Taken from the word, 'wieldan', meaning ‘To govern, subdue, direct’; wieldry is an individual ethical approach that embraces the idea that every single experience we have; bodily, mentally, emotionally and socially, is a potential source of power; and that virtually everything that we experience can be utilized (wielded) with life-enhancing results.
Wieldry is a unique approach that doesn’t seek to simply erase aspects of who we are in order to define who we are; which is the underlying goal of moral dogma. If our dogma tells us that certain passions are “evil” and we accept this, we are now compelled to tame or eliminate that aspect of who we are, as though we are somehow better off without it!
With wieldry, rather than hacking away at aspects of ourselves that we deem undesirable or as some sort of anomaly; we strive to create a more wholesome life by actually experiencing and accepting every part of our life as a whole. Every part of our character is necessary and not to be left to atrophy.
Just as we can’t call our right hand ‘good’ and our left hand ‘evil’, we also can’t call compassion good and rage evil. We all possess both of these. They are two polar extremes of a common dynamic, the dynamic of how we all respond to the actions others. Our hands can heal with compassion, and our hands can kill with rage. So, just as our hands can’t be good one day and evil the next, neither can compassion or rage, they are just tools to be wielded each and every day, by the will of their wielder.
We are given new opportunities every single day to wield our passions. We pass or fail tests. We win or lose in love. We gain the approval or the disapproval of others. To the wielder, all of these things are opportunities of equal value. Failing an exam is no more terrible than passing an exam. Failing one can be an excuse to give up; or it can become the fuel required for acing the next one. Passing one can give us the heady exuberance to move higher, or it can become a good excuse not to go any deeper.
Heartbreak can serve to push us out of our comfort zone, allowing us to seek out new love, or it can drive us deeper into our shell. By choosing the most useful expressions in each case, we are being true wielders. We learn to determine the value of our choices by establishing their usefulness.
Imagine what it would be like if we could wake up each day without anxiety or dread.
What it would be like if the circumstances of the day were irrelevant to how we felt about it or approached it.
Irrelevant because we are fully aware that all the power that we need to thrive is available for our use.
When we pull into a gas station to fuel up; we don’t choose between good gasoline and bad gasoline. Right? We have choices to make, of course. We have regular, premium and super unleaded, we even have diesel, Only one of these is the right choice for our vehicle; while other choices range from less right to poor. But none of them are intrinsically bad.
Furthermore, the right choice for us would be a poor choice for someone else with a different type of vehicle. But would we ever dream of yelling to the person at the next pump over
“You can’t put regular unleaded in that; my car only takes super!”
That would be absurd. Right? Their choice is right for them, and ours is right for us.
Here’s another analogy that you might find helpful. Our character traits and emotional states are like colors on a painters pallet. We use them to paint the masterpiece that is our life. Now we all have our favorite colors and colors that we dislike as well. We might favor blue over red, or maybe green over yellow, but the fact is, every painting has all these colors. Paintings that we like have colors that we don’t like, and there are colors that we like in paintings that we don’t like, and there are colors that we like in paintings that we don’t. A good artist doesn’t avoid the colors that he dislikes; as if they were somehow bad or wrong; he uses them and blends them into pleasing tones and subtle shades.
That is how we need to view ourselves; not as dark pools of meaningless contradictions and shortcomings, but as masterpieces painted from a vast array of colors; all of which are useful and essential to creating and recreating beauty in our lives.
Summation
Here, again, are the four principals of wieldry.
Every conceivable condition or emotion is a potential source of power, if handled with a clear mind and expediency, not as good or bad, but as useful or not.
Every tool is wrong for some job, but it becomes right when it is used for the purpose for which it was designed.
Every aspect of our lives is either a state of mind, a state of being or a tool for living, or a combination thereof.
Some of the most powerful ideas that have ever served to evolve people’s characters came from the minds of people who lacked those characteristics.
In the final analysis, wieldry is all about the gathering and use of physical, emotional and spiritual power. It does not judge or evaluate, because everything is both valuable and useful. Everyone is valuable and useful as well; and the freer that they are to fully express themselves the more valuable and useful they become.
Self-actualized people are the happiest and most interesting of us all, and the last thing we could want is to suppress or discourage the things that raise that level of happiness in ourselves or in others.
Wielders don’t judge the quality of an emotion, but its utility. For this reason, no emotion need ever cripple us, because, as energy, it’s mutable, and is always going to be useful to us in one way or another.
It is no longer necessary for us to filter the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’, or the ‘moral’ from the ‘immoral’. Our passions, our emotions, and our experiences, are nothing more than the fuels and tools that we use to facilitate our journey; where we end up is the result of our choices, not of the tools that we wielded to get there.