The Taproot Podcast - Parts Based Archetypal Psychology Meditation for Trauma and Knowing the Self

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

Ultimate Archetype Meditation for Inner Healing and Self-Discovery | Tapoo Therapy Collective Welcome to the Ultimate Archetype Meditation guided by Joel from the Tapoo Therapy Collective Podcast! �� This transformative meditation, rooted in Jungian psychology and Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, helps you connect with your inner Warrior, Magician, Queen, King, Lover, and Child archetypes. Whether you're seeking emotional healing, self-discovery, or spiritual growth, this practice is designed to guide you toward wholeness and empowerment. 🔥 Why Watch This Meditation? Explore the multiplicity of your psyche and heal past wounds. Cultivate confidence, intuition, compassion, leadership, intimacy, and joy. Perfect for beginners and advanced meditators alike. Backed by insights from Jungian psychology, IFS therapy, and neuroscience (theta wave brain mapping). 🔔 Subscribe to Tapoo Therapy Collective for weekly meditations, podcasts, and mental health insights: Subscribe Now💬 Comment below: Which archetype resonated with you the most?👍 Like and Share to spread healing and inspiration! Support Our Podcast We create this content for free, but it takes significant time and resources. Support us by checking out our sponsor, Hardy Nutritionals, a research-backed vitamin company that supports mental clarity and emotional balance. Use code TAPROOT for 15% off at GetHardy. Your purchase helps us continue creating transformative content! Timestamps 0:00 - Introduction to Archetype Meditation 0:27 - Understanding Archetypes (Jungian Psychology & IFS Therapy) 1:05 - Preparation: Finding a Comfortable Position 1:18 - Guided Breathing and Body Awareness 2:31 - Warrior Archetype: Assertiveness and Boundaries 11:35 - Magician Archetype: Intuition and Creativity 19:37 - Queen Archetype: Compassion and Nurturing 27:20 - King Archetype: Leadership and Purpose 34:10 - Lover Archetype: Intimacy and Connection 44:41 - Child Archetype: Innocence and Playfulness 54:13 - Integration of All Archetypes 56:49 - Closing and Returning to the Present 59:12 - Sponsor Message: Hardy Nutritionals Connect With Us 🌐 Website: Tapoo Therapy Collective📸 Instagram: @TapootTherapy🎙️ Podcast: Listen on Spotify📧 Email: [e-mail] #Meditation #GuidedMeditation #ArchetypeMeditation #JungianPsychology #IFSTherapy #SelfDiscovery #EmotionalHealing #MentalHealth #SpiritualGrowth #InnerPeace #Mindfulness #PersonalGrowth #HealingMeditation #TapooTherapy #WarriorArchetype #MagicianArchetype #QueenArchetype #KingArchetype #LoverArchetype #ChildArchetype #ThetaWaves #BrainMapping #MentalClarity #HardyNutritionals

Hey guys, it's Joel with the Tapri therapy collective podcast and now we're going to do a meditation on archetypes this fits Jungian psychology if you're coming from that background, it's also applicable to something like IFS therapy Internal family systems really any kind of parts based therapy That helps you feel the tension between parts of self and recognize them as a multiplicity, yourself as a multiplicity, and follow them back into the places where they have been affected and developed over the course of the life.

And before we start I want you to find a comfortable position, seated, crouching or lying down. And allow your body to settle into a posture that feels aligned and at ease. And close your eyes and take a few deep breaths all the way in hold it and out and let go of any tension or preoccupation with each exhalation for a few minutes before we start and bring your awareness inward. I notice the sensations and rhythms of your physical being. One way to do that, to check in with your body, is to imagine a point of light forming and brightening at the tips of your toes and then running

all the way up through your ankles and your knees and your thighs and your pelvis and your spine and across your heart and your arms and up your neck and through the top of your head and then just let the ball of light bounce back and forth for a minute so that you enter physical awareness or what we would call a theta wave in the QAG brain mapping lab at Taproot. And we'll begin by attuning to the warrior archetype. This is the assertive self. And it may have a different name and the type of therapy that you do, but just notice the part of you that is the part that sets boundaries and makes decisions, tries to be logical and objective a lot of the time.

