Personal Integration: The First Adult Life-Journey

I’ve just posted to the Unveiling blog about how I’m using the Unveiling archetypes to help myself clarify and prioritize tasks for my different roles, using the Weekly Compass in the Franklin Covey Day Planner system.

The more complex our life gets, the more it helps us to organize ourselves in terms of roles.

Just in these past two weeks, I’ve been teaching myself to connect my different roles with the various archetypes from Unveiling.

We each have six core archetypes; three male, and three female. Our masculine ones are Magician (visionary, creating “something” from “nothing”), Emperor (building structures, systems, and social order), and Hierophant (teaching and mentoring, within a well-defined and structured system). Our three female roles are Isis (also known as Empress; nurturing and caring), Hathor (perfumes, pleasure, and play – the “sweet things” of life), and High Priestess (contemplative, intuitive, insightful). We also each have two “reserve” modes; our Hestia (our hearth-and-home goddess; very comforting) and our “Green Man of the Woods” (our inner wild-man or wild-woman, who connects with nature and instinct). (For women, we may think of our “Green Man” as our “Green Woman,” or Artemis – the original goddess who “ran with the wolves.”)

These eight modes, taken together, are the eight “cylinders” of our “power car engine.” We need all eight. If we lose touch with any single one, it’s like trying to run a Corvette when not all the cylinders are firing. Dysfuction.

But operating in society, we tend to over-emphasize our Amazon (which for women is a combination of all of our masculine modes), and our Isis – leaving little or no time for Hathor or High Priestess. (No wonder we not only feel stressed, but – from time-to-time – disassociated. We’re missing at least two of our “power modes.”)

So as we use time-management and life-organization systems such as the Franklin Covey Day Planner, we can consciously factor in and identify roles that incorporate each of our core archetypal modes. Sometimes, we’ll blend two or more archetypes into a single role, but we can do this consciously and purposefully, so it will work.

Then, as we start allocating time, we can make sure that we identify Hathor-time, and factor pleasure and play into our daily lives. We can identify High Priestess time, and be certain that we step away from society, and from “digital distractions,” and commune with our inner being. We can associate simple housekeeping chores with our Hestia, and know that we’re nourishing an important part of our inner reserve by caring for our physical surround. (“Wax on, wax off.” This can be very refreshing.) And we can group our various nurturing and caring activities into our Isis mode, where we consciously choose and know how much time we spend on caring for others – and the trade-off in terms of caring for ourselves.

This gives us the basis for wisdom and discernment, two superior life-skills.