Ep.40/ Masculine Psyche: King & Warrior Archetype
Archetypes of the wise king and the brave warrior are as valuable to women as they are to men. Healthy masculine energy provides courage and determination, discernment and vision for our lives. Unhealthy or underdeveloped masculine renders us cowards, victims, masochists or bullies. All humans are a balance of intellect and intuition, masculine and feminine. Cultivating a grounded, resilient inner masculine is imperative for our stability and our progress.
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I love working with archetypes and there are four main archetypes of the male psyche: the Warrior, the Lover, the Magician and the King. Today I am going to talk about the King and the Warrior.
Next week I will work with the Lover and the Magician. The term Archetype was coined by the great psychologist Carl Jung in the 19th century. He was a student of Sigmund Freud; they had a big break up. I identify more with Jung myself and what Jung observed were these patterns of behavior and belief and action in people across the board, that seems kind of innate in people or that we collectively inherit unconsciously. So these ideas of King, Warrior, Lover, and Magician, we all kind of know what those mean. And in our cultural myths and stories, certainly these are major characters that play out over and over again.
In the value of stories for many of us, is this kind of unconscious identification with the forms in the stories and good stories instruct us in how to grow and evolve and develop. Myths and stories can also warn us about what not to do or how things can go wrong.
And although Carl Jung may have given archetypes a name, he certainly wasn't the first to discover the idea. The ancient Greeks talked about pure form and in fact Greek and Roman mythology really kind of solidified, as did the North and the Egyptians and many other traditions as well. A lot of things that are seen as spiritual or religious mythologies, are also teachings and instructions for the human life path. In fact, the ancient Greeks really codified and clarified in a very deep way, how archetypes play themselves out in the human psyche.
The King and the Warrior Archetypes are not just the realm of men, although they are considered traditionally masculine archetypes. Optimally as humans, we all have a balance of masculine and feminine within us, and this has nothing to do with genitals, although it is interesting to look at how they play out individually and in particular gender roles. I mean, that's one of the things I really love about working archetypally both with myself and my clients, is that each of us has our own unique expression of the different archetypes. And there are actually hundreds of them, but there seems to be some main ones that we all share.
Caroline Myss wrote a great book called Sacred Contracts, with the idea that we each have kind of a personal mandala of 12 archetypes that expressed themselves throughout our life in different forms. Working with the healthy or unhealthy aspects of our own expression of these different archetypes is a really powerful way to do personal growth work and see where we are underdeveloped and where we might be toxic and where we are really healthy and have positive, constructive expression of ourselves in the idea that we all have a different 12. That is kind of a core constellation of who we are throughout our life.
Caroline Myss talks about sharing 4 shadow archetypes that all humans have them. The Wounded Child, the Victim, the Prostitute, and the Saboteur. I will do a podcast on that too. I love talking about those. It's really powerful and very helpful when we can start to recognize these currents in within ourselves.
But today we are going to talk about the healthy and the toxic aspects of core masculinity. And again, these apply to women as well as they apply to men. You know, when a fetus is developing, the first seven weeks of development, it is undifferentiated. Neither male nor female, sexually indifferent. I've never been sexually indifferent. But that's another podcast too. I found this fascinating when I learned this, because males and females can often think of themselves as incredibly different, and it's fascinating how the genitals develop into male and female forms in this 7 to 12 week developmental period. That the clitoris and the penis are actually the same organ that grows in different ways, that the labia of a woman are actually the scrotum, that the testes in the ovaries could go either way, depending upon the sex hormones. So whether you have an inie or an outie, what I'm going to talk about today applies.
And certainly there are core female Archetypes; the Queen, Maiden, Mother, Crone, and I would add Witch or Healer.
in a healthy, well developed person, we have a balance of our own internal masculine and our own internal feminine.
And well developed men hold those feminine archetypes within them in their appropriate and healthy expression as well. So, there has been a lot of talk about toxic masculinity, lot of railing against the patriarchy. I am not going to talk too much about that. There is very little modeling for healthy, mature masculinity. In fact, in my observation, the toxic masculine actually evokes the toxic feminine. And I have seen some really devolving conversations these days, but I am interested in evolution, in the evolving conversation. And how the healthy masculine and the healthy feminine can interplay with each other both in relationship, in our culture and within our self.
Ep.40/
Masculine Psyche: King & Warrior Archetype
Many of us are already familiar with the toxic or unhealthy masculine. In fact, I think much of our culture has thrown all masculinity into that box and become afraid of actually the healthy self-expression, maybe not even realizing that it exists. If we think about these four key archetypes, the unhealthy King, we have one right now, we can look at a lot of what's happening in politics worldwide and see a lot of unhealthy Kings; lot of tyrants, lot of dictators.
The underdeveloped, immature, selfish King is very dangerous. The unhealthy King is rooted in his own lower nature; selfishness, greed, dishonesty, willing to harm others for his own benefit, does not actually care for the higher good of his people, has very little wisdom, and cares more about the acquisition of power and prestige than the long range good of his Kingdom. Because of this, we can think masculine leadership in general should all be thrown out. Women should run the world. That is not the answer either, because we share these archetypes within our self. Women can be just as prone to being an evil or selfish King as men are.
