The Five Archetypes is a guide to building more harmony in your life—whether with yourself or in your relationships. It’s an invitation to become better at every internal and external interaction you have by becoming more aware of, and in control of, your behavioral tendencies and understanding of the people around you. When you’re using this guide, I want you to remember that you are limitless. Your primary way of uplifting others, improving relationships, making things work better, creating systems, impacting a company, contributing to a team, or leading a movement—all are manifested through your own unique and beautiful brand of brilliance. Celebrate it! Teach it to others with a generous spirit, and learn how to deeply care for the lessons you learn from all the other archetype teachers in your life.
One of the first things you can expect to learn from this book is that each of the Five Archetypes demonstrates a unique set of gifts that can manifest as strengths or as stress states. For example, the Metal gift of creating beauty and consistency is necessary for living a balanced life. But this gift can become stifling to others if Metal isn’t able to counterbalance this ability with the flexibility to take other people’s opinions into account. That being said, your position along your stress–strength spectrum is constantly shifting as a result of a confluence of factors, including:
Once you understand the influence your nature, your environment, and your situational context have on your overall well-being, you can harness that knowledge and spend more time in courage, joy, compassion, and strength.
Immediately following this chapter, you will find the Five Archetypes assessment. Your assessment results will illuminate your primary archetype as well as the order in which the other four fall within your nature. Your primary archetype reveals your characteristic traits and tendencies in strength and in stress. Your primary archetype also reveals that the particular way you manifest stress is naturally predetermined. This knowledge will give you the power to redirect the trajectory of your life toward harmony and balance.
Understanding your lowest archetype will grant you insight into what competencies you can improve upon in order to feel more balanced when facing stressful situations. Additionally, learning where the other three archetypes settle within the range of all five will help you clearly understand which coping skills you probably already favor and more naturally reach for to self-soothe and modify your more intense reactions in the face of stress.
To summarize, knowing your primary archetype will equip you with:
Knowing your lowest archetype will reveal to you:
Becoming aware of your primary and lowest archetypes is an important part of your growth process. The individual archetype chapters will show you how to spend more time feeling strong by keeping your primary archetype harmonized. The skills you develop and the knowledge you gain from learning your primary and lowest archetypes will reduce the impact of uncomfortable stress responses and help you develop stronger interpersonal relationship skills.
The archetypes that naturally nurture and challenge your primary archetype will also offer invaluable insight during your personal growth process. To determine your primary’s supporting archetypes, flip back to the images of the elemental cycles on pages 3 and 4 and look at the two elements adjacent to your primary. The skills, behaviors, and people associated with the elements/archetypes to the left and right of your primary will feel more nurturing to you and easier to tolerate most of the time. They instinctively encourage you to reach your goals, and they help you feel soothed when things aren’t going your way.
On the other hand, the people, behaviors, and skills associated with the elements/archetypes that oppose your primary will come off as more prickly and challenging. You need these opposing archetypes to achieve balance and be effective at work and in relationships, but you aren’t likely to naturally gravitate toward them. In fact, the activities and people that correspond to your opposing archetypes will likely be those you shy away from and have to work harder to tolerate. These are your chronic button pushers, and empathizing with them can empower heroic states of resilience and compassion.
In the individual archetype chapters that follow the assessment, you’ll find the steps that are central to the Five Archetypes method. This method will teach you personalized skills for how to optimize your primary archetype with increased self-awareness and self-regulation skills, as well as how to achieve harmony in your life by increasing empathy for your own needs and those of others around you. In order to more effectively utilize the information in these archetype chapters, here are brief overviews of what the two main components of the Five Archetypes method entail:
Optimization is about gaining self-awareness and self-regulation. In the Five Archetypes method, optimization begins with identifying your primary archetype and then being mindful enough to recognize in the moment when you’re in your primary type’s coordinating strength and stress states. The act of recognizing calls upon your ability to adjust how you use your time. The optimization section in each archetype chapter will encourage you to take a conscious step back from the rigmarole instead of rushing through life, hoping that everything goes as planned. By simply learning and recognizing your primary archetype’s stress and strength states, you will begin to have more control over them, which will make it easier for you to return to calm in the face of discomfort.
