JANUARY CHALLENGE
The public Werewolf Challenge for the month of January focuses heavily on the alchemical concept of Nigredo: a burning away to make room for the process of new creation.
As such, we will firstly identify where we are looking to take our physical form in the coming year by setting aside the time to consider and map out our goals. What are we training our bodies for? What are our goals for strength, conditioning, body composition? Through what methods will we achieve this? In what time frame? This document that you create is one part of what we will call the Heroic Blueprint, and it will be built upon and expanded during this entire year as we explore other areas of the personal alchemical transformation. For now, keep it simple, a basic and brutal manifesto of your training goals. This will undergo some changes throughout the year, but it will act as an anchor to remind us why we are training, and a guideline for how we are training throughout the year.
This document is for you, and you alone- not to be posted on Instagram or flaunted on social media. This is your edict of strength, your touchstone of power, personal and living, maintaining its might in part through its secrecy and private nature. Too often, we leak our power by revealing its source, through our desire for recognition in all areas. Let your success speak to the strength of your conviction and hidden plans- let your actions ring out as you crush PR’s, burn adipose tissue and annihilate the competition via a fanatical dedication to your own command.
Second, we will embrace the simplicity of our existence and remove obstacle from our true goals by physically removing clutter from our lives. Throughout the month, we will walk through our abodes and headquarters with a critical and unmerciful eye, examining and evaluating the material objects we have accumulated.
Do they serve us? Do they provide a regular and steady benefit in our lives that is consonant with where we say we are trying to go? Or do they act as useless clutter, littering our physical space and our head space with their vestigial presence? Can it be done away with? Will we even miss it? You are the surgeon holding the scalpel, and often will find that there is a blurred line between process of elimination and the process of illumination.
Don’t fall into the trap of accumulating bullshit. In simplicity we find the burning truth. In deprivation, we find what really defines us- all the rest is merely detritus, slowly rotting on the garbage heap of the Great Modern Distraction. Over-consumption and the desire to fill every corner of our existence with comfort and distraction and trinket and toy is a dangerous and cancerous trap. Burn it all away and leave what is essential to your fiery being- all tools and weapons on the road of becoming.
Third, we will add a second page to the Heroic Blueprint, one we have discussed before. A simple list. On the left, we will jot down all those traits and characteristics that we view as essential to our understanding of the heroic archetype that we are seeking to embody. On the right, we will, with honesty and brutality, inscribe all those traits we currently contain within ourselves that we believe to be negative, unproductive, undesirable.
For the month of January, we will research this trait or characteristic, understand it, and attack it with precision and focus, using all resources and strategies available to us to overcome it. If we are having trouble controlling our temper, we will look to available resources to find strategies and techniques to master it, bring it under our control, make it work for us. If we lack discipline, we will discover tried and true methods to create habit, and use them in tandem with our Training Protocols in order to build a foundation for better discipline in the future.
It is step by step and deed by deed that we will build this Blueprint, and thereby, ourselves. I invite you to begin this alchemical process with us, and to join our efforts to constantly challenge and recreate ourselves as more complete individuals, engaging in the Total War to annihilate ourselves and reforge our stories and selves on the anvil of trial and ordeal. We call this alchemy Operation Werewolf!
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