What if nothing in me needs to be fixed?
By Brett Benson, Big Joy Alchemy & Dragon Training team
What if the parts of you that you have spent years trying to heal, understand or overcome were never evidence that you were broken? This post explores a more radical possibility: Beneath the fear, anger, grief, shame, and longing is not a defect to eliminate but living energy waiting to be met, released, and returned to love.
The shadow is energy
A cornerstone of The Dragon Training is something called the Predator Process. It is a way of encountering shadow energy in its raw form. We don’t try to get rid of it. We don’t explain it away or stand outside it and analyze it. We don’t grapple with it. We step into it. We become it. And paradoxically, it is often when we are willing to fully inhabit an energy that it begins to lose its grip on us.
This approach rests on a larger idea: what we call the shadow is, at bottom, energy. We often spend enormous amounts of energy trying to control, suppress, explain, or overcome the parts of ourselves we find frightening or unacceptable. The Dragon Training offers a different possibility: what if we stopped treating that energy as the enemy and learned instead to enter it, feel it, and allow it to move?
Many of us who have done personal development work start with an understanding of our inner landscape as a collection of things that need to be fixed. There are wounds to heal, patterns to overcome, shadows to integrate. There is always another layer to peel off the onion, another piece of ourselves to understand, another developmental task to complete.
But there is a danger in that model. It can quietly reinforce the conviction that we are deficient at the core, that the deepest part of ourselves is somehow opposed to God, and therefore that we need to spend our lives improving ourselves. Once we accept that premise, almost everything that follows is organized around it: self-improvement, control, grappling, and the endless search for evidence that we are finally enough.
But what if the problem is less the presence of difficult energy than what happens when we decide that some of that energy is unacceptable? We experience something powerful moving through us and immediately begin trying to contain it, understand it, suppress it, or discharge it.
What if the energy itself isn’t the problem?
What if energy wants to flow? What if beauty wants to be revealed? What if life itself tends toward expression, relationship, growth? A river doesn’t need to be taught to flow downhill. A flower doesn’t need a guarantee of rain to blossom. Something in life seems to know how to move toward its own unfolding.
I have become convinced that consciousness has a directionality. Many of the structures we experience as problems to be mitigated may then be understood as places where that movement has become congested, a retrograde current contrary to the larger flow of blessings and beauty.
When energy gets congested
Some of these structures began as limiting beliefs or protective adaptations installed through childhood trauma that never fully resolved. Jung described a complex as a cluster of energy in the unconscious, charged by history and reinforced through repetition. We’ve used a number of names for essentially the same phenomenon: blocks, deep structures, congestion, dense places, frozenness, eddies in the stream. Whatever we call them, they represent energy organized around an old adaptation that no longer serves the larger movement of life.
But even “block” may be the wrong word. A block implies something that needs to be removed. What if the energy itself isn’t the obstruction? What if the obstruction is the way the energy has become organized? The Dragon Training offers a more alchemical possibility: we don’t have to eliminate the energy; we can redirect it. What was moving contrary to the blessing current can become part of the blessing current.
That, I think, may be the difference between transformation and transmutation.
Transformation can mean that something changes form, that a pattern loses its power, that a wound no longer organizes our behavior. Transmutation goes further. It suggests that the energy contained in the old pattern becomes available for something else. Nothing is wasted. Nothing has to be thrown away. The dragon doesn’t have to be killed. Its fire becomes available.
The Dragon's fire
There is another distinction that has become increasingly important: predator energy itself is not the problem. Predator energy is an expression of the will to survive. It is ancient, primordial, and necessary. For us to live, something else has to die. Life feeds on life.
What becomes problematic is when that life force gets tangled in an energetic cluster and begins swirling against the larger flow. Predator energy can become domination energy, directed outward or inward. The instinct to move toward what we want can become the need to control another person, or the need to control ourselves. We can dominate others, or we can withdraw, keep ourselves small, or suppress our desires. The instinct to protect ourselves can become the compulsion to dominate—or disappear. Either way, life force that could be moving toward life becomes organized around preventing danger.
One countercultural definition of aggression is simply moving toward something. I love that definition because it rescues aggression from its automatic association with violence or domination. Predator energy says, “I am alive, and I am moving toward what gives life.” Domination says, “I need to make you give me what I need.” The first is life force. The second is life force caught in a structure.
This is another reason the Predator Process is so powerful. The goal isn’t to eliminate the predator. It’s to enter the energy deeply enough that the congestion can release its grip and the underlying life force can move again. When the eddy begins to unwind, the underlying energy becomes available again—not as something to suppress but as fuel. What once went into controlling ourselves or someone else can be redirected into desire, courage, intimacy, and what we might call a New Love Biology.
The Dragon doesn’t need to become less powerful. Its power needs to become available to love. That’s alchemy. That’s transmutation.
The Predator Process is a Shadow Work® process, but it approaches shadow differently from the familiar impulse to fix or overcome it. The question is no longer simply, “How do I get rid of this part of myself?” It becomes, “What happens if I stop making this part of myself the enemy?”
One formulation I’ve been playing with is: Don’t love the lie. Love the part of you that got tricked into believing the lie. When we do that, something returns to wholeness. The lie doesn’t need our love. What believed it does.