So we can look at healthy King energy being a sovereign, being a ruler, a leader, a manager. We all benefit from that energy both collectively in the need for good leadership, but also within our own life; how we manage our household, how we manage our business, how we manage our children, our finances. Healthy King’s energy holds order and stability, has a vision, a mission, a purpose. Well-developed King energy is wise and resilient.
Healthy King’s energy makes decisions not from a reactive emotional place, but from a place of grounded, thoughtful, wise decisions.
And we can look within ourselves at these archetypes:
How do I manifest King Energy in my life?
How do I manage my life?
The idea that my home is my castle. How do I manage my throne? How do I treat my subjects? Do I have wise advisors know my own limitations? Am I a dictator who just wants to have power because I want to have power and disempower others? Or am I making choices that are actually the best for everybody involved?
The Warrior Archetype is the reason a lot of people turn away from the masculine in general. The Warrior Archetype really works with anger, fear, protection, weakness, and power.
Unhealthy warrior is violent and violence doesn't have to be physical, although certainly it can. Violence can be emotional, can be financial. I worked with a family who had a college age girl who had very different ideas of what she wanted to do in her life than what her parents did. And they saw themselves as very open minded and they said well she can do whatever she wants, but she's going to have to pay for college by herself. They had some twisted idea that they were being permissive and actually they were being financially violent and controlling. There is King or Sovereign energy in that as well.
Healthy Warrior Energy is really important. Healthy Warrior Energy allows us to say no when we need to. Many people are dedicated to nonviolence. I can't tell you that I've evolved that far yet. I live in the city. I have a crazy neighbor. I have a baseball bat near my front door. Make of that what you will but my job is to care for myself so that I can continue to be in the world to care for my children and to bring my work to others. If someone tries to harm me, I am going to do everything I can to defend myself. That is me, I am open, I am still working on it.
I don't watch a lot of movies on TV, but when I do, I frequently see the unhealthy warrior archetype. Very common plotline in movies, there is some kind of harm perpetrated, and then the person spends the rest of the movie getting revenge, and the solution is to kill the bad guy. Violence is often acted out through sexuality and not just rape. Lot of steamy sex scenes are on the edge of violence, wiping everything off the table, breaking stuff so that you can't control yourself. Even violence expressed instead of actual grief or sadness.
Healthy warrior like a healthy King has management of his emotions. A healthy warrior knows how to be friends with his anger, has control over it, and takes action from a place of decision and wisdom again rather than from rage or being a bully, a sadist, or some other kind of perpetrator.
And there is also a deflated warrior where we don't own enough of this power, and we become a coward or a victim, or a masochist. Healthy Warrior Energy is courage and valor. It moves us to do difficult things personally, professionally, romantically. It is able to overcome fear, take decisive action, make things happen.
Without Healthy Warrior Energy, we do not have good boundaries and we aren't able to move forward in our life in a powerful, decisive way.
So, how can archetypes be helpful? I was working with a client recently; young guy, very strong, in really good shape. He had a lot of trouble with violence when he was younger, and as he's grown and become a professional and become educated and turned to his own personal growth work. He's turned away from violence completely, and he's got this girlfriend. He really loves her, but he's feeling passive in the relationship and is sometimes struggling in the bedroom. And we started to talk about Warrior Energy, Healthy Warrior Energy. And we talked a lot about his misuse of Warrior Energy in his violent youth and I asked him to get in touch with his own relationship right now with that Warrior Energy in his life.
And this is where I love the work of spiritual psychology and directly accessing our own psyche. And just by dropping into his body, he had all this imagery come up now, not everyone's visual, but he was visual and he got a sense of this violent young gang member in jail and that is unhealthy warrior energy.
I asked him if he could get a sense of his healthy warrior energy with all the experiences he's had in all the work that he's done and he said there's a samurai, big guy that got this really cool armor on and he's standing relaxed and really grounded centered. He's a quiet guy but you can't push him over. He's a well-trained warrior and he doesn't perpetrate violence. In fact, if someone comes at him, he knows how to do that kind of martial art where you use the own person’s energy and just throw them past you. And he’s really got a sense of his own needs and he can express them without any pretense or guilt or insecurity. Just a fact. This is what I need. This is what I want. He's able to really sense what's around him in the physical world. He's got highly trained senses, and he's aware of other people. He has access to his own feelings and he can make room for the emotions of others without being overly affected by them. He is wise and powerful, and he has got a sense of humor. And although when he means business, he can really mean business. He also doesn't take himself too seriously.
And I asked my client how it would be to connect with this energy in his life? How would it be to bring this into work? How would it be to connect with this samurai in the bedroom when he's having sex with his girlfriend or when they're talking about something challenging or uncomfortable or deeply vulnerable and intimate? And he said, the samurai is smiling and I know I could do this.
I had another client who has terrible boundary issues with her mother and we talked about the King Energy of managing your own Castle, being a sovereign of your own space that her mother doesn't have a right to violate her emotionally or energetically, or even to violate her time. That she is an adult now and she has right to her own space to her own Castle, even if that Castle is just within the space of her own fingertips, circumference of her own life and energy. And she got that. She saw herself as a Queen, sitting in the throne of her own life. And her mother could visit, but her mother was not the Queen anymore. She was the Queen of her own life as an adult.