The next step toward achieving optimization is understanding your primary archetype’s needs for safety. Knowing your unique needs will further expand your skill set for self-regulation. As you practice observing how you feel when your needs for safety aren’t met, you begin to make the connection between your archetypal needs and the onset and subsequent severity of your stress states. This knowledge and mindfulness practice broadens your self-awareness and amplifies your ability to regulate in the face of difficulty.
A harmonized life is not one that lacks stress and challenge. Harmonization as part of the Five Archetypes method is actually about achieving an elevated state of empathy, which leads to sustainable strength in the face of stressors and challenges. In harmony, you will be able to predict, avoid, and nimbly navigate the difficult personal and interpersonal moments of your own life. Simultaneously, harmony among your Five Archetypes will manifest as the power to support those around you whose primary way of engaging with the world may be naturally at odds with your own. In harmony, you have more tolerance and appreciation for people who usually push your buttons. At its core, a harmonized state of being is akin to unconditional love for yourself and those around you.
When your archetypes are harmonized, you notice the deeply meaningful interconnectedness within and throughout the global environment.
In addition to setting you on the path toward personal optimization and harmonization, this book will teach you how to recognize and foster more harmonious relationships with the following key people in your life:
Relationships are where we test-drive what we think we know about ourselves and others. The intersection of me and you is where the magic happens. It’s where I learn what’s unique about me and how my beliefs and actions are received and reflected in your eyes, facial expressions, body language, and behaviors. It’s the playing field of life, where we experiment with and practice our engagement tactics. It’s the terrain where we are at the highest risk of having our hearts broken and simultaneously having the best shot of falling in delicious, lasting love. Where you and I meet is where we have the most potential to become heroes in this wondrous game of life.
We thrive in connectedness, affiliation, and socializing. In relationships, we exchange ideas, emotions, glances, intentions, and touches. We experiment to see what pushes his buttons and what calms her down. We learn how long we have to dig in our heels to get what we want. We find out what she likes to eat, and we examine what makes him feel safe. Together, we become the creators of life, literally and figuratively.
Applying your knowledge of the Five Archetypes to your relationships can increase your capacity to learn fascinating intricacies about yourself and others. As a result, you can develop exponentially expanded skills for empathy, listening, critical thinking, decision making, and compassionate communication, and therefore become a more reliable, stable, and predictable source of unconditional love for yourself and other people. The Five Archetypes method does not call for avoiding certain relationships because of your primary type or others’ primary types. There are no inherently bad combinations based on our internal nature. Understanding relationships through the rubric of the Five Archetypes is about learning to achieve harmony within yourself so that you become a better partner to any of the five types while remaining present, aware, and empathetic to others.
We’ve all heard the idea that we must put on our oxygen masks first before we can assist others—and it’s true. We’re not much use to someone else if we’re depleted.
Self-care works best when it’s customized to meet your individual needs. As you’ll learn in this book, you’re drawn to certain types of exercise, certain patterns of eating, and certain needs for sleep and social interaction based on your primary nature. One way to make sure your wellness plan works for you would be to seek the help of a professional health-care worker who is trained to customize self-care guidelines. There are many health coaches, integrative doctors, Ayurvedic nutritionists, and acupuncturists who are skilled in building individualized holistic care plans for their clients and patients. If you’re just starting out on your wellness journey, though, this book also offers personalized wellness practices to complement all five archetypes.
In the archetype chapters, I include some overall approaches to self-care for each particular archetype, as well as Ayurvedic strategies that correspond to that type’s specific needs for balance. Ayurveda is a science concerned with living an optimal and healthy life. It’s considered to be the world’s oldest known medical system, originating in India more than five thousand years ago; it’s a personalized method of care that encompasses a vast array of lifestyle medicine, including yoga, pranayama (breathwork), nutrition, sleep, stress-reduction techniques, and more.
