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Finding and Using your Personal Icons

Manhood rites for Native Americans and other cultures who lived close to nature often involved a quest for a personal icon.

The young initiate would be sent out alone into the wilderness, fasting, to discover who he was. He expected to receive dream revelation concerning his clan and his role in society and to receive a personal token of some kind to keep as a sacred record and source of inspiration.

We can all benefit from a similar exercise, particularly when one role comes to and end and we are looking for a new direction and a new purpose in life.

Whether you believe this revelation to be from some supernatural agency or from your own unconscious mind, or even from some interaction of the two, you can learn a great deal and derive comfort, insight and strength from taking time to seek out some item that will symbolise your belief in your ability to break out of your shell and build yourself a new and better life.

I suggest that you make the quest a meaningful and enjoyable ritual.

If you live and work in town, you could make a special trip to go window - shopping until you see some item that "speaks" to you and that you can take home to occupy a prominent position where you can study it often and find out the messages it holds.

It does not matter what it costs. It may be some small fantasy toy in cheap plastic, or it may be a valuable piece of jewellery. The important thing is that you recognise it as having meaning for you and being a worthwhile investment in yourself.

You will know if it is right for you. If in doubt - do nowt! It may take hours, weeks or even months to find your icon, but you will know it when you see it. It may take days to convince yourself that it is the right thing. It may be quite different from anything you had imagined, or it may be more expensive than you had intended.

Trust yourself to know it when you find it and have faith that it is important to you and will become a treasured symbol of your growth towards all you can become.

You may have access to a beach, a wood or a country walk. Take a picnic and spend time there alone, just thinking about the things you need to know and looking for the item that will come to mean so much to you over the next few months or years.

It may be a shell, a pine-cone, a piece of driftwood, a stone. It could be anything.

One of my clients spent a drenching evening on a stormy beach and returned with a shiny pebble on which some sea-creature had built a pattern of limestone swirls like some bizarre script. He described it as his message from the universe, a rosetta stone he could not read, polished from its years of being battered against the shore, hard, indestructible and with a shining beauty all its own. He had recognised it as symbolic of his own struggle and of the qualities he could claim as his own.

The hieroglyphs promised him a source of meditative thought. He could guess at some phrase they suggested to him and explore the ways in which it was relevant to his situation and his needs. Truly he had opened a line of communication beyond his conscious and rational mind, a rich source of future inspiration.

Another young man who had felt himself destroyed by the breakup of his family came back from his assignment with a single sheet of paper, an illustration from a book he found in a charity shop. It was an engraving of a rearing stallion.

He soon realised that it was telling him he still had health, strength, and virility and had only to tame the wildness of his emotions in order to emerge as the beautiful and powerful creature, the potential winner he had always been.

I have three very special icons, acquired over the years, each appropriate to my needs at the time I found it.

As a young, single parent, jobless, homeless and desperately poor, I saw a glass paperweight in a shop window. It was a deep burgundy in colour, cut into flat planes through which one could see a sprinkle of tiny bubbles of air.

I"knew" it would be stupid to spend money I did not have on something I did not need and could not afford. But, somehow, I kept being drawn back to that shop window to look at "my" paperweight.

Several times I went into the shop, held it in my hands and gazed into the universe it held, caught in rich refracted light. I have never seen anything like it, before or since. Eventually, I felt compelled to go back and buy it.

As I travelled to the shop I was afraid it would no longer be there. As I brought it home I was beset by guilt and shame at spending so much money on something selfish and "useless". I was afraid that I would soon see it for the tawdry piece of folly it really was.

But after thirty years it still has pride of place. I still love it and think it both beautiful and inspiring. It spoke to me of eternity, of peace and space at a time when life was frantic and constricted. It was a token of my belief in myself and of my own worth at a time when I could see nothing but failure, danger and pain.

Years later, when my children were grown and my husband had found a younger companion, I bought myself an intricately crafted miniature of a unicorn with her foal. It told me that I was not merely a lonely, middle-aged reject with no role in life, but that I wasa fabulous creature, a loving and nurturing female, a mother, a faery thing with a magic all my own.

Each time I dust my dressing table, I hold it reverently in my hands and reiterate its message.

The last treasured icon in my collection is a gnarled piece of driftwood that has assumed the appearence of a tattered and whimsical dragon.

It reassures me about endurance, humour and the individual value of even the most battered and unprepossessing of life's flotsam. Seen from certain angles and in certain lights it transcends itself to become something quite unique and wonderful.

So go with my blessing and find your icon, your inspiration for the rest of your life.