Someone posted a
video in the past few months of a man who plays with lions. These are wild lions who live on the South African safari, albeit a nature reserve, but wild lions who live in their traditional grouping, known as a pride, and don't normally coexist with humans other than possibly as predator and prey. The man in question is a South African animal behaviourist who has studied lions to the extent that he knows and understands their ways and has learned to get them to accept him. So he can go among them unharmed. The lions, of course play rough. They knocked him down a few times on the video but he always got up grinning, much to the relief of the camera crew who were outside of the fence and knew that these lions were no tame lions, as they, the crew, had already been approached and seriously roared at earlier on. Our intrepid "lion tamer" admitted that the lions could kill him, not intentionally but just with sheer size and strength and treating him as one of them. But his relationship with the lions was more important to him than playing safe.
The traditional Tarot image of Strength is of a woman and a lion, one lion in this case, not a whole pride. But the concept is the same. The woman understands and works with the lion and doesn't try to control and master it, which she couldn't do anyway. The lion would always win. The picture of a woman is symbolic of intuition and inner knowing, essentially the High Priestess of the Tarot major arcana. So intuition seeks to understand and work with instinct, energy and the wild, untamed force of nature that the lion represents. All "animal whisperers" (
Cesar Millan, The Dog Whisperer who appears regularly on Animal Planet;
"The Horse Whisperer" who was the theme of a 1998 Robert Redford movie; a lesser known horse whisperer who came from my neck of the woods in south-west England, one Henry Blake who wrote
"Talking with Horses"; and even another southern Englander who raised a motherless litter of wolves at a nature sanctuary and then released them into the wild at Yellowstone), all of them work with understanding intrinsically the nature and the habits of the animals in question and responding in kind, instead of seeking to dominate them through force and willpower.
The instinct is to fight or flight in dealing with self-preservation. Our traditional human concepts of strength usually involve building more muscle, more firepower or more technological savvy to deal with what we see as the foe. We try in our court systems to administer some kind of oversight to this concept of strength as "dominion over" (someone or something) with more or less success. But we are doomed to repeat our failures if we adhere rigidly and fearfully to the concept of strength as power, muscle and might. This is not to advocate pacifism over war, or, as the press likes to say when referring to Democrats or Republicans, "mummy power" over "daddy power", but as a reminder that strength is not mere force but involves a sensitive and intelligent appraisal and understanding of the "enemy" of the moment. There is a Native American adage that gets passed around: "Never judge a man unless you have walked a mile in his moccasins". In
Hexagram 61 of
I Ching, "Inner Truth", the advice is "when obliged to judge the mistakes of men, (you need) to penetrate their minds with understanding, in order to gain a sympathetic appreciation of the circumstances." This is an example of the strength of "Woman working with Lion" and not trying to overpower it with force.
In martial arts you seek to galvanise the force of the opponent's energy coming at you and use it in your own favour. There are other circumstances in life where that type of response works, not just physically but psychologically as well. Many situations seem less threatening when you try to understand what initiates an aggressive attack. It helps you to deal with it, instead of your feeling overwhelmed by it, or, worse still, feeling as if you have to fight back in order to defend yourself. The attack might be directed at you but it will still have as much to do with the other's pain and problems as it has to do with you, which is not to say, of course, that you don't have your own pain and problems. However, it is better all round NOT to conflate the two. When you project your story and your motives onto another, you may miss their story and their motives altogether. The teaching and practice of
A Course in Miracles around this theme is to recognise an "attack thought", whether it is yours or someone else's, as just that: "an attack thought" and therefore problematic.
Lesson 26 states that "My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability". You are not strong (or invulnerable) when you are the prey of an attack thought which you believe you must defend yourself against. All the might, right, muscle and firepower in the world does not make it otherwise, nor defend you from from your thoughts of attack and vulnerability.
ACIM helps you to move past the vulnerability of attack thoughts by reminding you in
Lesson 47 that "God is the strength in which I trust". "If you are trusting in your own strength, you have every reason to be apprehensive, anxious and fearful. What can you predict or control?" The Course goes on to say that "to believe you can (predict or control) is to put your trust where trust is unwarranted and to JUSTIFY (my caps) fear, anxiety, depression, anger and sorrow. Who can put his faith in weakness and feel safe? Yet who can put his faith in strength and feel weak?" Your inner voice, your voice from God speaks to you in all situations and in every aspect of all situations, provided that you are open to putting aside fear and attack and learning to listen inside instead. This inner voice will guide you to deal with any "enemy" of the moment, any attack thought you are in the grip of, as long as you can practice listening and do not just react and try to win by beating down the other side. The other side has issues that you have to deal with. But you have your own issues that are also involved. As ACIM says elsewhere, any interaction, whatever its nature, is "a holy encounter" for both parties concerned. Strength lies in facing this interaction, and, with inner focus, learning how to perceive and work with it. The "Woman who works with the Lion" is safe no matter what is going on because she is centered in trust, faith, guidance, knowledge, all aspects of God, of The Big Universe and of Spirit. If you follow the word "spirit" to its Latin origins, you will find the word for "wind" and "breath". Spirit "whispers" its messages to you, blowing through you mind like the wind. Likewise the, the Nordic spiritual tool, mean "whispered secrets". Your strength lies in being open and sensitive to the mysteries and messages from spirit.
