Integrating the Hero into the Warrior: A Journey in Masculine Growth

When I was 19, I travelled to South East Asia with only a backpack and a lonely planet guidebook.  This was in the days of internet cafés and not-so-smart-phones and digital cameras.  And upon returning after my 6 months of travelling, I remember having 3 main resolutions.

The first was that I wanted to learn how to tell a good story.

The second was that I needed to learn first aid.

And the third was that I needed to learn how to fight.

In my 19-year-old worldview, I saw my trip as the hero’s journey.  I felt like the protagonist of a great story!  I mean, I went into the unknown, where there was danger, I lived on a shoestring budget which was uncomfortable and rugged (relatively speaking) and I had to do battle with loneliness, alienation and the harrowing revelation the fates had in store for me.

Hero, Hero, Hero!

Long story short, the trip was mind-blowing and it lived up to its promise, and I had many experiences that I felt needed to be shared… hence the desire to develop the ability to tell a good story. 

And I saw people get hurt, where I felt powerless to help, hence the desire to learn first-aid. 

And, I did encounter danger and people who meant me or others harm, which left me feeling vulnerable, weak and a different sort of powerlessness…

So, upon returning to Montreal where I lived, I began to train and compete in Mixed Martial Arts in order to fulfill my third resolution, to learn how to fight. 

Which brings me to the photo (above) and the “heroic” display of me sitting on my opponent’s chest, punching him relentlessly in the face until he turned over and gave me his neck... so that I could choke him and he could tap out, allowing me to win the fight in front of a cheering crowd of 2000ish spectators.

Hero! Hero! Hero!

Right?

In Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, the authors describe hero consciousness as the pinnacle expression of the immature masculine’s energy of the Warrior. 

My understanding is that the hero is the aspect of the masculine who can overcome obstacles through courageous action.  But the hero also seeks recognition, acclaim and valor… he is the the one who has something to prove… who is on the hunt for validation and to affirm his strength, courage and discipline through the world’s response to his journey and his own self-perceiving in the process.

At worst he wins something priceless for himself through his journey and at best he brings the spoils home to share with his community, where he is honored and celebrated.

In either case, he DOES NOT FAIL and proves to himself and to others that he is and was worthy of his heroic status and he develops integrated skills through his trial by fire.

Essentially, it’s a journey into masculine potency, which many young men feel called towards through sports, competitions of different kinds, debates/arguments and a variety of other means.

In my case I cultivated this potency through learning how to fight through competition fighting. Training, sparring, tapping out, pushing physical and technical capacity, competing and winning, all led to an unlocking of masculine qualities and confidence, which I had never otherwise known. 

Getting back to the 24-year-old in the picture…

Regardless and in spite of the concussions I accumulated in preparation for this professional fight, my brain was not yet fully developed at this stage of my life… and I can see the immaturity and underdeveloped nature of my longing to prove something, especially to myself.

I wanted to prove that I could do it, that I could fight and win and I wanted to be witnessed in that ability... I wanted to be seen a certain way, full of potency and heroic courage. I cringe a little looking back.

But does that mean I shouldn’t have lived the process? 

Does that mean I should have skipped over the hero stage and jumped right into warrior wisdom, if that were even possible?

After the fight depicted in the photo, I went on to teach high school full time and shifted my priorities, but the victorious hero- boy that I was wanted more glory, more victory and was convinced he could do the trick again, without fail!

About 1 year later, I had fallen out with my coach and because I was working full time, I had less time to train but I began focusing on boxing more seriously.  My fire for MMA competition felt sated and I was on the hunt for a new heroic land to conquer. 

I changed gyms, changed coaches… I was arrogant…. I had won a professional MMA fight after all; an amateur boxing match should be easy! 

Even though my training camp was shaky and moving from MMA to boxing was like moving from yards to millimeters in terms of precision and finesse, I thought, “no matter the odds or shakiness of this game-change, I will emerge victorious!  I will win this on will and grit alone!” 

HERO, HERO, HERO!

Needless to say, and you probably know how this turned out…  I was knocked unconscious by a younger, stronger and hungrier upstart boxer in front of my friends and family.