And it protects what we value, it protects our values and it represents our ability to assert our own needs, stand our ground and fight for what we believe in, to have confrontation with others. It says it's not my job to do that. When we have a healthy relationship with our inner warrior we feel confident. The warrior also holds accountability and it's capable and it's often energetic and animating, physically animating and our posture is upright and alert and our muscles are toned and responsive and our body is ready for action and our breath is deep and charging and when we're in touch with the warrior we meet challenge head-on trusting our strength and resilience to carry us through. It is deeply has a deep sense of faith in the self

has a deep sense of faith in the self and itself as archetype does. And if our early experiences of asserting ourselves were met with opposition or criticism or outright danger, we may still have learned to fear or suppress our warrior energy and we may slouch or hide making ourselves small and invisible not wanting to be seen not wanting to stand up with broad shoulders and a straight spine and our nose pointed outward and our chin tilted up to meet someone's gaze and our muscles can become tight and immobile frozen in a state of self-protection. And our breath is shallow and hesitant and unable to fully take in life when we're out of touch with our warrior.

And we may struggle with fatigue or passivity or victimhood and lack the vitality and direction of the warrior spirit. And some of us may have grown up in homes with domineering or aggressive or abusive authority figures that didn't give us room to develop our own agency. We can only have agency within system, within hierarchy, and the warrior is allowed there in sports or in business, but not other places in life where we can hold authority to

change our mind to be different. In our attempts to stand up for ourselves, we may have been repeatedly overpowered or punished or judged, even silently leading us to feel fundamentally helpless and afraid of our own inner power. And we may continue to attract and submit to bullying personalities, never feeling safe enough to speak up and show up for what we want. And others may have witnessed and absorbed the destructive rage of a parent or caregiver and internalized the message that anger can only ever be expressed through violence and intimidation. This is an over identified warrior. We're terrified of becoming like them, like the abuser, so we push down

our life force and we numb our passion and assertiveness in an effort to stay safe and good and we associate de-escalating to the point of enabling with being good because we don't hurt people for any reason. And sometimes your path may hurt people in a way that in the long run is best for them and best for you. The temporary honesty, the temporary conflict outweighs the good. If you're under identified with your warrior, you may not be able to make contact with that.

You may bottle up fury and then it leaks out sideways to other parts of life through projection. Or it you explode and then feel bad and feel guilty. Or we adopt of a persona of exaggerated niceness and accommodation. If that's the case, remember Alfred Adler's admonition that it is compensation for a place where we were wounded and that even if it feels scary or like it will make you an abusive to follow your own path that's not true. Remember Albert Ellis's admonition that it is pathological to want to be liked by everybody 100% of the time sometimes the right thing to do and the good thing to do is to piss someone off and on the hand, if our youthful aggression was overindulged or even encouraged

without limits and without guidance, we may compensate by becoming rigidly armored and domineering and our posture can become puffed up and imposing and our muscles tense and bulging and everything becomes a contest. We don't understand life without a fight. We don't understand life without dominance. Life without games. Things that strip life of its color. We're always trying to understand the game we're playing and to win.

If we're over identified with the warrior and our breath is forceful and erratic and it's always ready to explode into action and we may intimidate and control others and endlessly be defensive or hostile leaving a trail of damage in our wake because when life is a game we become perfectionists. Some of us may have been given the message that we had to be tough and invulnerable to survive and that any sign of softness or sensitivity was an unforgivable weakness. And driven by a desperate need to prove ourselves, we relentlessly pushed past our limits, ignoring signals of pain and exhaustion.

And we become fixated on conquest and domination in all arenas, from the boardroom to the bedroom, terrified of ever letting down our guard. And others may have grown up in a chaotic or dangerous environment plagued by the threat of violation or abandonment and without any sense of safety or stability we armor ourselves in layers of aggression and defiance, always pretending to fight or to flee and we remain perpetually on edge. And unable to trust or truly connect, we act out cycles of explosive rage and then crushing shame. So take a few moments to reflect on your relationship with your warrior. What messages did you absorb about anger, assertiveness, and power in your early life?

All of these archetypes can show up one way at church, one way at home, one way with children, one way with women, one way with girls, one way with boys, one way with men, one way in groups. They're all places where we have different relationships to these things. They're not gods, they're parts of our psychology. They're networks of brain chemistry, different parts of the brain, all different assumptions and associations.

different parts of the brain that hold different assumptions and associations. So how does your body hold the imprints of those experiences? Without judgment, simply notice what rises up and breathe into those places with care. You may want to invite your warrior energy to express itself in a healthy way, perhaps by standing up tall and strong, straightening the spine and lifting the chin and broadening the shoulders, not clenching the fingers but holding them loose or in a slightly loose fist. And you'll feel this fire igniting from your solar plexus and infusing you with this whole being

