FINDING THE ARCHETYPE OF YOU
The other day, after viewing my presentation on the SOUNDS TRUE POWER OF SHAMANISM SUMMIT someone on Facebook asked me if I could say more about “The Archetype of You” which was one of several archetypes I discussed in the Jung and Shamanism in Synthesis discussion. Here is what I wrote:
“The Archetype of you not a “typical” or “universal archetype” applying to everybody. Each person comes with only one of these. The Greek word for it used by Plato was paradeigma, which is an essential patterned essence to be embodied or reduplicated and expressed in an individual’s life. While each person has one, like what Sandra Ingerman called “your spirit-signature.” It is a kind of unique spirit signature that each person brings here (to life) and leaves with.

To find, recognize, and honor it requires attention to your inherent manner of being and self-expression, your style of play, creativity, loving, and work. Each of these will have your highly unique “fingerprint on it, to use another image. While it is not visibly observable, it is intuitively felt and noticed. As a unique soul pattern, look at your childhood, and your past choices, and notice when those choices were coming from your heart, and not from social convention. The Archetype of You is implied in Jung’s rather large concept of the Self Archetype, your center and totality, your entelechy Self, and much more. I coined the term “Archetype of You” or alternately, “Your Archetype,” Her Archetype” and so on to specify the essential patterned essence, which is like a ground plan or blue-print for you to embody and express in life, in every time and place. I am simply further decoding what Jung meant when he said: “The main thing is that you embody the essential. If you do not embody that, life is wasted.”

Expanded Discussion
The psychoshamanic heart-path is foundational concerned finding or discovering Your Archetype, and expressing it through numerous channels in your living. I teach the heart wisdom and practices for finding Your Archetype. It is fundamental to my own consulting and mentoring practice. The Archetype of You is your uniquely patterned foundation of being, your ground plan for this life. It includes a calling to a sense of self-transcending and meaning giving purpose or service, getting the feel of your unique and irreplaceable pattern of living, and gifting the world with it. When you are connected to it through the heart, you feel yourself really coming alive. When you want to find it and clarify your understanding of it, you need to use the Heart Compass, your inner navigational system for living.

Finding and and making it more conscious requires that move gently but with attention into the dark and unknown but central area of your being, because it lives in the heart, and because it is not lying on the surface details. You have to “see through,” the surface appearances and feel into this uniquely patterned essence. Once you do, you will be able also to sense it or track it in others. The visual photo image I offer here, is a metaphor for “seeing” or “feeling” this unique essence in others. The best way to track it is to clear some space and time and use your Heart Compass to track down the pattern, through “memories, dreams and reflections” on, what are the major clues to how Your Archetype has expressed itself already in your life. What I say about the heart path in this book, has been seeded in my own experiential-autobiographical story. A heart path, one way or another is a tracking your essential nature and irreplaceable individuality. It spontaneously shows itself in those moments in living when you feel really alive, inspired, excited, passionate. It shows itself in the felt experience of delight or joy, fulfillment or depth of satisfaction in your living, and in those moments when you avoided a path that would have dulled or flattened your joy and fulfillment. It also points a right way forward in difficult and challenging times. Even if we can’t recall any recent experiences of its shinning through in our life recently, we have recourse to early childhood, to moments when we lived and acted spontaneously with delight and satisfaction, with awe and joy. The Archetype of You also communicates to you, through feeling, what is organismically wrong for you, or out of integrity with your essential nature.

Embodying your Archetype is also highly creative process. Yet, Your Archetype does not change. You do! You are the one who is living with it, whether you are aware of it or not. It is a dynamic force that invites you to really become You, and this does means to change or transform your self-system so that you can live creatively, intentionally, and spontaneously. Your Archetype issues Invitations that delight and bring depth of satisfaction. But if you repress Your Archetype a lot, sooner or later it will bring you conflict and eventually sickness in body or mind, emotions, relationships, or spirit. It then becomes a Symptom Maker. So you can’t simply do anything you want either, nor can you do what others want you to do. You can only do what it is your true nature to do. Otherwise you will suffer and not be happy or fulfilled. Fulfillment comes from living your specific ground-plan for this life. All these are signs or intimations that you are experiencing Your Archetype in one form or another.

Your Archetype seeks to break your ties to the Persona-based in feeling tones of acceptance or rejection (wanting to be acceptable, fearing rejection from the social field). Your Shadow is the rejected parts of You, and many of those parts are your truth, and the capacities that the Archetype of You needs activated and brought back on line. Recovering your ability to dance, give voice, embrace your sexuality, get creative, hold your ground and fight for what you want and believe in are crucial to living from your heart so you can embody Your Archetype, and live your true life. When Picasso said, “I don’t develop, I am,” that was His Archetype speaking through his mouth. He himself, the person and self-system in relationship to His Archetype did develop in his capacity to embody his patterned essence through his art and an aesthetic and carefree way of living in the world. Stunning individual creativity and development artistically are evident. It is also evident, from those close to him, that Picasso had other areas of his soul and life that needed more attention, sensitivity, and development of His Archetype there.

Once you begin to use the heart compass to track and notice the feeling tones surrounding Your Archetype, keep a hold of it as you enter the daily round with all its demands at work, with family, and dealing with the obligations of life. Keep alert to the signs of its appearance in your feelings, instincts, dreams, fantasies, synchronicities and other outer events, lucky developments and so on. These are clues for your NGS to continue to hunt down. Keep in mind that it is less what you do, what your job or career is, and more about the way you go about doing these things. It isn’t just about your gifts or talents either, but how you go about using them, what you serve with them.

