What is a Spiritual Warrior? 3 Ways to Turn Pain into Power

The world feels like it’s collapsing around you. Deep down, you feel scared, confused, lost, alone, and adrift in a black ocean of emptiness. 

Where are you to go? What can you do now? You feel a sense of being shattered inside – there is a hollowness in your chest, a void where your Soul was meant to be.

There is a part of you that wants to scream madly, pound your fists against the earth, and protest about the injustice of it all until your voice breaks.

Perhaps most of all, you feel weak, deeply fatigued. You’re tired of fighting. There is a sense of deep existential tiredness that drags at your bones and eats away at your core.

Where has the light gone?

If you have experienced any of what I’ve just described, chances are that you’ve gone through, or are going through, a life crisis of some kind, perhaps even a Dark Night of the Soul (or spiritual crisis).

We are living in complex times riddled with suffering of all shapes and varieties. Personally, societally, and globally, we are experiencing the repercussions of many forms of greed and violence.

It’s no wonder that so many of us feel angry, tired, full of anxiety, and grief-stricken.

But as tempting as it is to collapse into apathy, nihilism, or learned helplessness, these aren’t helpful or practical solutions. 

In other words, these reactions don’t help you and they don’t help others. As such, they’re unhealthy and pointless uses of our energy.

What we need are spiritual warriors – those who are of great service to themselves and society. And this is what I’ll be exploring in this article. 

What is a Spiritual Warrior?

A spiritual warrior is a person who has learned how to transform their pain into a source of power. 

Instead of turning to violence or victimhood, the spiritual warrior is an individual who chooses to wear the armor of compassion and wield the sword of wisdom.

Unlike a warlike warrior, a spiritual warrior isn’t focused on killing and destroying external enemies. 

Instead, the spiritual warrior is concerned with meeting, befriending, and overcoming the internal foes within. 

Doing so enables the spiritual warrior to be a light in the darkness, not just for themselves, but for others as well. 

In their arsenal, the spiritual warrior doesn’t carry guns, knives, and bombs, but instead carries the spiritual weapons of courage, clarity, compassion, forgiveness, and humility.

In the words of Sogyal Rinpoche in The Tibetan Book of the Living and Dying, 

To be a spiritual warrior means to develop a special kind of courage, one that is innately intelligent, gentle, and fearless. Spiritual warriors can still be frightened, but even so they are courageous enough to taste suffering, to relate clearly to their fundamental fear, and to draw out without evasion the lessons from difficulties.

The Lone Wolf as a Symbol of the Spiritual Warrior

In our work here on lonerwolf, the lone wolf is seen as a powerful symbol of the spiritual warrior and as the metaphorical ‘hero’ who goes on a journey of spiritual awakening.

To embark on any meaningful journey in life and to make our way through the dark forests where we can find ourselves lost, we need to embrace this inner lone wolf quality within ourselves.

The lone wolf as a spiritual wanderer AND warrior possesses the qualities of courage, strength, authenticity, and an insatiable thirst for freedom. 

If you’re called to be a spiritual warrior at this point in your life, you might be entering stages five and six of the Wanderer’s Journey of Spiritual Awakening. See the image below:

As you can see, stages five and six are defined by the archetype of The Warrior who is tasked with the responsibility of both going inwards and facing the darkness they find there.

The Warrior part of our life journeys often feel heavy, dark, and full of a lot of emotional turmoil and processing work – or what we refer to as inner work.

It’s at this point, in shamanic terminology, that we enter the inner Underworld. 

9 Signs You’re Called to Be a Spiritual Warrior

We all have the capacity to be spiritual warriors no matter what cards life has dealt us or how wounded we are.

In fact, the more deeply broken we feel, the more powerful our process of inner transformation and awakening will often be.

Here are nine signs you’re called to be a spiritual warrior:

1. You feel tired and world-weary.
2. You often feel overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness, lostness, or emptiness.
3. You’re drawn to spending more time in solitude.
4. You find yourself enjoying contemplation, introspection, and inner exploration.
5. You’re attracted to the archetypes of the Warrior, Shaman, and Wounded Healer.
6. You’re prone to getting stuck in a depleting victim mentality and want to find more inner strength, empowerment, and self-sovereignty. 
7. You’re dissatisfied with shallow self-help teachings and want to experience something of more depth and substance.
8. You’ve done some soul searching/inner work already, but you feel called to go deeper into your personal Underworld.
9. You feel called to do the work of healing your deep-seated personal and inherited ancestral wounds to find more freedom, expansion, and wholeness.

How many of these signs can you relate to?

Way of the Spiritual Warrior: 3 Ways to Turn Your Pain into Power

Now more than ever we need spiritual warriors who are willing to do the courageous work of turning their pain into power. 

Doing so lights a way for others in this world who may feel lost, confused as to how to befriend their darkness, and are in need of inspiration and motivation.

