely. Scott Galloway has joined the uninstall movement with his Resist and Unsubscribe initiative. This is an all hands on deck moment. We need every soulful ass on the line. The American people need you. Whether that’s uninstalling, protesting, witnessing, litigating, farming, teaching, healing, creating, supporting, reforming, leading, or praying, we need you.
But it’s not just what we do out there that matters. We also need to become warriors internally and socially - as a culture. We need your heart and gifts, as a realized Rainbow Warrior, an integrated Shambala Warrior, for what will be at least a decade-long fight for the prophesied realization of solidarity, the redemption only available through reckoning, repair, and renewal, - the embrace and support of the endless love in all our hearts for all life - to take the form of a new covenant, a new Constitution, a new future to create together.
Your purpose (vision + craft + virtues) will guide you as to which dimension of this prophecy, this Great Turning, that you’ll be engaged in realizing. Of these dimensions (holding actions, creating new structures, telling new stories, and nurturing life), my purpose calls me into stories (about actions and new structures that nurture life). Bison Medicine is a love letter to the American people inviting us into a more complete, global, and spiritual origin story. My purpose is to courageously and compassionately co-create a flourishing world, by receiving and sharing a vision, and building beloved community. That’s the heart of this dispatch and all my praying, writing, speaking, and facilitating. Your purpose will also give you specific guidance as to which of these dimensions you’ll work with and what is yours to do within it.
[For those of you who don’t know me well, I’m nuts for purpose: I completed a 400-hour, 8-month purpose guide training and certification with PGI, have written four books on the subject, co-founded a global community of practice, and aggregated the research on purpose.]
If you haven’t yet done purpose work to reveal your unique seat assignment, complete with the clarity and courage to fulfill your destiny, please do so. You can begin with this free 1-hour purpose statement exercise. For best results, grab a friend and do it together. Allocate an hour in a place and time that will allow you two to focus just on the exercise. It can be helpful to do this exercise and then create a vision board to represent your purpose-driven life.
From here, with your purpose statement (and vision board) in hand, you have a few tasks. The first is to develop a morning purpose ritual, the second is to integrate your psyche (ego parts + soul), and the third is to join or start a circle to support you in living in alignment with your purpose and healing the wounds in the way of you living your purpose. The main subject of this essay is the purpose ritual, the spiritual activism required to stay on mission, to be led and sustained by the great work of your life (at the end). Before we go there, it is important to share a little bit about the other two tasks that I introduced in Part 9: Bison Medicine Protocol.
#1 An Integrated Psyche
The integration of your psyche requires getting to know each part of it and creating a union of these parts. Purpose work helps you get to know the part of your psyche that knows your purpose and always has. This part is called many names such as the higher self, the soul, or intuition in the West, and many other names across cultures.
An integrated psyche is the marriage between this part of your psyche with your ego parts. Ego parts are fragments of your psyche that arose during childhood traumas to keep you safe. They come online and take control when that trauma is triggered by resonant circumstances in your life. The originating trauma may have been subtle or dramatic. The resulting protecting part of you is not wrong or bad, but rather an ally in waiting. It’s there to keep you safe, and through parts work, each part can be honored and repurposed to fulfill the summons of your soul - your purpose. Tim Kelley’s book True Purpose has many exercises to help you name, understand, work with, and integrate your ego parts, beginning with the big five - your Inner Critic, Skeptic, Risk Manager, Image Consultant, and Wounded Child.
I recommend working with a True Purpose Purpose CoachTM to help you perform this ego-soul marriage. You can also work with a Voice-Dialogue Coach or Internal Family Systems certified therapist. I do not recommend the app-based / tech-enabled approaches such as Positive Intelligence, as your ego parts are slippery and can convince you to take unaligned actions or entirely abort the whole integration process. It cannot be done alone. No one has ever done it alone. You’ll need someone who is trained to help you and keep your ego parts from sabotaging your progress.
Unfortunately, even with an integrated psyche, the odds of you fulfilling your purpose, realizing your potential, making the impact The Great Turning requires of you, and enjoying the fruits of your labor are nil, unless you have a circle of support, to help you stay on mission, grow, and heal.
#2 Circle of Support
Community is the primary unit of human, not the individual, not the romantic partnership, not the nuclear family, nor the extended family. This has always been the case, but patriarchal society has convinced us otherwise over the last few thousand years. As such, it’s important to center this primary unit of human in all things. Unfortunately, nearly all groups are not communities, but rather transactional networks (e.g., alumni and professional associations), affinity leisure groups (e.g., D&D clubs, pickle ball courts, book clubs, mom groups) or social clubs (e.g., institutional religions, employer brands, alumni clubs, luxury brands / experiences / clubs / neighborhoods).
Friend groups are not by default circles of support. Unless each person is in the group is purpose-activated (integrated) and accountable to their purpose and supporting the other members of the group in fulfilling their purpose, it is not a true community, not a circle of support. I’m not saying ditch your friends. I am saying that unless they are purpose-activated, they don’t know themselves, and thus cannot fully love themselves, and thus cannot fully love another - including you. So while you all may care for each other, your ability to care for and support each other is greatly diminished without purpose activation and integration.