With courage and determination and this is something that you do deserve Now we're gonna shift to the magician archetype and the magician is the part of us That perceives the hidden dynamics at play in all parts of life, politics, religion, advertising, office politics, family structure, society, and it transforms reality, the magician does, through our own intention and skill, and it lets us activate powerful intuitions. But if we're not careful, we may not be able to tell those intuitions from traumas. And find clever solutions to tricky problems. That's

what the magician does. Problems other people can't solve or don't even see. And it represents our access to knowledge and ingenuity and creative power. And when we're in touch with our inner magician we feel imaginative and intuitive and fluid and our senses are heightened and receptive picking up subtle cues and energies and our hands are dexterous and expressive weaving meaning through word and gesture and our posture is loose like a kung-fu fighter, ready to entertain and to reach forward to people or reach out to a new experience, and our minds are quick and flexible and able to shape-shift between multiple perspectives.

However, if our innate sensitivity and curiosity were chronically dismissed, ignored, or even punished, in childhood we may become disconnected from our magical capacities and our bodies feel wooden and numb and they move mechanically without inspiration or joy. And our faces fall into a blank mask, hiding our true thoughts and feelings. And our minds are dull and they're literalistic, and they're unable to read between the lines or envision new possibilities. And we may plod through life in a state of boredom and cynicism and cut off from the wonder

and mystery of existence. And some of us have been told that our questions and ideas were silly, were not realistic, they're strange, or they're disruptive, and that they would want us to stick to practical matters and leave the fanciful dreaming to someone else, or to tradition, or to hierarchies. And if you are shamed for gifts of observation and imagination, then we detach from them retreating into the gray fog of convention. And we may discount our intuition and we may second-guess our innovative solutions or we may fail to speak up when

we don't see, when we see what others don't see. And others may have pigeonholed us as the smart one in the family or pressured us to perform academically while our other needs went unmet. Because if you're over identified with the warrior, you're going to have a lot of other people's projection on you. People who mistake you for their own self-image and over-identify with you and then attack you and radically under-identify with you because you're reminding them of a capacity they were cut off from. And that can happen with any archetype, but with a magician especially. People are attracted to you and then they expect you to be something you may not want to be and these early childhood patterns are reinforced. And if we were praised maybe for intellectual prowess or wit,

we become over identified with our mental capacities and we neglect the intelligence of our bodies and our hearts and we're driven by a compulsive need to figure everything out, to understand every facet, every root, every current of life all the time. And we overthink ourselves into paralysis and disconnect from our instinctual wisdom because our curiosity has become co-opted by trauma. And we're really trying to learn not to experience the beauty of life, but to keep ourselves safe by not acknowledging some childhood wound. And on the other hand, some of us relied on our cleverness and our charm to navigate frightening or chaotic early environments. And without a foundation of safety and security, we survived by staying one step ahead and reading the room and giving

others what they wanted from us. Highly attuned to what was hidden under the surface we anticipated so that we could avoid danger, so that we could figure out a way to get around the problem to not be hurt again. And if you took advantage of these opportunities, you know, you learn to hide hurt parts of yourself. And others may have dealt with situations that felt out of control by retreating into fantasy and magical thinking. And unable to influence our external circumstances, we escaped into the limitless playgrounds of imagination. And while this served an important function at the time, we may have become stuck in the patterns of wishful thinking, an avoidance passively waiting to be rescued instead of proactively shaping life.

And alternatively if our early curiosity and exploration were met with consistent encouragement and guidance then we may have become overly enchanted by esoteric things and exceptionalism and we become addicted to complexity and specialness. We get lost in arcane theories and niche interests and we neglect the practical foundations of existence and life like routine, like bodies, like time, like money, like diet, like substance use because for an intuitive feeler, for someone who the magician comes naturally to, limitations are the shadow that not everyone accesses and realizes their potential. We get lost in visions of what the future could be, and sometimes we forget what it can't be because of other people's

choices. We see what we want to see and like the sorcerer's apprentice we play with forces we don't fully understand and we fail to ground our knowledge and embodied experience or in logic or in physical embodiment. And take a moment to sense into your own relationship with the magician archetype. When did you first feel the most imaginative? When did you perceive perception? When did you become

intellectually agile? Either introvertedly in a book, picking apart films and stories, or extrovertly by figuring out what people really were saying, what they really wanted. The secret games of communication that were going on. When did those qualities feel blocked, denied, or distorted,

