CHAPTER ONE

The Dragon and your Inner Treasure

In Pursuit of the Dragon

It takes power to move into the world and pursue your dreams. It takes energy to live on planet Earth and discover your life purpose. If there’s one creature that has a lot of energy and a lot of power, it’s a dragon. I don’t know whether dragons ever physically existed on planet Earth, but I know that they exist in fairy tales and myth. I also know that in European fairy tales, the ones that I grew up with, dragons were meant to be killed. Some hero (usually a male) was always heading out to slay a dragon, rescue a helpless princess and claim the treasure that the dragon was protecting.

One of the first things I learned as a young metaphysician back in the ‘70s is that characters in fairy tales, myths and dreams are symbols for the inner workings of our own psyches. Carl Jung worked with this idea, as did Joseph Campbell. You’ll find the use of symbol in all of the esoteric teachings, including Kabbalah, astrology, tarot and even magic. A symbol is a container for a living energy or life force. Fairy tales, dreams and myths provide a structure for us to work with this energy in a meaningful way.

I have to tell you honestly that I did not get this at first. Yes, I got it intellectually, meaning I could repeat the statement back if asked about it on a test, but I didn’t get it in my gut. I didn’t get it in the part of me that could actually use it. I didn’t understand it deeply enough to work with it in my own psyche. Still, I had enough faith in my teachers to continue exploring this principle and it has certainly paid off. I’d like to help you get it in your gut, I want you to understand how to touch, hold and even mold the energies inside of you so that you can begin to use your power creatively and productively. But before we can touch our inner power, we often have to face the dragon. As a symbol, the dragon, in combination with many other characters in our inner world, is typically responsible for our inability to fully love ourselves (and others).

We don’t always know about our dragons. In fairy tales and myths, dragons don’t typically live close to a village, meaning they are not always accessible to our conscious minds. Dragons are most often found hidden in a dark forest, or hiding in a subterranean cave, meaning that dragons typically live deeply in our unconscious. We may be slightly aware of them, or we may not, but if you are willing to take the journey necessary to discover your dragon, the treasure to be claimed is actually your own life force, strength and the wisdom of your inner being.

We’ve established that the dragon is a symbol for something that lives in our psyches, but what is it? What do dragons stand for? When I think of dragons, I think of power. They are often angry and threatening, typically hoarding things like gold and treasure that they like to keep all for themselves. In most fairy tales from the Western world, they don’t cough up the treasure or the captured princess unless you kill them dead.

So if a nasty dragon lives in our psyches do we really have to kill it in order to get rid of it? How do we snuff out a part of ourselves without doing away with our whole self? Personally, I am not a dragon slayer. I don’t believe in capital punishment and I don’t like to kill things, not even spiders. Even if I had been consciously aware of my dragon when I was younger (which I definitely wasn’t), I still wouldn’t have wanted to kill it. So as I grew from a child to an adult, I did on the inside of myself what society does on the outside. I took the selfish, angry, violent parts of myself and put them in jail. In psychological terminology this is known as repression. I wasn’t aware of this process, it just happened. I believed that if something is dangerous, you lock it up. Based on my training growing up, I assumed it was the right thing to do.

Now repression is fine if you want to be an intellectual and work with ideas, but if you want to be an actress, a dancer, a singer, or a musician (all of the things I wanted to be), you need your juice. If you want to be a storyteller or a speaker and captivate your audience, you need your life force. If you want to feel alive and awake in your body, you need your emotions; you need your passion. I didn’t want to kill my dragon. I wanted to set my dragon free. I needed to find the key to the prison and let my dragon out, but how? My inner dragon seemed dangerous, violent and mean. First and foremost I didn’t want to hurt anybody, as harmlessness is one of my key operating principles. So I did my best to control this energy, to lock it deep inside. But I came to realize that my caged dragon was really hurting me. My inner dragon was raging and even though I had her caged, I couldn’t control her venom. It would leak out into my bloodstream, poisoning my system and poisoning my life.

Most people didn’t know I was mad inside. I didn’t even know I was mad. I was simply moving through my life trying to “be” all of the things I thought I was supposed to be in order to be accepted, approved of, successful and loved. From what I could tell, that meant skinny, talented, entertaining, cheerful, and a walking lie. All of the energies that I thought were “bad,” meaning all of the energies that I thought would not bring me what I wanted (i.e., approval, success and love), I tried to stuff away. I tried to get rid of them. I tried to stuff my anger, my rage and all of my pain. All of that stuffing and pretending just made the dragon stronger. It didn’t leave. It dug in. The dragon wormed its way deeper into my body, deeper into my cells. Sometimes, when I could no longer control myself, the dragon would come spewing out.

The dragon is an incredibly rich symbol. For me, the more I explore it, the richer it becomes. It’s going to take me some time, and more than a few words to share what I’ve discovered, so stay with me as we embark on the quest to find the dragon. But when you find her, sheath your sword, because in my fairy tale, even the dragon deserves a happy ending. In my fairy tale, when we discover the dragon, we’re going to teach her how to dance.

The Inner Kingdom

Back in the 1990s during my years of training in my mother’s mystery school, I would often be fighting with my boyfriend. I was trying desperately to find love in our relationship, but it felt more like hate. We would argue about something, I would feel righteously wronged and call my mother for advice. I was usually mad and in tears at the same time. I wanted her to listen to me and feel compassion for my situation. I wanted her to tell me how “bad” he was to hurt me—how “wrong” he was. I wanted to hear her say that I should pack my bags and immediately leave. This is not the advice that I got from my mother.

I would be crying in tortuous misery and she would be screaming, “You’re identified! Stop it!”

I didn’t get it. “What do you mean?” I sniffled.

“You’re caught in your emotions. You’re identified with them. Your emotions are not you.”

“If they’re not me, who are they?” I would argue. “If they’re not me, why do they hurt so bad?”

But she persisted in this line of reasoning.

“Your emotions are not you. Your body is not you. You are the watcher. You are the witness of it all.”

This always pissed me off. Why couldn’t she just be my Mom, hold me in her arms and tell me how to find a man who really loved me? Instead she would always tell me that my boyfriend was a decent guy and leaving him now would not change anything. She insisted that the problem was in me and that until I resolved the inner relationship, the outer relationship would remain the same. It might be a different guy, it might be a different movie, but the story line would be similar.

“Besides,” she would add, “do you just want love, or do you want to be free? Do want a relationship or do you want liberation?”

At the time, I mostly wanted a relationship. But there was always that little voice inside, that persistent voice guiding me toward something higher, something eternal, something everlasting. That small still voice inside, and Mom’s loud one on the outside always kept me digging deeper and deeper into my own psyche. She pushed me toward the dragon. Not so that it would devour me, but so I could see it. The word dragon actually originates from the Greek word derkesthai, which means, “to see.”

My mother was right. She was usually right. One day as I was crying about my boyfriend, and she was screaming, “You’re identified!”—I finally got it. I saw myself crying, but the part of me that was seeing was different from the part of me that was crying. The crying was happening, but I was not completely in it; I wasn’t totally identified with it. The crying was happening, but there was also something separate from the crying watching the whole experience. It was like watching a movie; only the movie was about a character I was very familiar with and attached to, a character I called me.

That crying little mini-me was only one of many minis. I discovered that I had a slew of characters living inside me, a whole cast of “me’s.” I found an entire kingdom of inner players, some of whom I liked and some of whom I found repulsive, yet they were all “me.” Or none of them were “me,” depending on your preferred vein of Eastern thought. I wasn’t quite ready to disappear into nothingness, so I decided to play with the idea that all of the characters were “me.” Now I’ve...