Problems cannot be solved by the same consciousness that created them.
—Albert Einstein
Part One of this book provides a map to the hero’s journey and the archetypal guides that help us on our way.
Part Two explores the practice of personal mastery.
It contains crucial information about strategies to increase self-awareness and, in so doing, to become more capable of living a successful and happy life.
Some people tell me they do not believe in archetypes.
Unfortunately, what you do not see or think is real can still trip you up.
Such people often are controlled by the archetypes within them: they cannot stop trying to achieve every minute (Warrior), they obsessively take care of others (Altruist), they always seem to be victimized (Orphan), and so on.
Failure to understand the dynamics of the inner life can retard our progress just as much as if we did not believe in learning to read or do math.
You can utilize information in Part One simply to understand what archetypes have been expressed in your life thus far and to appreciate people who are different from you.
If this is all you do, it still is valuable.
Understanding what motivates you and appreciating the perspectives of others are important ingredients of career and life success.
Part Two, however, invites you to go deeper with this material.
If you do, you can gain the personal mastery necessary to take charge of your life at a more profound level.
In classical Jungian analysis, you find meaning in life by attending carefully to your dreams and the archetypes that populate them.
This practice is an important aspect of inner resource development and is highly recommended to readers of this book.
1 The goal is individuation, which means simply that you find out who you are at a very fundamental level.
As we become aware of archetypes—in Jungian analysis or by applying the concepts in this book to our lives—our relationship to them shifts.
Eventually, it is possible not only to honor their presence, but also to cooperate with them consciously.
At this point, we are partnering, or even dancing, with our inner guides.
In the process, we reach a new level of freedom and power.
The more familiar with our inner terrain we become, the more conscious and liberated we can be.
There are many more archetypes than the ones described in this book.
These six, however, provide an inner structure that allows us to develop ego strength, which in turn makes it possible for us to work safely with other archetypal energies.
Many people today do not go further than this in their development, in part because they do not believe in anything beyond material reality.
As the returned Innocent and Magician are awakened in us, we move into a deeper, more spiritual and soulful level of being.
In the final chapter of Part One, we learned about the Magician’s role in achieving balance.
Personal mastery means that we are capable of becoming conscious of any discrepancies between our outer role commitments and our emerging inner archetypal realities.
We stop trying to be all things to all people and focus instead on expressing our own inner truth and meeting the challenges that are meaningful to us.
In today’s world, it also is helpful to have each of these six archetypes available to us.
When this occurs, life begins to have
greater ease.
Although there is no prescribed order that must be followed for the journey, personal ease and mastery are fostered when the archetypes are in relative equilibrium.
Wholeness in the psyche traditionally is symbolized by a sacred circle that is inherently harmonious because it is a microcosm of the universe.
Jung described how patients approaching wholeness spontaneously drew mandalas—that is, circular figures with four outer parts arranged around a center.
In virtually every indigenous shamanic tradition, the medicine men or women create a magic circle (or medicine wheel) of some kind, with the four directions and the center, to invoke balance between the human, spiritual, and natural worlds.
In
Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology, Marie-Louise von Franz writes:
One primordial image in particular has survived in scientific tradition for a greater length of time than most, one that has appeared as a visual image of God, of existence, of the cosmos, of space-time, and of the particle: the image of a circle or of the “sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”
Over the centuries this image has undergone many transformations, until finally it was understood more and more as the image of the endopsychic reality in the human being.
2
The circular diagram on p. 221 is a visual summary of Part One of this book.
Before the journey, our consciousness is defined by the society around us.
The Orphan emerges when we fall from innocence, when something happens that undermines our faith—in our parents, authority figures, God, even life itself.
As we face our disappointment at living in a fallen world, the Wanderer escapes from captivity and prompts us to head out on our own to discover what is possible.
However, we soon learn that we cannot always leave when things do not go right.
At this point, the Warrior helps us
learn to stay and assert ourselves.
But in the normal progression of life, if we are always battling, we find ourselves isolated and alone.
When the Altruist emerges, we discover the joys of giving to and caring for others.
By this time, we no longer feel so vulnerable.
The return to innocence heals the wounded inner child and allows us to trust life.
Then the Magician appears, and we gain personal mastery and the ability to make life-affirming choices.
This process creates an inner “family” that can compensate for any deficits in our family of origin.
That is, when you gain a family within, your life no longer is limited by what you had or did not have as a child.
You carry a healthy family with you always.
THE INNER FAMILY
The Orphan archetype teaches the inner child to survive difficulty.
The Wanderer differentiates the adolescent from parents and others and promotes the sense of adventure we need to face the unknown.
The Warrior activates the inner father so he can protect and provide for us.
The Altruist supports the inner mother so she can nurture and comfort us.
(Here, of course, I am using the traditional attributes of mother and father.
They may or may not correspond to qualities of your actual parents.
