
Walking the Mythic Water Path of the Lover
The mythic path of the Lover focuses on learning lessons around emotions and the subtle energetic dynamics of life. The desire to deeply explore life and to strive for authentic connection with others is at the core of this path. You can easily be impacted by your environment and very often feel the pain being experienced by others, which may add a quality of heaviness to your life and pull you into focusing on what you are experiencing internally. This malleability and sensitivity can be minimized or ameliorated by creating healthy energetic boundaries with others, and by building the ability to recognize the source of your thoughts and feelings. Releasing what is not yours to carry is a powerful healing movement for you as you walk the water path.
Consciously bringing more levity into your life is especially helpful as you navigate the times when you are deeply immersed in your feelings. You may have a tendency to want to stay in a place of inner comfort, which can impact your spontaneity and momentum, and lead to missed opportunities. Shifting from a preoccupation with your inner life to being on purpose, productive, and helping others can bring balance and healing to your life. The positive side of being able to recognize the more subtle aspects of life is being able to remind people what is essential or what truly matters in life. As you create a deeply inspiring and passionate life, you can easily motivate others to do the same.
Principle of Mythic Transformation
Recognizing your life as a mythic journey highlights the lessons that are hidden underneath your life challenges and reveals how your challenges are secretly guiding you to reclaim your authentic self and your creative potential.
Essential Soul Capacities for the Lover
There are a variety of soul capacities (skills, aptitudes, or abilities) that a person walking a water path is asked to utilize during their mythic journey. However, there are three capacities that are essential for navigating the path of the Lover because they temper common imbalances in a person’s emotional life. The capacities described below focus on what is needed to:
- discover and share your gifts,
- create personal wellness and soul nourishment, and
- transcend the limiting patterns that hold you back.
Discovering & Sharing Your Unique Gifts – Acceptance
Acceptance involves being able to acknowledge and “feel” what is happening in the world and with those you care about without taking it on or altering the vision for your life. Creating balance between helping others and honoring your personal needs produces clarity about the gifts you are meant to share with the world. Through practice it becomes possible to accept the choices of those you love, to feel the pain of the world, and to still stay focused on creating a life that reflects your truth and passion.
Creating Personal Wellness & Soul Nourishment – Open-heartedness
Exhibiting open-heartedness in your life requires creating clear boundaries that make it safe to be vulnerable and authentic in your interactions with others. It also involves being able to take in the goodness of life as well as to impart warmth, compassion, and empathy to others, especially those in pain, without denying your needs. As you build the ability to process your emotions—both pain and joy—you live more and more from a place of empowerment and balance.
Transcending the Limiting Patterns That Hold You Back – Gratitude
Gratitude focuses on recognizing and valuing the simple things in your life. It also includes shifting your mindset when it becomes fixated on disappointment and dissatisfaction to recognizing the beauty that is already in your life. By living in a state of wonder and gratitude, you naturally re-ignite your faith and passion, and enhance your ability to attract the abundance and joy you desire.
Enhancing Your Creative Process
Enhancing your creative process starts with creating clear mental pictures of what you want to create and taking consistent action based on where there is flow and ease. Perceived blockages can be overcome by enlisting the help of others and creating a “team” process. Acknowledging your strengths and limitations is also helpful for clarifying the support you need to accomplish your goals. Through recognizing the subtle energetic dynamics impacting your creativity and your ability to take action, you will take a very important step toward creative liberation. One way to perceive the subtle dynamics occurring around you—those that the intellect is unable to detect—is to learn how to listen to your heart. Communicating your needs and feelings is vital for creating clear agreements with those in your inner circle and with those supporting you in your creative pursuits.
Identifying Potential Imbalances in Your Feeling Nature
- Getting stuck in pain and upset, and having a hard time letting go of old emotional baggage
- Being overly sentimental and holding on to people, places, and things, leading to stagnancy
- Getting overly attached to situations because of what you think others need
- Taking things personally and being overly sensitive
- Finding it challenging to recognize what you need for personal nourishment
- Easily going to a place of apathy or indolence
- Being so inwardly focused that you miss the possible connections and opportunities that are occurring around you
- Finding it hard to be compassionate with others without losing yourself
- Struggling with bringing a sense of lightness and fun into your life
- Being overly impacted by the emotions of the people around you
Principle of Mythic Transformation
By understanding the themes and dynamics pertaining to your mythic path, you are able to rewrite your personal mythology, thus making it possible to create a life that fully nourishes your soul.
Travel Compass
Navigating your mythic path and establishing right relationship to your feelings and emotions is easier when you stay connected to the bigger picture of your life and to how you want to share your gifts to make life more beautiful for yourself and others. It is easy to get lost in the sea of emotions, but by embracing action-oriented capacities—demonstrating determination, being on purpose, and learning the skills that allow you to be of service to others—you will be guided along your path.
Lover Declarations
- I am ready, willing, and able to welcome abundance, beauty, and love into my life now.
- I choose to support others without losing myself now.
- I commit myself to creating healthy, energetic boundaries with the people in my life now.
- I release feeling obligated to motivate the people in my life who aren’t taking responsibility for their own lives.
- I associate with people who are comfortable with me being emotionally free and uninhibited.
- I embrace the courage needed to share my needs and feelings with the people I care about.
- I let go of taking things so personally now.
- I bring discernment into my emotional life, recognizing what is mine and what is not mine.
- When I feel stuck in my pain and wounding, I choose to take small steps that bring inspiration and purpose back into my life.
- I release trying to please others at the expense of my own truth and creative authenticity now.
© 2015 Gary Jobe Ferguson, PhD