and how do you hold these patterns in your physical and mental habits today? You might experiment with awakening your magician energy in a generative way, letting your senses attune to the nuances and the shades of your environment, moving your hands to craft meaning and beauty, or allowing your mind to dream up whimsical new ideas. Feel your third eye chakra as the Hindus and some of the Eastern Medicine practitioners would say, open and illuminate and bring clarity and possibility to your inner and outer worlds. Now we'll invoke the Queen Archetype, the part of us that nurtures and empowers and influences others through our receptive

presence and emotional attunement. And the Queen represents our capacity to be with the full spectrum of human experience, pleasure and pain, light and shadow, yours and mine. When we are anchored in our Queen energy we feel compassionate and generous and at ease in our own skin It's a maternal force that is nurturing and creative but creative on others behalf And our posture is relaxed and open and our shoulders down Our belly is soft and our arms are ready to reach out and wrap around

and embrace and we listen are ready to reach out and wrap around and embrace and we listen deeply and reflect humbly and respond with care and wisdom. Others are naturally drawn to us finding our company a sense of being soothed and uplifted and inspired. However, if your feelings and needs went chronically unmet in childhood, we may struggle to embody the Queen's loving confidence. If our attempts to share our inner world were rejected, ignored, or misunderstood, we may have withdrawn into a state of silent suffering and if we were punished or shamed for having big emotions, for reacting with too much empathy, too much becoming sad when we saw somebody on the street or somebody getting hurt on TV, we may try and control and compartmentalize or cut off our feeling nature.

If we experience suffocating enmeshment or role reversal or parentificate we were parentified as a child by lack of ability or neglect on behalf of the parent and we had to become the parent too soon, we may compulsively focus on others to the point of losing ourselves. We may become locked into a false dichotomy where having needs makes us needy and putting ourselves last makes us good. And especially women socialized to be self-sacrificing, may be over-identified with this.

Men may have a martyr complex and feel like they have to die or kill part of themselves in order for other people to be happy. And they may provide things that are not even needed. And deeply afraid of disappointment and abandonment, we may extend ourselves way beyond our capacity only to end up feeling depleted and resentful. Or we may go to the other extreme of refusing all

help and support as a way to stay strong and autonomous. We often privatize and minimize pain. We've been taught it's too much for others to see. It'll hurt them. And that privatized pain makes us unconscious of our own experience of suffering and so we become hypersensitive or oversensitive at strange times. And we may struggle to set boundaries or say no. We may overly fear loss of connection and approval when there's little to no risk of that. And we may overcompensate by micromanaging or controlling or having an artificial affirmation or an artificial positivity that

is avoidant. We may contort ourselves to try and fill in the gaps and smooth over the edges in our relationships and we may martyr ourselves and call it love. And when we're disconnected from our authentic queen, we often feel consumed by everyone else's feelings and everyone else's problems but numb and inarticulate or fuzzy about our own. And we may become paralyzed by indecision, unable to get in touch with our deeper values and desires. And we may look to gurus and experts to tell us who we are and how to live. And alienated from our intuition, we feel for situations.

We overthink and second-guess ourselves. And we may attempt to heal and transform others without their consent, trying to give them the help that we need. And remember if you're under-identified with a queen and you're projecting onto gurus and prophets and spiritual advisors and bosses and co-workers or people you see and speak with that don't deserve the projection. Remember that they're only reminding you of that spark of yourself out here that you're cut off from. And once you manifest it and reconnect with that energy, you won't feel that way anymore. On the other extreme, when we're over identified with the shadowy queen we become dramatically attached to our moods and our miseries like a black hole

of need we pull on others to fill an inner void. And we may confuse intensity with intimacy and attempt to rush into merging and we may perceive problems everywhere and appoint ourselves as the one to solve all of them and hooked on the validation that comes from helping we don't allow others the dignity of their own journey. We can't let go the maternal hug, the maternal embrace, we can't open our arms and let our children grow up and And we may start to see our worth as dependent on how much we've sacrificed. And take a few moments to attune to your inner queen if any of this resonated with you. Where in your body do you notice the presence or the

absence of the Queen's empowered compassion? What happens in your nervous system and energy field when you contemplate opening to witness the truth of your feelings and those of others. What traumas and internalized beliefs block your access to the wise and the warm boundary love that is your essence. What shifts as you practice embodying unconditional acceptance and holding space for yourself and for the world. And feel down into your gut and affirm your right to take up space and to tend to your own needs and your own hurts, to mother yourself with exquisite attunement and from this place of inner communion feel the spaciousness