Heart Compass Clues and Folktales
We see the problem of ignoring small but crucial sources of guidance mirrored in folktales the world over. There will be three brothers or three sisters in search of something they really want or need. They set off on a difficult journey that has several challenges. Usually the first two brothers (or sisters) pass by some dwarf or small creature, a gnome, a hag, … and this creature is scorned, mocked or laughed at. Its advice is not heeded. Yet it turns out that this despised or rejected creature will hold the very key or secret to success in the Quest. The hero or heroine in the story is the third brother or sister and this one stops, shows respect, listens to the advice or instructions, and in this way honors the advice or instruction and puts it into practice. Now this motif that occurs across cultures is trying to show us all one of the big sources of heart centered wisdom.

We are more aware of what we have been taught in school, than the subtle feeling tones in our bodies. But the lesser can be more. The smaller can be larger in significance. Attention on the heart path must be given not just to the foreground things, but the tiny felt things happening background, however easy to not notice, or pass by quickly. We have been socially programmed ignore, disrespect and not heed the counsel of these tiny bodily felt messengers, and yet if we reverse this habit and begin to show respect by slowing down, listening to what they have to say, and trusting in their wise guiding power, our lives will take on greater depth of satisfaction and joy. This will happen because we will begin to follow our true nature and become more alive and authentic. We will acquire new sureness in our steps and more confidence in our choices and actions because we will know the source of them is natural and solid.

How Can You Find and Clarify The Archetype of You?
You do it by taking some time to recall and reflect on past moments in your life where it emerged spontanesouly, when you were unselfconsciously just being yourself, without interference, fear, or judgment. You can notice it anytime you actualize a new potential and anytime have had a dream come true, when you worked hard to make that happen, and finally you succeeded. You can find it in memories that stand out and shine for you. You can also find it in any recent moments that were deeply fulfilling or satisfying. Fulfilling moments may not be pleasant, but you are called forth to be your best self, to lend a hand with compassion even when dealing with the unpleasant, to speak out against the crowd with your truth, even in the face of criticism and opposition because you feel it is right to do so. A fulfilling moment calls forth your potentiality, activates it, and gives you an opportunity to express it in a way that is aligned with and in integrity with Your Archetype.
You use your Heart Compass to pick up on the felt traces of Your Archetype, the way a hunting dog picks up on the scent of its prey. The sense of smell provides a good analogy for using your instincts and intuition, and bodily feeling to hunt down something, by picking up a whiff of it scattered in the winds of time and memory.
The experiential practice, Finding Your Archetype, is a journaling method for slowing down, activating your Heart Compass to sniff out instances in your life, when Your Archetype was shinning through in some small way. Tracking Your Archetype helps you embody it and brings a lot of pleasure, joy, delight, and centeredness to your life. It can especially helpful in times of turbulence helping you stand in your center and keep in integrity with yourself. It can creatively guide you out of difficult situations. Your Heart Compass always points to the True Magnetic North of Your Archetype. Here are the steps I have used and taught many people to use to find and clarify the Archetype of You. Clear some space and plenty of time on this practice until you have achieved clarity about Your Archetype.

An Experiential Practice for Finding Your Archetype
Part I
a. Use your Heart Compass to track, recall and write down three specific times/actual events in your life which occurred. Your memories are your archive, waiting for you to explore and track down little signs and epiphanies of you living Your Archetype in some small way.

– First, recall a time when you were, without interference just very naturally yourself, effortlessly.

– Second, recall a time which shines (is brilliant) for you.

– Third, recall a time that was deeply satisfying, as recent as possible.

b. Form a felt sense of the crucial point (crux) for each of these times. You can feel it, energetically, where the energy or live point is.

– Stay with the feel of the first time … and notice the crux of the “natural right”
– Bodily sense the second time …… the crux of its brilliance
– Bodily-felt meaning of the third time … and the crux of this state of satisfaction

c. a characteristic/quirky thing you do

Notice one thing you’ve always done since you were a child … something that was so often there, something that every person who knows you well recognizes as your quirky, unique pattern of being yourself.

d. How this thing characteristic/quirky thing has affected 1,2,3 times?

Go back to your bodily sense of each specific time and ask each internally “How has this quirky –characteristic thing I always did helped me to make this time so ‘…’ ”
– In the first situation …

– And in the second…

– And in the third…
e. What opens your heart
What opens your heart most deeply when it happens?
Write generously in your journal on this question.

f. Your highest potential

– In the last moments of your life, what would you see, when you contemplate your past life up until this last moment; what will you really remember, or spend energy recalling?

– Remember one time, probably very early in your life, when you had a deep sense of connection to Who you really are, within the meaning of your life, your destiny, your highest potential ….

– Note what strikes you the most about that time now.
-Reflect for a moment:
Can you begin to see, or feel the patterned-meaning of your life and who you really are (Your Archetype)?
g. A felt sense of “you”

Allow yourself to form a large holistic feel of you … sit for a minute with that sense of yourself before you let the words come … then write what comes with words …

h. What currently gets in the way or prevents you from living from Your Archetype?

Usually there are several things. Write them down. Identify the crux of each.

Part II
There are many kinds of questions to help you track down moments of experiencing and feeling Your Archetype. Some other good core questions for recognizing the Archetype of You are

What really brings me alive?
What shuts me down?
What must I be, do, have, to fulfill life?
How can I get my life aligned with My Archetype?
What kind of life do I really want?

Identify and write down the crux of each of your answers. Take the time to write down all the details, complete with life style and things you must have. Many other questions are possible, feel free to create your own.

Another fruitful line of inquiry is to ask: “When did I use my Heart Compass?” To answer this question is to show yourself when you were living from your heart

C. Michael Smith, Ph.D.

 

 

© Crows Nest 2018