When adversity strikes in the guise of life’s villains you come through that soul fire tempered.

You are stronger for it and you now possess powerful gifts earned in the crucible of your harrowing heroic journey. Mythologist Joseph Campbell says it simply: Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.

Yesterday you wrote down a list of the gifts your villain was a catalyst for revealing. I say revealing instead of creating because those strengths were always in you but latent. It took a villain’s actions for those character traits to emerge into the light and for them to become established in your being.

An astrologer can look at your natal chart and tell you which gifts you showed up with fully ripe and which gifts are to be ripened through conflict. It is these hard-won gifts that have the greater magical potency because they are karmic medals of honour. They are traits you have incarnated to master.

Or in the 2000-year-old words of Roman poet Horace “Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.”

Today we are going to choose ONE of our villain-forged gifts that have emerged from dormancy and we are going to play with it for the rest of this Forty Day Challenge.

(By the way, a synchronicity for you: the Gibran poster inserted here appeared on the top of my Facebook feed as I wrote today’s challenge. You gotta love it!)

Assignment: 

Look at your list of gifts (or you might have only one gift from yesterday’s assignment, that is okay too). When you read over this list, is there one gift that you feel most drawn to? One that as you contemplate it, you feel most excited to possess?

A way to choose is to simply read each gift then close your eyes and feel your body. How does it feel in your body to own this gift right now? Do your hands tingle? Do you feel heavy or light? Do you feel expansive or contracted?

For me, right now, from my list of gifts—courage, self respect, determination, faith, trust—what draws me the most is DETERMINATION. 

Tomorrow, after you have chosen your “weapon” you will receive instructions on how to wield it.

(Don’t worry, there is a good reason for this deep dive into the mythic structures of your life other than having fun! We are going to craft a potent enchantment by day seven of this ‘fairytale” segment. We are heading toward an activation of your ‘special purpose.’ So hang in there with me! )