that arises in your heart, your capacity to unfold all beings and all experiences into your vast embrace and warmly accept them but not hold on too tight and not abandoning yourself and not abandoning others, trusting the intelligent unfolding of each soul's sovereign path, and resting in the knowing that all is welcome and all is workable and all is well. And now I want you to settle into the King archetype. And the King is the part of us that sits in the center, the still point from which we orient our path of purpose. It is our capacity to see the big picture, to lead from a place of integrity and inspiration. But it's a

goal-focused big picture. It's not the deep esoteria and complex systems of the magician. It is a purpose and effective orientation. And when we are rooted in the king we feel clear and confident and in flow with a larger order and our posture is upright without being rigid and stable and poised like a mountain and our breath is slow and deep and anchoring and our presence is reassuring to those around us and our voice resonates with a quiet power and a profound simplicity of speech not the flowery ornamentation or the deflection or the misdirection of the magician. And we're able to hold all the ideas of many and chart a course that blends the interests of one into

the needs of all. But for many of us this kind of centered integrative leadership is a distant dream and buffeted by the winds of our traumatic histories and unconscious patterns we often feel like lost children, more so than sovereign rulers of our own realms that are in chaos. And if we grew up in chaotic, neglectful, or abusive homes, we may struggle to develop a coherent sense of self around which to order our inner and outer world. And overwhelmed by a constant sense of crisis, we careen from one fire to the next, rarely feeling on top of things. And without a foundation of safety and stability, it can be hard to relax into our executive functioning, our ability to plan and prioritize and organize and follow through to the end.

Not to start a million things with the energy of the warrior, but to bring all things to a conclusion. And instead we procrastinate and avoid and escape into addiction and distraction and become scattered and forgetful, and we may chronically underestimate the time and energy required to meet our goals or set our sights so low that we never actualize our potential. And crushed by the weight of a backlog of unmet needs and unresolved issues, we may despair of ever getting on top of it all. And having never gotten the proper mirroring,

modeling, and mentoring, we may have a hard time envisioning a life of meaningful contribution and self-actualization. We may develop doubt. We may have a lack of faith in our ability to make good decisions, to pass judgments, to hold authority in roles that others nominate us for. We're always looking to others to make up our minds for us and we may shrink from positions of responsibility, isolate into a small and unthreatening existence, or wrestle, you know, job hop, search for some elusive sense of fit that will tell us what we are. Never feeling quite ready or adequate, we hesitate to stand tall and take a definitive

stand. But on the other hand, if we were prematurely elevated into adult roles, if we were parentified as children or forced into rigid molds of perfection, we may compensate with a tyrannical approach to life and work. We may be alienated from our authentic desires and rhythms. We drive ourselves relentlessly in service of external standards. We may become a workaholic, an uncompromising idealist, or a micromanaging control freak. More invested in appearances of competence than actual lived experience of creative effectiveness.

And terrified of the shame of criticism or failure, we become our own worst task masters, holding ourselves and others to impossibly high standards. We may deny our basic needs to rest, play, connect, and try to go it alone while in our inner state is steadily crumbling. and we may outwardly be successful in conventional terms while feeling inwardly empty and hypocritical, addicted to the validation that comes through visible achievement, objective measures, not the inner world of subjectivity or the imagined. subjectivity or the imagined. Now pause here and notice where these king themes come out in your life if you identify with any of the things that I said. How do you experience your own capacity for inspired and effective leadership, both

personally and professionally? Where are you owning your expertise? Where are you being accountable when you fail? Where are you stepping into your authority? Staying the course with your deepest values and what parts of life and what modes of thought? And where are you abdicating your power, suppressing your truth, running around in circles? What parts of you still need to be integrated to have a seat at the table inside you. Now feel your feet on the ground and the crown on your head and open up to heaven's will and breathe into your belly and your chest and allow your spine to gently lengthen up and sense the solid nature

of your back that supports you in opening your heart and walking and talking from your chest and listen for whispers of your soul that want to talk to you in these parts of the body. What would it be like to bring just a little bit of this energy into the areas of your life that you find that you shrink and that you hide behind other people. Imagine yourself wearing a crown and feel the heft of your integrity. Now we're going to move to the lover archetype. The lover is the part of self that allows us to dissolve our individuality and to be

part of a greater whole. It allows us to be a part of the unitive experiences of life that require letting go of our individuality and our defenses to be part of a greater whole. Not only within human relationships but a experience of spirituality, an experience of community, or a relationship or commitment to a greater ideological structure. The lover is our capacity intimacy and communion and total devotion to another thing, another idea, another experience, another person, another community. And when we're flowing with the love or energy we feel porous, passionate and drenched in delight or animated with ecstatic communion. Our skin tingles with sensitivity or our heartbeat might quicken with anticipation. Our breath might deepen into rapture and all of our senses become doorways to enchantment and everything becomes an invitation