As I shared in Appendix F: An Approach to Community and Belonging, a community is centered on purpose, both its collective community purpose and each person’s unique purpose. The easiest way to find a community (in this sense of the term) is to do a men’s or women’s intensive, such as those offered by Woman Within, HER, The ManKind Project, or Sacred Sons, and sit in one of their local or online circles that meets 2-4x a month, with others who have also completed the intensive.
Your circle will help you make purpose-aligned stretches, stay accountable, and gently guide you to explore the wounds and shadow beliefs that take you off your purpose. You can find other communities that have circles as well, but just be certain that they center each person’s unique purpose, and not some arbitrary notion of what is a human or a member or worse, denying the self totally in service of a notion of “no self” or universal love or a guru’s whims. With psychic integration and circle of support, you are two-thirds of the way there. Congratulations!
#3 Morning Purpose Ritual
The last piece is a morning ritual to center yourself and ensure that each day is an expression of who you are and not an expression of other people, institutions and dynamics that do not have your best interests at heart. At the beginning of your journey, it can be as simple as placing a post-it note that says “I am committed to living my purpose” on your bathroom mirror, something to look at as you brush your teeth each day. It’s a daily reminder that you’re on the journey, so that no matter what happens that day, you’ll know at minimum that each day will begin with a commitment to, or grounding in, your purpose.
As your journey evolves, such as if you do the above exercise, you can swap out the post-it note with one that has your purpose statement, a singular sentence that contains your virtues, vision, and craft. For example, here’s mine:
As a compassionate and courageous man (virtues), I create a flourishing world (vision) by receiving and sharing a vision and building beloved community (craft).
Your purpose statement allows you to remember who you really are each day, who you are underneath your name, family, culture, career, and faith. You can also consult it like a wizened elder, by simply asking “Of the available choices in this scenario, which is most aligned with my purpose?”
I began purpose work in 2012, and after moving through dozens of exercises, similar to the one above as well as trauma and parts work, I set up an altar and a vision board to center myself each morning in my purpose. I highly recommend an altar. It doesn’t have to be enormous. It can simply be a bandanna on a table, desk, or shelf with an object or two or ten that represent aspects of your purpose or soul. As you sit or stand in front of it, speak internally or aloud what each aspect represents. I recommend doing this before you interact with any other human. I find I’m much more present, centered, and on purpose when I do this. Or put another way, I’m much more of an asshole before I do my morning ritual / prayers.
I understand that a morning ritual might be difficult if you like to sleep in or generally awake to a home full of others bustling about needing things from you. Busy parents might adapt this to an evening ritual, or set an alarm in the middle of the night. I recommend beginning by making a stretch in your circle of support, e.g., “I will spend 5 minutes for 3 mornings this week, centering myself in my purpose.” Then report back to your circle on how it went. Keep making these stretches until you’ve made it an immutable daily habit.
Five minutes a day may be enough for you. For me, I find it necessary to do 10-30 minutes each morning, but that’s because I’ve been doing this since 2012, don’t have kids, and now have a fairly large altar, with many objects and symbols. I can do it in 10 minutes if I need to, but I generally give myself more time (15-30 minutes), which allows me to expand into each prayer and enter into a more liminal space. When I do this, I end up receiving a good deal of soul information, such as what to do about sticky / cloudy situations. Or I receive new ideas; many of the ideas in this dispatch were sparked at the altar.
Although, part of me really wants to share my morning rituals and prayers with you, the other part doesn’t want to lead the witness or spark imitation. This is your soul, your practice, your personal spirituality, and not really my concern. My job is just to share a story in hopes that you will take the next step that is right for you.
LMK if you’d like to chat about your journey or how to bring this critical work to more people.
Big bison luv:)
Brandon
Some updates:
Trump has poked the bear. He is trying to open California’s protected preserves for oil and gas oligarchs to pillage and ruin our soil, water, and air. He will see an unprecedented response of protests and monkeywrenches. Obviously, the case keeps getting stronger with each passing moment, for California to lead the way towards a new Constitution.
I’ve been enjoying participating in ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families). It’s an hour of deep sharing about the pain we carry and celebrating our growth and liberation as we face it and learn from it. It’s helping me peel back more layers of the neglect, abuse, abandonment, and psychic incest I experienced as a kid, how my Image Consultant’s people pleasing / codependency tries to protect me from feeling this pain again.
I had an interesting experience in traffic court. I was ticketed by an agro cop for riding my e-bike on a bike path, as I have done almost everyday for 3 years without issue. I wasn’t speeding, but because my bike has a twist throttle as well as pedal assist, he considered it an off-road vehicle. So I contested the $157 ticket, prepared my defense and for added measure, composed an indictment of modernity’s murder machines (cars, car culture) and policing in America. Unfortunately, the cop never showed, so I got off and wasn’t able to stick it to the man as planned. The gift of this was that I was the last defendant called, so I got to witness about 10 other cases be tried. In all but one of the cases, representing diverse defendants for relatively minor offenses, the judge found them guilty and they were ordered to pay the full fine. The one case that had more serious offenses - speeding (100mph), reckless driving, and driving without insurance-, the judge reduced the $1,500 in fines to 8 hours of community service. The white, male defendant told a sob story to the white, male judge about how he’s turned a new leaf, doesn’t do crime anymore, sold the car, and is on disability. Shocker.
In the next couple of weeks, we’ll be officially launching the National Pilgrimage / People’s Constitutional Convention website, along with a crowdfunding campaign. So if you’d like to get involved and join the team, please reach out. We need lots of help.