How This Doctrine Was Found

There were things I could not change.

There were people I could not change.

There were losses I could not reverse.

There were answers I might never receive.

There were explanations that, even if I received them, would not undo what had happened.

And there were circumstances over which I had absolutely no authority.

I had to accept loss as part of reality. More difficult still, I had to accept the role my own decisions had played in bringing me to where I was.

That did not mean assuming responsibility for the actions of other people. There were a myriad of elements present in the shadows of my experience — people, relationships, deaths, betrayals, past indiscretions, broken impasses, choices made by me and choices imposed upon me.

All of those things were real. But I could no longer allow them to become the governor of my internal dialogue.

Looking outward and continually asking why I was in so much pain was not where I was going to find resolution. At some point, the question had to change. It could no longer only be why did this happen to me?

And the first thing that belonged to me was my own mind.

I had to change the tape. Then I had to change it again. And again. And again.

I began treating my attention as something that required protection. When I allowed it to wander and the internal voice escaped the quarantine I was attempting to construct around certain destructive thought patterns, I needed something that brought me back into the present. For a time, I wore a rubber band around my wrist as a physical reminder. I would use that interruption to catch the thought and consciously redirect myself.

I began speaking the darkness back into its box. Not denying that it existed. Not pretending the memories were gone. Not convincing myself that nothing had happened.

I did this repeatedly. For months. And eventually I noticed something beginning to shift.

There was more space. More time with myself and less time running the same memories through my head in an endless loop.

I stopped questioning every decision I had made. I stopped expecting answers from people who either could not or would not give them. I stopped making closure dependent upon someone else’s explanation.

Instead, I began consciously observing myself.

My thought patterns. My moods. My focus.

My consumption. My reactions. My pain points.

Where my attention went. What triggered me. What settled me.

What I was feeding with my energy. What I was avoiding.

What I already knew but continued trying not to know.

At first, there were very few recognizable pleasure points. Most of what I associated with happiness existed in memory. And memory was dangerous territory.

A good memory would remind me of something I loved. That reminder would immediately become a reminder of what I had lost. The memory I had reached for because it represented happiness could send me directly back into mourning, self-doubt, and darkness.

I began realizing how easy it was to fall backward simply by chasing something I recognized as happiness. So I stopped chasing it. For a while, I simply observed. I tried to remain present, attentive, and almost indifferent to the demand that every thought or emotion immediately mean something.

Something entered. I watched it.

Something hurt. I watched that too.

Fear appeared. Memory appeared. Anger appeared.

Love appeared. Loss appeared.

Instead of immediately becoming whatever entered my field, I began learning to create a space between receiving it and reacting to it. That space became one of the foundations of everything that follows in this book.

Over time, something else began happening. I started building trust with myself. Not confidence in the conventional sense. Trust.

There is a difference. Confidence can tell you that you are capable. Trust requires evidence.

I began proving things to myself.

If my emotional body sensed that I was walking toward something dangerous, I was learning not to automatically silence it.

If discernment told me something was wrong, I became more willing to investigate it instead of immediately rationalizing it away.

If I made myself a promise, I tried to keep it.

If I established a boundary, I tried to honor it.

If I failed to honor it, I tried to stop lying to myself about why.

Each time I followed through, another small piece of evidence accumulated.

That realization was transformative. The more I kept my promises, the more I accepted responsibility for what actually belonged to me. The more responsibility I accepted, the more the different parts of me seemed capable of trusting one another again.

My mind could trust that discernment would be heard.

My emotions could trust that they did not always have to scream to receive acknowledgment.

My body could begin learning that recognizing danger did not necessarily mean remaining helpless inside of it.

And the part of me responsible for action could begin trusting the systems behind it to provide information rather than chaos.

Slowly, the scattered pieces began communicating. And as they did, something I had not expected began returning.

Value. I began rediscovering value in myself. Then pride. Then confidence. Not pride in being better than anyone. Not confidence that nothing could hurt me. Confidence in something much simpler:

I could control what I internalized.

I could become more deliberate about what received my attention.

I could decide what I would engage with.

I could decide what deserved access.

I could decide whether another person’s chaos would become my environment.

And eventually I could exercise that authority all the way down to the little voice inside my own head. I could not always control what the voice said. But I could decide whether it received the throne.

That was the beginning of dominion. And it was through the repeated practice of discernment that I rediscovered it.

I was still fragmented. Still healing. Still hurting. But something had changed. My dominion was becoming stronger, more resolute, and more intentional than anything I had experienced before.

I began understanding that dominion was not power over another person. It was not controlling the world around me. It was not ensuring that nothing painful ever happened again. It was the increasing capacity to govern the territory that actually belonged to me.

My attention. My response. My participation.

My boundaries. My conduct.

My internal dialogue. My next decision.

This is not an imagined process I constructed from a distance. It was lived. It was tested under pressure. It was built while the outcome mattered very much to me — while my life, my identity, the man I had been, the man I was, and the man I still wanted to become all felt as though they were hanging somewhere inside the balance.

In that chaos, I found a way to begin securing myself. To protect what needed protection. To heal what could be healed. To take agency over my mind, body, heart, and actions in a way that had previously been unfamiliar to me.

I trusted myself. That trust allowed me to become more honest with myself. That honesty made discernment possible.

Discernment allowed me to distinguish truth from projection, the present from the past, compassion from self-abandonment, boundaries from control, and fear from authority.

From there, I began rebuilding my dominion. And dominion gave me architecture. It gave structure to things that had previously existed only as values, instincts, pain, hopes, and reactions.

And self-trust gave me enough stability to begin constructing something larger than survival. A kingdom.

Not a kingdom over anyone else. A kingdom within my legitimate jurisdiction. A life governed deliberately. A mind no longer surrendered indiscriminately to every thought that entered it. A heart capable of remaining open without leaving every door unlocked. A body beginning to believe that when danger appeared, someone would respond.

Me.

That is Dominion of Discernment. And Coyotes and Crows is the story, philosophy, and architecture that emerged from learning one fundamental truth.