to merge and dissolve the illusion of the separate self. But as we already know most of us did not get the blessing to develop these potentials in a safe and nourishing container as that is so rare and many of us receive a barrage of contradictory messages about love or sexuality or religion or community or ideological structure and we don't develop an intimate bonding that created deep conflicts in our psyches and our emotional systems. And if our basic need for a warm, responsive touch went unmet, we may have ended up starved for touch,

and desperately grasping at any crumbs of connection. Or we may have shut down our need for physical affection altogether to convince ourselves that we don't want it, or that it's weak, or that any attempt to get it from us is some kind of violation of our boundaries or disrespectful. And if we experienced inappropriate sexual grooming or overstimulation or violation. We may swing wildly between intense erotic charge and then intense sexual aversion, seemingly for no reason. There's an ambivalence and we may not know how to regulate our nervous system's response. And we may act out compulsively, mistaking intensity for intimacy and end up repeatedly

traumatized. Or we may go to the other extreme of repressing our sensuality and vulnerability, living in a state disconnected from our body and from our desires and longings to be part of a bigger whole or to let our defenses down and feel trust and protection. And if we were shamed, punished, or humiliated for our natural sexual curiosity, self-exploration, or simply our desire to dissolve our identity and participate in anything, if that was judged, we may continue to carry a deep sense of unworthiness, a feeling of being dirty or broken or unwanted, or an inability to trust and feel safe. And this can show up as an inhibited, constricted relationship

with our own erotic nature or our own sense of boundaries and community and where we go through all of the motions of intimacy without really letting ourselves feel and it can also manifest as a pattern of pursuing sexuality in a degrading or dangerous context as a way to confirm our worst fears or confront our worst fears. And either way we are riddled with anxiety and self-loathing. And if we grew up surrounded by repressive, traditional, hierarchical, or sexually negative attitudes, where the body and its desires and needs were seen as sinful or animalistic or immature, we may struggle

to embrace our love or nature at all. And when we are alienated from these things, we live mostly in our heads because our hearts are armored and our body can feel numb. And we may pride ourselves on being above baser instincts while our unlived life festers in the basement of our mind and our body. And this can breed a susceptibility to sudden lapses into destructive excesses, followed by renewed vows and purity and self-control. And this is incredibly important when we are exploring our relationships to substance use,

obsession or addiction, because the lover when it is unconscious can manifest as a desire to be completely dissolved, for the mind to be completely turned off by a substance or a person or an experience and then a rigid judgment of that and clinging to a white-knuckling of control and then a relapse or a re-experiencing of that pattern over and over. And then on the other side if we were exposed to an onslaught of hyper-sexualized media and messaging about conforming identities and mandatory participation in a interpersonal or community experience.

We may have internalized and distorted performative scripts about sex and love and community, and we may be conditioned to objectify ourselves and others to value superficial attractiveness and also we may view sex or relationships as conquests and not as experiences of the joy of getting to be with other people to be a part of other people and to have them be a part of us, us be a part of them. There's not a natural exchange in sexuality or community and it can be hard to rest in the simple realness of being present with another person. But beyond just specific sexual trauma, many of us carry attachment wounds

that further complicate our experience of the lover archetype. If we grew up with inconsistent caregivers, absence or betrayal of trust, we may have an ambivalent relationship with closeness and vulnerability, desperately wanting to be seen and held but terrified of being engulfed or controlled again or abandoned again. We may lurch between anxious clinging and avoidant pushing away. Without a template for secure bonding, it can feel like an impossible dilemma. A choice between a soul crushing loneliness and a soul crushing enmeshment. Take a moment to sense into your own unique configuration of lover wounds and capacity and scan your body and subtle energy field for the places where you feel most alive,

energy field for the places where you feel most alive, awake and adventurous in love and communion and in experience. And what helps you relax into the soft animal of your being and rest in the radical communion with yourself, with others, with life, what stops you from letting go, what kicks you out of that connected consensual flow and into patterns of grasping, chasing, fighting, or fighting. And you might place a hand on your heart or your belly or your middle of your stomach or two hands while you're sitting on your thighs and imagine breathing a sense of safe, warm and accepting presence into that part of you and feel the layers of shame and fear and frozen tension begin to melt into the light of loving gaze and awareness and send a message of reassurance