It is not important which parent carries which qualities as long as a child is safe, loved, and challenged.)
As we build an inner family, the inner child does not feel so lost, alone, and dependent.
Thus, we no longer have to be so reactive to what our families of origin, and particularly our parents, did or did not do.
Though most of us project issues with our parents onto other authority figures as well as onto organizations, we can learn to defuse this process by building an inner archetypal magic circle that allows us to withdraw these projections.
It is important to remember that these inner figures are archetypes—and archetypes are both within us and around us.
When we return to innocence, the universe itself begins to feel
like a more friendly place.
Having found out who we are, it is not such a stretch to imagine that everyone is precious, because others, like us, have something unique to give.
Having developed boundaries, it does not seem so frightening to open our hearts to receive.
We know that if anything hurtful comes our way, we can defend ourselves.
Having opened our hearts to care for others, it seems logical that others will love and care for us as well.
When this circle is complete and the inner child is healed, the Magician steps to the center to hold the other archetypes in balance.
It also supports choice and the inner mastery that allows us to create the lives we truly want to live.
Most of us think that our lives are spinning out of control because of external pressures,
such as the need to juggle multiple roles.
The truth is that we cannot make order in our lives because our archetypes are not in balance.
Too much Orphan, and we feel we’re at the mercy of our circumstances.
Too much Wanderer, and we constantly distance, so we do not get the help we need.
Too much Warrior, and we feel compelled to overachieve.
Too much Altruist, and we become martyrs, giving our lives away to help or please others.
Too much Innocent, and we fail to anticipate problems and get blind-sided.
Too much Magician, and we lack any sense of limits: we think we can transform everyone and everything.
THE SELF AND THE SIX ARCHETYPES
Just knowing the names and qualities of these archetypes automatically helps you separate from them enough to keep them from possessing you.
What I mean here is that essentially we are “possessed” by an archetype when we allow its perspective to define who we are.
If you can name a feeling or thought as belonging to a particular archetype, you no longer are identified with that thought or feeling.
As soon as you differentiate yourself from the archetype, you can influence the degree and quality of its expression in your life.
Not too long ago, I was leaving work after a particularly rugged day.
I thought to myself, “I’m depressed.”
I realized that I easily could talk myself into getting more and more down if I kept up this thinking pattern.
Using
The Hero Within model, I remembered to ask myself, “What part of me is depressed?”
I then realized that my Orphan was unhappy because I had been mistreated by some colleagues.
The unfairness of what had happened stung me so badly that it immediately threw me psychologically out of balance, and I began identifying with just one archetype.
As I thought about it, I realized that the rest of me was fine.
Differentiating the self from the Orphan brought immediate relief from identifying who I was with this negative feeling.
I could call on my inner Altruist, who recommended a good chat with a friend,
followed by a bubble bath.
Then my inner Warrior gave advice on how to defend myself from the nefarious political maneuvers going on in my workplace.
Finally, I could call on my Innocent to remind me to choose inner peace and trust the process of the interaction.
When we recognize the archetypal basis of all thoughts, we develop the capacity to identify the structures beneath them.
No longer trapped in one point of view, we can switch mental models to solve problems when one of our habitual approaches is not working.
This is why the capacity for inner resource development is essential for anyone in a leadership position today.
The great problems of our time cannot be solved by people in the grip of any one archetype’s way of seeing the world.
LIFE STAGES AND ARCHETYPAL STRENGTHS
Archetypes also tend to emerge at predictable life stages, unless they are repressed by our conditioning or current environmental pressures.
Although archetypes can be present at any time, we need certain ones to help us face key developmental challenges.
Therefore, we are not out of balance if, at particular times, these archetypes take a more active role in our lives than others.
For example:
• The Innocent and Orphan archetypes always are present in childhood.
They give rise to continuing inner-child issues until both are integrated into the psyche.
• The Wanderer tends to be activated in adolescence and the mid-life transition.
If its lessons are not learned during these key passages, we can be left with an unnerving lack of direction and self-knowledge.
• The Warrior and the Altruist dominate in early life, as we learn to take on family and career responsibilities.
If they are not expressed at this time, we are likely to be plagued by feelings of powerlessness until both are activated.
• The Innocent reemerges and the Magician appears in mid-life and later, if not before.
Without these archetypes, we cannot resolve issues of spirit and soul and are left with a sense of meaninglessness.
It also is true that we always have access to every archetypal mode.
What “stage” we are in has to do with where we “hang out” the most, where we spend the greatest percentage of our time.
The most oppressed victim will have moments of transcendence.
And none of us gets so advanced that we stop feeling, every once in a while, like a motherless child.
In fact, each stage has a gift for us, something critical to teach us about being human.
Most of us have a favorite archetype throughout life, but we need access to all the others to traverse predictable life passages successfully.
If we continue to grow in this way, we will gain wisdom as we age.
