Work gives us the means to create the physical safety upon which our lives depend. Work feeds and shelters us and those we love. Work can give us meaning. But work can also be a means of our suffering. By understanding what’s truly happening all around us, the ways our core belief systems influence our everyday experience, we can extract meaning from the suffering, coax the lotus from the mud, as the Buddhists teach. But this will happen only if we use those challenges that the calls to leadership make on us, not only to grow up but also help us discover our why.

My noble truth, I’m humbled to admit, didn’t come from within me. It came from the simple act of choosing to continue to live.

Looking back, I realize this time as the beginning of my own radical self-inquiry. My pain helped me realize that I was lost. My soul, no longer content to be ‘bruised and battered,’ took charge of my body and grabbed the attention of my conscious mind. The headaches, which continued even as the self-inquiry began, became a way for my body to say, in effect, ‘Wake the fuck up.’ For, if I didn’t wake up, my soul was going to drop me to my knees, writhing in pain.

For many, that place where we’ve come to think we belong has become stultifying; it’s where we are small, unseen, unsure, and unwilling to claim our strengths, our capacities, our courage, our leadership. We are frozen by the belief that it’s just too dangerous to reach into the black bag and grab hold of the disowned, dismembered parts of ourselves.

All Loyal Soldiers then have one basic task: to keep us safe from the wars that raged in our childhood. No matter how awful these strategies have come to make us feel as adults, they were brilliant in their own ways.

What makes all of life complicated, and not just hard, is this unwillingness to do the work that’s ours to do; our unwillingness to live the examined life.