to your younger selves. It's okay. You're allowed to want, you're allowed to feel, you're allowed to receive, you are safe to open and surrender to now. And let yourself dissolve a little more into this luminous field. And feel how vast you can become when you let go. And you open yourself to relationship and connection and feel the tendrils of your essence intertwining with essence of everything around you. Natural and man-made, subtle and concrete, and sense that there is no real separation

between you and the world, it's all made of the same glowing stuff, the same dust, all longing to be touched, pretending it is separate, but wanting to be connected again to itself. And finally, let's look at the child archetype, the last archetype we're working with today. And the child is our original innocence, our wonder and spontaneity prior to the masks and adaptations that we had to take on to survive. And it is our capacity for presence, playfulness, and unabashed, unafraid self-expression. And when we're at home in the divine energy of the child, we feel safe and held and free to be exactly who and what we are. We don't think about who we are. We just are it. And reconnecting with the child is not so much an imagining as a remembering. And our bodies are supple and relaxed.

And our faces are bright. And we are involuntarily animated and naturally open. And our voices resonate. And we laugh. And we cry and we meet life with a beginner's mind, led more by curiosity than fear and led more by intuition than intellect. But as you've guessed by now, many of us did not get the experiences we needed to establish a secure and a joyful inner child. We were born into a world of overwhelming circumstances and did not get everything that we needed to attune

based on the natural limitations on the child energy and the parts of ourselves that we had to peel away. Robert Bly would say that we put into the long bag that we drag behind ourselves, that we call the shadow until we hear elements of the bag call to us over the course of the lifespan. And then we have to reach for them and take them out of the bag and reclaim them and reconnect to them. And we had to contort ourselves in all kinds of ways to maintain a precarious sense of okayness. And we may have coped by becoming precociously self-sufficient, perfectionistic or parentified, convincing ourselves that we were more mature

and more in control than we ever really felt in our gut. Or we may have submitted completely, making ourselves as small and as silent and unseen as possible. And if we were subjected to chronic chaos or neglect or violence, we may have spent much of our childhood in a state of hyper-vigilant alarm, on constant lookout for threats and escape routes, marinating in stress hormones. We armored our bodies and braced ourselves against life, viewing it as an adversary that we had to begrudgingly deal with, not an experience to awaken.

And we lost touch with our inborn capacity for ease, delight, and spontaneous authenticity. And we may have coped by disappearing into fantasy, compulsively caretaking others, or acting out in ways that screamed for help that we could not directly request. Our woundedness led us to manifest through our behavior that we needed help and maybe people heard it and we rejected them or reacted angrily or maybe no one heard. But even if our early environment was relatively safe and stable we may still have internalized messages that it wasn't okay to fully inhabit our child nature. Steeped in a culture that rushes children to be little adults, that commodifies and sexualizes their innocence, that shames their sensitivity and unrestrained vitality, many of us learned to put a bushel over our light and we got the message that intensity was too much,

that questions were disrespectful or bad, that big feelings were dramatic, that emotion was impractical, that needing help and comfort was weakness. And so we peeled these parts of ourselves off comfort was weakness. And so we peeled these parts of ourselves off and put them in the long bag we dragged behind ourselves that Robert Bly calls the shadow. And in Jungian psychology and parts-based therapy, we have to hear those parts and take them back out of the bag. And scrambling to be accepted and approved of, we built our identities on the shaky ground of other people's projections and expectations. Take a moment to reflect on your own journey with the child archetype. Do you have memories of feeling truly safe to play, explore, and express yourself? What did you most love to do as a little one

before the world told you who you should be? Are you living the life you chose or are you living the life that chose you as the Jason Isbell song goes? How did experiences of powerlessness, betrayal, and scarcity impact your ability to trust life and other people? What younger parts of you might still be stuck in painful past experiences or frozen in fear or grief? You might invite one of those little selves to come sit on your lap or to curl up in your arms. Infuse your experience with the warmth of a loving parent, an older sibling, a protective ancestor. ancestor and feel the armored places begin to soften, the held breaths begin to release and offer your younger self the words they needed to hear. I see you, I hear you, I am here for you, I will keep you safe.

You can hurt and you can heal. You can cry and you can laugh. You don't have to be anything other than what you are. You are enough. You are me. And I am enough. I feel what I am supposed to feel. And I am what I am supposed to feel and I am what I am supposed to be. And let your inner child know that it's never too late to get your needs met, to renegotiate your early contracts, to come out of hiding and exile. If it feels right, you might spend a few moments in spontaneous, childlike play. You may flitter your digits in your limbs about, put on some music and dance wildly without paying attention to how you look.