The fact that people address certain developmental tasks in a predictable order
does not mean that we leave one archetype behind in a linear fashion and go on to another.
We attain deeper levels of understanding and higher levels of performance associated with any one of the archetypes only by intensifying our investment in the others.
We continually sharpen and refine skills in each category, for the journey truly is a process of high-level skill development.
Ultimately, we gain a repertoire of possible responses to life, giving us incrementally more choices about how we can react in any given situation.
Accordingly, over time, we tend to achieve greater archetypal balance, simply because the pressures of maturation expand our range of options.
You can use the archetypal wheel to analyze the overall balance in your life.
Leading a full and complex life requires the following:
• The ability to anticipate problems so that you can avoid overload (Orphan);
• Some form of authentic self-expression (Wanderer);
• Clear goals and the will to achieve them (Warrior);
• Generosity toward family, friends, and colleagues and concern for the good of the whole society (Altruist);
• A sense of faith and trust in a God, Goddess, Higher Power, or simply life itself (Innocent); and
• That you take responsibility for existential choice and creating or restoring the balance that is right for you at any given time (Magician).
*
INNER ENERGY AND OUTER ROLES
When the outer roles we are living conflict with our inner energy dynamic, we can feel stale, burned out, as though the meaning has gone out of our lives.
This can happen because, while those roles once fit us, we have changed inside or because we are making choices based on what others want for us, what seems expedient, or what might work in the short run, rather than what we genuinely desire.
Our lives seem manageable to the degree that we are able to express our inner realities in the outer roles we play.
If the energy within us is moving naturally toward outer activities that we are repressing, we will have no energy for what we in fact
are doing.
As a result, we feel either exhausted or hyper all the time.
When the energy of our inner archetypal potential matches our outer activities, our work proceeds with ease and we experience life as pleasant.
Sometimes we can alter our outer roles to fit our inner lives, and sometimes our challenge is to awaken an archetype within that is needed to fulfill our external commitments.
Part Two is a guidebook for developing personal mastery.
Chapter 8, “Honoring Your Life,” offers an opportunity for you to use the hero’s journey map as a way to celebrate the route you have
taken—one that is uniquely your own.
In the process, you can explore the archetypal influences upon you of your gender, your family of origin, and your current workplace.
Chapter 9, “Troubleshooting When You Get Lost or Stuck,” provides a compass to help you find your way when you are lost or to find the way out when you feel stuck.
Finally, Chapter 10, “The Ethics of the Journey,” explores the heroic code, since nothing throws us off balance as quickly as violating our principles and values.
As a whole, Part Two is designed to give you the tools necessary to work with your own heroic journey and in this way to take greater control of your life.
Exercise A: If you have not taken the Heroic Myth Self-Test in Appendix A already, now is the time to do so.
To explore the balance in your life right now, look at your results on Part One.
Compare the archetypes within you to the roles you actually play at this time.
For example, if you score high on the Altruist and are engaged in parenting or otherwise helping or developing others, you would have archetype/role congruence on this measure.
However, if you scored low on Altruist and your major role is a caregiving one, you may experience stress.
Then you might look at your current activities more generally to see how your inner archetypes are, or could be, expressed in your outer life.
If some of your archetypes are evidenced primarily in their negative forms, you also might explore ways they could be expressed more positively.
The chart on the following page provides examples that might stimulate your thinking.
It is not meant to be exhaustive.
Exercise B: Part Two of the Heroic Myth Self-Test tells you what archetypal behavior others see in you.
Look back at your results on Part One and compare them with those on Part Two.
First, notice whether you see yourself more or less positively than others do.
Second, pay attention to whether others are seeing an archetypal expression in you that you are missing.
Third, if some archetype you know to be active
within you is not apparent to others, analyze why this might be.
Perhaps you are not acting in external ways that show this inner strength.
Perhaps others are not open to noticing this archetype.
Perhaps they see you through their own archetypal lens.
If others see you very differently than you see yourself, however, you may want to work on aligning your everyday personality and behavior with your inner truth.
Internal Archetype
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Possible Outer Expression
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Orphan
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Participation in therapy or a recovery program, reaching out to others in need, work that provides job security, involvement in liberation movements, learning about ways to live more effectively
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Wanderer
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Solitary endeavors, travel, exploration of new ideas or experiences, following your own interests, differentiating yourself from others, starting a new endeavor
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Warrior
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Competitive endeavors, persevering in difficult circumstances, setting and achieving goals, asserting your needs and keeping strong boundaries, building physical strength
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Altruist
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Taking care of children, the elderly, or the ailing, volunteer and community services, philanthropic efforts, nurturing yourself or others
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Innocent
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Prayer and meditation, creative/artistic pursuits, learning from others, celebrating, having fun
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Magician
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Being a catalyst for change, exerting influence or leadership, making big decisions, helping others work well together, creating new models, practices, or approaches
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