This becomes especially important when we encounter the existential wound of not-enoughness. I’ve never met a human being who didn’t carry some version of it. I’m not good enough. I’m not lovable enough. I’m not successful enough. I’m not safe enough. The wording varies, but beneath the variations is the same claim.
The wound itself may be unavoidable. Of course we’re not enough. We’re not enough to be perfect, to avoid the discomfort that comes with being human, to never age or fail, to do everything we want to do. We’re not enough to transcend the human predicament or shine 100 percent of the time. None of us is.
The trouble begins when we become ashamed of that fact and start trying to prove that it isn’t true. That’s when the energy begins to form an eddy, turning against the larger current of life.
The sequence is almost comically simple. I’m not enough. Is that true? I’m scared it might be. So I look for evidence that I’m enough after all — successful enough, desirable enough, impressive enough, loved enough. But no amount of evidence can settle the question, so the search continues. What began as a wound becomes energetic congestion, sustained by our resistance to it.
What if we simply stopped? What if we said, “Right. I’m not enough”?
Not as a judgment or collapse, but as a recognition of reality. We are not enough to be everything. We are not enough to control what other people do. We are not enough to guarantee that someone will love us, stay with us, or never hurt us. We are not enough to prevent pain.
The astonishing thing is that when we stop trying to prove that we are enough, the fear that we might not be enough begins to dissipate. The wound doesn’t have to be defeated. We simply stop wrestling with it. The energy tied up in the argument becomes available again.
Beyond the management paradigm
I’ve begun to wonder whether perpetual grappling is itself a shadow of what I might call the management paradigm: the assumption that life can be made safe through sufficient fixing, controlling, and understanding.
When we pursue something larger than ourselves, we encounter opposition. Robert Augustus Masters writes about the need to neither submit to that opposition nor attack it, but to face it and redirect its energy toward what serves the highest good.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke takes the idea somewhere more radical: “What we triumph over is the Small, / and the success itself makes us petty.” He imagines the angel who wrestles with Jacob not as an opponent to defeat but as a being so much greater that being overcome by him becomes a form of growth: “His growth is: to be the deeply defeated / by ever greater things.”
What if grappling produces diminishing returns because the struggle keeps energy circulating around the very structure we’re trying to escape? What if some of what we call opposition is actually an invitation to be exceeded by something greater than the self we’re trying to protect?
The Dragon Training offers almost the opposite invitation. We’re not trying to conquer the dragon, domesticate it, or wrestle its power into a manageable shape. We’re stepping into the fire.
The Dragon is what participation looks like. Instead of standing outside the movement of life and trying to control it, we enter it. We feel what is here. We let the energy move. Perpetual grappling keeps us in opposition to what is happening; participation asks whether the energy we’re fighting might contain something life-giving that wants to be released.
This is why I’ve become wary of my instinct to capture and describe every transformation as soon as it happens. There is something in me that wants to pin the butterfly to black velvet. I want to grok the experience, preserve it, turn it into a concept. But the naming can become a way of leaving the experience. The mind wants to capture what the body is still living.
Don’t explain the opening. Stay open.
I’m beginning to trust that whatever has happened will inform my mind eventually if I leave it alone. Trust is more important than knowing. If I don’t know, I can trust that eventually I will know.
This isn’t an argument against thinking. It’s an argument against making thinking responsible for transformation. The Predator Process embodies this distinction: I don’t need to understand the energy before I enter it. I move toward it first and discover what it has to teach me. I can’t manage my way to a new state or stage. Those things emerge, often unexpectedly. What I can do is become more spacious, more present, more attuned, more willing to encounter what is actually here.
My teacher Robin Duda has suggested that we are conditioned to hate pain because pain has been used to punish us. Perhaps what we actually hate isn’t pain itself but manipulation. If we equate pain with punishment, we may never discover what the pain itself is carrying.
One of the seven lessons I took from living on the road for 17 months was this: Accepting whatever happens is helpful. Embracing whatever happens — including pain — is transformational. Acceptance stops the struggle with what is; embracing goes further. It lets us enter the experience and discover what energy becomes available when we stop fighting it.
What does the energy want?
This is where the Predator Process makes so much sense. When we say, “That’s not who I am,” the energy doesn’t disappear. It leaks out. It finds another route. But when we step into it and become it, we take away some of its hidden power. We can finally feel what is actually there. And once the energy is available to consciousness, something else becomes possible: We can redirect it.
The Dragon asks a different question than the fixer does. The fixer asks, “How do I get rid of this?” The Dragon asks, “What does this energy want?”
That question changes everything.
Transformation doesn’t necessarily happen alone. This is one reason we do this work in groups: We provide compassionate witnesses. When something deep opens, we may need to be witnessed and held in that expansion so we don’t immediately contract back into the familiar. We don’t need someone to fix us. We need a relational field in which we can remain present to what is happening.
The goal of The Dragon Training isn’t to become a person who has no wounds, no pain, no shadow. It is to become someone who no longer has to turn those things into enemies. The structures can soften. The congestion can release. The energy can return to the current.
And when it does, perhaps what we call transformation is simply what happens when life is once again allowed to move in the direction it was already trying to go.
Beauty wants to be revealed. Energy wants to flow. Life wants to live.
The Dragon doesn’t need to become less powerful. Its power needs to become available to love.
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