And it was in that moment in my life that I began the process of integrating the hero into the consciousness of the warrior.

Really, it’s only hindsight that makes this clear and easy to articulate.  But what happened was that I began integrating the consciousness of the one who needs to prove something, who needs to reveal unto himself that he is indeed special… to integrate that one into a consciousness who is sober to his own strengths and weaknesses, his purpose and limitations.

To integrate the hero into the warrior, is to become aware of his own real, tried-tested and true capacities.  The integration (and I think this word can be overused) was to weave the boy-hero into the man who is actively discerning the worth and need for the full application of his will, let alone the need to fight for something or with someone.

Simply put, I became more and more a man who isn’t on a quest to prove himself unto himself or others. I became the man who could draw on the courageous and "up for anything qualities" of the hero, while in the active efficient discernment of the warrior.

I argue that a warrior has a capacity for braving danger and being dangerous like the hero but is also highly attuned to the needs of the moment, which are both mundane and cosmic in scope. Jordan Peterson's vision of the hero needing to be a "monster" is an example of this. He goes on to describe the restraint, discipline and capacity for cruelty cultivated through this process as really necessary for self-respect and confidence to emerge.

A warrior’s wisdom and discipline reign over his need to be regarded as special or glorified and thus he does not fool himself or others through his heroic impulses. This is confidence and self-respect.

This sort of man creates and defends peace, with efficient application of his will, capacity and skills... which is not a game of self-reflection, self-aggrandizement or self-validation but rather a movement of what good simply needs to be done.

Many young men now, especially post-covid, live-out the heroic journey from their living room, online… where the metaphorical and conceptual stakes of their e-world require no embodiment of risk, victory or defeat. They fail with no real consequence and they are victorious within metaverse cultural vacuums.

Because of this, I wonder, are young men bound to repeat the ongoing cyclical process of re-living the hero’s journey, again and again and again in an addict’s search for the pinnacle hit that will allow the hero to return home or die?

I remember times in own computer/video game addiction, where the binary oscillation of victory/defeat in Starcraft 2, where the algorithm had me matched with opponents where I would essentially win 49% of the time. I would play hundreds of to-the-death matches, winning and losing in about equal measure, and the only way to shift in the direction of triumph was to significantly improve my skills!

But I couldn't, not without a significant evaluation and re-training of my habitual game play style. Which I was unprepared to take-on because I would have to devote serious work at improving and I was unwilling because it "was just a video game".

So, there I was chasing glory on a hero's treadmill, in a war-game simulation... without anyone bearing witness to my wins/losses, as a wallowing hero in a land of doesn't-matter.

I think many young men are caught in this cycle and are failing to launch because of this. It's like they want to cultivate and activate the hero's qualities through their e-avatar... doing battle against the dragons of imagination, pixels and trolls but are in a perpetual training simulation... accumulating levels and gear and loot for the day they leave the training ground into the real world but never do because the risk of real world failure is too great, too scary and too exposing to the skin they would have to put skin in the game.

Any man who integrated the hero into the warrior had to temper the steel of their being in the fire of real risk, real danger, real defeat, real victory.  Only with this experiential exposure could they create the conditions for the seeds of warriorship to crack open and sprout.

Does this mean that all young men should embrace extreme sports like MMA or the like? Absolutely not. Danger, risk, exposure and obstacles come in many forms... what's required is real skin in the game, which is a pre-requisite for growth and development. Only when there is something real to lose is there also something real to gain. My friend Sean Douglas Cameron calls it "entering the arena".

The hero must enter the arena and for his development, he must succeed and he must fail for the mature masculine to begin his emergence.

Both victory and defeat are required in the journey into masculine growth and it is this sort of paradox, unreconciled, that leaves young men stuck in the heroic cycle innocuously and vicariously simulating the journey of the hero through different media modalities. During which, they will at some point find themselves too impotent to strike out on the journey through the hero and into the warrior, in RL.

Are you heroic enough to experience and develop from both victory and defeat? Are you discerning enough to cultivate the power necessary to be heroic but still long for the release from the cycle of chasing approval, validation and lesser booty?

Book a free Discovery Call with me to explore your own development and emergence into the human being you yearn to be.