The Warrior Without a Mentor: A Journey from the Walls of the Past
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- December 30, 2025
The Mining Village of the Mind
I was born into a landscape of hard lines and grey skies—a small Scottish mining village where the air felt thick with more than just coal dust. It was a place of financial poverty, yes, but more significantly, it was a place of a “poverty of being.”
Even as a toddler, I knew I was an outlier. While the adults around me moved through life on rigid rails of presumption and judgment, I sensed something else. To me, the world wasn’t solid or unquestionable; it was energetic, spacious, and vibrating with possibility. I could see the walls my parents lived within—not physical walls, but structures of thought and survival strategies they had built to protect themselves from a world they perceived as hostile.
The Mirror of Innocence
I was coping. Or at least, I was learning how to mask. I was beginning that slow slide into acquiescence that we call “growing up.” But then, when I was five, my brother arrived.
His arrival was like being thrust into a freezing pond that snapped me awake. Looking at his tiny, vulnerable presence, I felt an urgent, visceral need to protect him from the world he had just stepped into. But in that urge to protect him, I had to face the reality of what I was already carrying.
His innocence revealed my own. It highlighted the weight of the previous five years—the constant judgment, the lack of acknowledgement of one’s true presence, the subtle unkindness of a world that demands you stay small. I realised that if I wanted to rescue him, I had to rescue myself. Even just holding his tiny hand made me feel possible again. His arrival helped me realise I was never going to fit in… I couldn’t settle for, ‘I guess that’s just how life is going to be.’ That was never going to work for me.
The Inconvenient Child
I became a warrior without a mentor. I was the inconvenient child, the one who would not pretend the emperor was dressed and wouldn’t stop pointing it out. My rebellion wasn’t about breaking windows; it was about refusing to blend in just to belong. I sensed the looming cost of socialisation—the way school and society strip wild, untamed life down, shaping it into “acceptable versions” of ourselves.
We are taught that to care about our parents or our community, we must become like them. We prove our love through our limitations. We “fit in” as a way of saying, “I’m just like you.” And while parents generally want what is best for us, their version of “best” is how best they can get us to fit in and not stick our head above the wall.
I sensed my own aliveness begin to smolder. I started wearing the acceptable version of myself like armor. It’s a heavy suit to wear. It appears to keep you safe, perhaps, but it also keeps you from hearing life’s song or feeling its fire within.
The Survival of Normal
Why do we do this? Why do we trade our innate brilliance for the dull safety of the crowd? Because we are taught that avoiding others’ discomfort is the only way to be kind and at ease. We absorb the belief that if we are “too much”—too loud, too smart, too aware, too different—we will be cast out.
But what if the problem was never you? What if the reality you were born into was just one possibility, and most have forgotten they could step outside it and choose another?
Growing up in that mining village, I saw people who never cared enough for themselves to ask a single question. They looped in the same cycles of hiding and judging, never realising they held the keys to their own prison cells. I refused to be another loop in that cycle. I knew there was a reality where we move differently, where our voices carry unapologetic truth, where our choices sync with a deeper rhythm than the one dictated by “socialisation.”
Reclaiming the Wild
Waking up to your own possibility is a radical choice. It is the moment you decide that the “poverty of being” is no longer your inheritance. You were born with a deep knowing—not the rules like not licking shop windows, but the quiet, powerful awareness of your own presence and the contribution you bring to the world.
You were conditioned to suppress that knowing. You were taught to numb your intelligence so you wouldn’t make the people around you uncomfortable.. But that era can be over. The choice is now yours. You can continue to stay in the warm water, like a frog, until you’re cooked, or you can jump.
Change begins with the realisation that you have no reason to align with what doesn’t serve you. You don’t have to fight it, and you don’t have to agree with it. You just have to outgrow it. You can move into the peace and joy that is your birthright by starting to ask questions. Question everything. Questions are what create awareness. Not answers. You have enough of those.
We are at a crossroads, both individually and as a species. Are we going to use our intelligence to create a kinder, more sustainable future, or are we going to stumble along until we’ve destroyed everything in the name of “normal”? The answer starts with you. It started for me as a five-year-old child holding my brother’s hand and acknowledging that “That’s just how life is” is the biggest lie ever told.
What is truly possible for you?
- About the Author
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Moira Bramley is a meditation practitioner and teacher with over 25 years of experience in anthropology, energy work, and consciousness. Her journey began with the profound question: What exactly consti- tutes a lack of awareness? And what does consciousness truly give us? Moira’s mission is to raise consciousness on the planet, helping others understand that they can create the space and presence accessed in meditation as a full-time reality.