Go outside and look up at the sky and wonder. Sing at the top of your lungs or try funny accents and make yourself laugh. Get out some crayons or a pencil and just doodle without thinking. Draw what you imagine. If you access safe nurture, then you can let yourself go and stomp and puddles or roll down a grassy hill and let yourself make a mess. Forget about work, break rules, be unapologetic in your body and your joy. And from this place of primal aliveness and undefinedness, feel how the whole world begins to shimmer with sentience and invitation. Trees

beckon you to climb them. Bugs call out to be befriended. Nature itself longs to be watched. Smell flowers. Stroke the grass with your fingertips. The earth can hold you in a wider and a wilder embrace than the human trance of separation and scarcity and rules and judgment and forethought and reactive attachments and painful memories. So just participate in that embrace and hold yourself and let the world hold you and know that you are where you are supposed to be. And there is no self and no other and there is no subject or object, only an endless dance of reciprocal recognition and belonging and being. And this is your original face. It is your essential nature. And as we prepare to close this practice, take a few moments to feel the spectrum of all of these archetypal energies moving through your cognition and your behavior and your body and feel them as older and deeper things that come through you

but are not all of you at any time As the late James Hellman was wont to quote W.H. Auden, We are lived by forces that we pretend to understand. The warrior, the magician, the queen, the king, the lover, and the child are all alive within you in their own unique configuration, and they each have gifts to bring and wounds to heal and fears to face and powers to claim. And the more you turn towards them with compassion and curiosity, the more integrated and accessible they become. But none of them is all of you.

But you are all of them. And remember this isn't about perfecting a static set of qualities or balancing things on a scale, but about learning to dance fluidly and skillfully, consciously and unconsciously, with different parts of your psyche and your soma. You are becoming porous and less rigid so that these things can move freely and that you can trust them without thinking about them. And through that you can learn to trust yourself again. And there will be times when you need the warrior's laser-focused mindset or the child's unfiltered delight. The magician's clever shape-shifting or the queen's

deep holding presence. You contain multitudes and the world needs the full brilliance of your unadorned, unarmored and unadulterated light. And trust that your nervous system is wired for healing and your body is coded for wholeness and every experience you've ever had and especially the most painful ones. You've been compost for the flowering of your unique and individuated self. And as you feel ready, begin to deepen your breath and bring your awareness back to the space around you. And wiggle your fingers and wiggle your toes and stretch your arms overhead. Let out a big sigh,

and let your spine be loose, but strong and upright. And open your eyes and take a moment to look around, feeling your senses resyncing with the outer environment. And if you like, you might place a hand on your heart environment and if you like you might place a hand on your heart and feel gratitude and blessing for your courageous, tender, and resilient nature. And if you forget sometimes, if you fall back asleep, that's okay. That is part of this process too. There is no other journey but yours and there is no other moment than the one you are in. There is nowhere to get to but here and you can come back to it anytime. There is nothing to do but to be. You are

already what you seek. Already whole beyond belief. It's just a matter of practice and patience and a deep, deep remembering of what you already know. There is nothing to learn, only to remember. So please be kind, wildly kind to yourself and take care of your innocence and never give up on the possibility of your joyful genius. The world is waiting for you and you are longing for the world. Remember that you are free. So Hey guys, I wanted to pop in here to give you a quick reminder that we do this podcast for free and there are significant expenses associated with it, including the biggest resource of my life right now, which is time. One of the

things that would really help us and hopefully would help you would be to check out one of our sponsors, Hardy Nutritionals. Hardy is a vitamin company that I never encountered the advertising of. We heard over and over again from multiple people with treatment-resistant anxiety and dopamine disorders like bipolar disorder and other things that they had tried everything and Hardy was what worked. And so I checked them out and they have really good research. I'm not a fan of a lot of the BS

that's in the supplement and wellness space. Hardy paid for a lot of research on their product. And when I ordered some for myself, I saw a big difference in my life. And my wife made fun of me, thought it was gonna be Alex Jones selling vitamins on the radio And when she tried them, she really liked them, too There's a lot of data about how they can reduce the symptoms of ADHD

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It would help them, it would help me, and it also would probably help you. One of the more frequent things that patients and people in the randomized controlled trials that Hardy conducted report is that they feel more themself, more focused and more effective at getting things done, which can result in all of us having a little bit more time.