The Apprenticeship of Warriors – Part One

In previous posts I’ve discussed the use of the Medicine Wheel as a tool for personal development. 

The four directions on the Medicine Wheel correlate with four aspects of ourselves (our four bodies).  They are:

• Physical
• Mental
• Emotional
• Spiritual

For many Native Americans the Medicine Wheel was also used in the development of warriors.

In order to identify specific practices and discourses of warriorship, I examined ways that membership in a community of practice of warriorship became available and desirable.

I looked for stages of increasingly committed membership that was culturally patterned, not random or haphazard. I wanted to identify stages of warriorship that represented a progression that might be broadly reproduces for individuals in similar ways to the Warrior apprenticeship experienced by the Native American cultures.

Awareness and active learning, two cognitive processes, are components of a larger cognitive process of attention. These processes are supported by the physical, emotional, and intellectual aspects of human learning prior to identity formation, but moving toward a particular identity.

Affiliation and affirmation, two additional social processes, are components of a larger social process of commitment. The processes involved in commitment are supported not only by the physical, emotional, and intellectual aspects of human social and individual identification, but in addition require the presence of a spiritual component in the learning/identification process.

The diagram below shows the stages of becoming a warrior. Cognitive processes are represented in text boxes aligned in the left column.

Social processes are represented in text boxes aligned in the center column. The aspects of a human being that are employed during, and contribute to, either the cognitive processes or social processes are in text boxes in the right column.

The identity produced by this interaction of learning about warriorship, social influences of warriorship and personal choices to pursue warriorship is a Warrior Identity.

In subsequent posts that will follow, we’ll look into ways that the learning/identification processes represented in this paradigm were experienced and articulated by the participants in this warrior transition.