This is profound spiritual work, and it is a core part of the spiritual journey of awakening and Illumination.

Here are three ways to turn your pain into power and find your inner strength:

1. Accept having a broken heart and embrace the pain within you

Firstly, read this quote from poet Mark Nepo (from the Book of Awakening) – it says it all, emphasis my own:

There is a beautiful Tibetan myth that helps us to accept our sadness as a threshold to all that is life-changing and lasting. This myth affirms that all spiritual warriors have a broken heart—alas, must have a broken heart—because it is only through the break that the wonder and mysteries of life can enter us. So what does it mean to be a spiritual warrior? It is far from being a soldier, but more the sincerity with which a soul faces itself in a daily way. It is this courage to be authentic that keeps us strong enough to withstand the heartbreak through which enlightenment can occur. And it is by honoring how life comes through us that we get the most out of living, not by keeping ourselves out of the way.  The goal is to mix our hands in the earth, not to stay clean.

As we can see, being a spiritual warrior and carrying some level of pain inside go hand-in-hand – what else would motivate the spiritual warrior to be a warrior?

To turn inwards and face the pain, woundedness, and darkness we find there, we need to first be willing to look within.

Next, we must be willing to accept the pain that we find inside ourselves without avoiding, judging, suppressing, obsessing over, or pathologizing it.

Remember that pain is a part of your inner landscape, but it doesn’t define the whole of you. 

Accepting your brokenheartedness instead of pushing it away is one of the most fundamental and important ways of turning your pain into a source of power.

2. Don’t collapse into passivity – proactively step into a space of courage

When we’re in the metaphorical dark forest of pain, not knowing where to go or what to do next, it can be all too easy to throw our arms up in despair and fall onto the ground defeated. 

But every good hero will pick themselves up and realize that collapsing into passivity is not just dead-ended but ultimately pointless: it keeps you stuck in a disempowering victim mentality.

While feeling anger about, grieving, and accepting our victimhood is important, that’s only part of the journey. 

The other part is to step into a space of survivorship, a place of proactive healing and self-empowerment. Only then can we be of authentic, deep, and practical service to others and society at large.

In the words of Thomas Moore (Dark Nights of the Soul),

Even though your dark night has much of positive value to give you, you shouldn’t be completely passive in it. You have to be armed and ready for battle. You have to be a spiritual warrior and take on the emotional accouterments of the knight and hero. You have to be a big person, which is not the same as being full of will and ego.

To be a ‘big person,’ in this case, is to be a person of courage, a person willing to rise above fear and go into the dark forest with fortitude, zeal, and resolve. These qualities don’t come from the ego but from the Soul.

3. Return to your heart and let love be the light that leads you

Fear is the darkening of the light in the gloomy forest of our inner Underworlds – but love is the candle, the lantern, the north star, the sun rising over the horizon, that lights our way.

To be a spiritual warrior is to be a heart warrior, a Bodhisattva, a devotee of Divine Love, and it is only through love that we can find our way out of the dark forest in the first place.

Sufi mystic and teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, when writing about the sacred text of the Bhagavad Gita, says the following,

So the way of the Gita is the way of a spiritual warrior, a peace warrior and an eco-warrior—what Gita calls a karma-yogi: one who is engaged constantly for the upliftment and well-being of the deprived and dispossessed but who acts without desiring the fruit of his or her own actions.

Letting love lead you isn’t only about showing compassion to your wounded inner parts (such as befriending your inner child and shadow self), but it’s also done in service of helping and being an example for others in society as well.

When you face the darkness, when you look into the eyes of your innermost demons, you’re not just doing this for yourself, but you’re also giving it a higher purpose. You’re doing it for the collective good as well.

You recognize that your inner world has a direct impact on your outer world. Your actions create ripple effects. You aren’t separate, but you are one interconnected strand on the greater web of life. 

What you do counts.

Even if you don’t get public accolades and badges of honor (which typically never happens when it comes to any form of inner work as it is a very internal and often private experience), you still know, feel, and are irrevocably assured of the profound value of what you’re doing.

Now is the Time

If you would like to read more related to the Warrior part of the spiritual journey, see our Turning Inwards and Facing the Darkness portals.

You can also see our Wanderer’s Journey page for an overview of the whole spiritual quest.

Now is the time we most need those invited to be spiritual warriors in this society to arise and step up to the calling.

Now, more than ever, we need brave souls who are willing to do the deep inner work of facing, befriending, alchemizing, and integrating their darkness – so the same can be done in the wider society, and so we can find more individual and collective peace, healing, and awakening.

The work Mateo and I do here is a humble contribution to this cause, and if you’d like to get started, I recommend beginning with our three Inner Work Journals. 

Our Shadow & Light Membership is also designed to provide you with ongoing intuitive guidance and support for this part of your journey in a practical, introspective, and safely empowering way. 

May the spiritual warriors of society rise.

May we all have the courage to face the darkness and rediscover our Inner Light.