I’m including Ayurvedic well-being practices in this book because they jibe seamlessly with the Traditional Chinese Medicine philosophy of achieving harmony by learning and being aware of nature’s rhythms in our daily lives. Specifically:
While there are differences between the two systems, both Ayurvedic medicine and TCM perceive the body as having energetic centers and pathways that correspond to a host of interrelated physical, emotional, and spiritual qualities. By focusing treatment along and within these energy lines and areas, as well as on their correlating organ and endocrine systems and emotional and cognitive behaviors, the body and mind are supported and gently encouraged toward balance.
The energy centers associated with Ayurveda are called chakras, and Ayurveda identifies seven major chakras in the human body. From bottom to top they are:
According to Christopher R. Chase, MD, of the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Vermont Medical Center and Larner College of Medicine in Burlington, Vermont, the seven chakras share direct and specific correspondences to the Five Archetypes of TCM4:
Boost your sense of agency by personalizing your self-care approach. Ayurveda and the Five Archetypes method are systems that empower you with customized well-being road maps. They each pair deep self-knowledge and understanding with natural strategies for balance. Practicing these methods will improve your skills for self-regulation in the moment and expand your foundation of resilience over time.
You will notice that the Ayurvedic lifestyle practice sections at the end of each archetype chapter provide a variety of multisensory self-care recommendations. This is because when we feel disharmony in the mind or body, it’s expressed throughout all our senses. Our ability to think, be creative, love, smell, taste, see clearly, listen, digest, sleep, stretch, move, feel emotions, hear ourselves or one another, and access our greater sense of purpose can all be impacted as a result of a spiritual, emotional, or physical imbalance. Ayurveda suggests that we can reestablish balance by using multimodal and multisensory therapeutic interventions. Therefore, the strategies listed in these sections endeavor to restore balance through our different senses. They involve aromatherapy, color therapy, yoga, tastes, and sounds, and overall, they give us a greater understanding of personal strength and purpose.
Ayurveda, like the Five Archetypes method, provides insights into how to live in harmony with nature and natural rhythms. The practical guidelines of both systems can help us take control of our lives and cultivate radiant health.
In the archetype chapters of this book, you will also find information on how to optimize overall well-being according to each particular archetype. I encourage you to follow the advice you feel drawn to in the Ayurveda section that correlates to your primary archetype. That said, you may also consider following the Ayurvedic guidelines for the archetypes you want to enhance within your nature. Feel free to have fun and try the practices that speak to you.
As you peruse the Ayurveda and self-care sections, keep in mind that we are naturally drawn to strategies that match our primary archetype and repelled by those that represent our opposing archetypes, or those in which we scored the lowest on the assessment. Remain aware of how balanced a regimen you keep. Track the lifestyle improvements you avoid integrating and the ones you favor. To achieve harmony within yourself, you’ll need to practice self-care activities that pertain to all five archetypes, not only the ones you like most.
Ultimately, my hope is that the Ayurveda and other self-care strategies in this book will expand your options for achieving and maintaining a sense of overall well-being.
Personal and interpersonal struggles over our lifetime cause wounds that, when left unexamined, can intensify and impair our ability to experience a fulfilling life. We often wonder why we get stuck in ruts, repeating thought and behavior patterns that don’t serve us. As time passes, we ache for some semblance of relief from the discomfort we feel. Without a seemingly simple “way out,” we sometimes veer toward destructive activities and behaviors to feel better. The antidote is self-awareness. By becoming aware of who you are and what you need through the Five Archetypes method, you’ll have unfettered access to the personalized tools and skills that will help you thrive.
Now that you have a better idea of the way in which the Five Archetypes method can help you build self-awareness, self-regulation, and empathy so that you can more effectively predict and overcome obstacles in personal and interpersonal relationships, you’re ready to take the assessment and start using the guidelines that follow.
3 Bhushan Patwardhan, Dnyaneshwar Warude, P. Pushpangadan, and Narendra Bhatt, “Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine: A Comparative Overview,” Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine 2, no. 4 (December 2005): 465–73, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1297513/.
4 Christopher R. Chase, “The Geometry of Emotions: Using Chakra Acupuncture and 5-Phase Theory to Describe Personality Archetypes for Clinical Use,” Medical Acupuncture 30, no. 4 (August 1, 2018): 167–78, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6106753/.