The women’s empowerment movement has encouraged many females to step forward and become leaders in the world. The way she can really make a lasting difference is to make the change in her own mind first rather than fighting the world. If you are hiding out, afraid to make waves, this is the episode you have been waiting for to get out and make a difference.
In this episode, Debi describes:
- the Four Feminine Archetypes based on Jungian Psychology and how they influence a woman’s life.
- how to cultivate the strength and courage to go for your dreams using the power of the Warrior Archetype
- the key to making social change
- how angry protester is not as effective as someone who is inspiring others
- how to integrate the Warrior archetype for women that isn’t based on old masculine models
Interviewer: Welcome back to the Debi and Dr. Rob Show.
Debi: Hello.
Interviewer: Today I’m interviewing Debi because we usually don’t get to talk about what we’ve been working on individually. I know you’ve been working on publishing in Inc. magazine. Congratulations on that. As well as empowering women and developing programs to empower women.
One of the most interesting things that has come out of your work is this idea of the feminine archetypes and how to use them in empowering women. I thought I’d ask you a couple of questions on that.
Debi: Okay, sounds good.
Interviewer: First of all, what are the four feminine archetypes?
Debi: The four feminine archetypes– I’ve done a lot of research with Jung’s who are working some of the other psychologists that have studied under Jung, the women that have worked with Jung, and out of all the reading I’ve done, the four that I think are the most important and primary are the warrior, the lover, the mother, and the priestess.
The warrior represents our willingness to make social change. The lover is our sense of pleasures, including relationships and food and enjoying life and experiencing the sensuality of life. The mother is the nurturing and creative aspect in ourselves to create life and also to nurture it and cultivate it. Then the high priestess is really our spiritual nature, our divine nature, our devotional nature.
I think if you look at women, and the four, is makes the self, which is the wholeness. That’s why I picked four, and I think those four, whatever you experience in life as a woman, whatever challenges you have, you can go to these four and you’ll find the answers.
Interviewer: It covers a lot of ground. Now, for those not familiar with Jung’s work, what is an archetype?
Debi: I think of an archetype, and he describes it, I’m not paraphrasing him, but I see it as a universal template. We have in our life, our conscious life our personal experience, and we have personal patterns and conditioning that we’ve gotten over our lifetime how to react, how to behave, what makes up our personality based on our personal experience. Jung believed that there’s a deeper level to our unconscious beside just our personal unconscious, our personal experiences, interactions with the knocks in and pulls of life that there’s actually a deeper nature to us which is the collective unconscious.
The collective unconscious is organized in archetypes. There’s archetypes for everything, and it’s basically the matrix of what creates reality. Like we talk about the mother archetype, everything has a mother. Even a plant has a mother, there’s a mother plant. It’s an idea that you can’t really see directly, but you see the pattern everywhere and you see the symbols everywhere and you’re like, “Oh yes.”
If you think about movies, just watching a movie, all the characters in the movies, if you look at a bunch of movies, I love movies, so I see them all the time. You see that there’s always the villain, there’s the warrior in the movie, the mother character, and the movie itself has an archetypal pattern to it as well. Even the trajectory of the movie has a pattern into it. We live in this patterns, and it’s just really how we create our life.
Interviewer: Just for the sake of brevity and time wise-
Debi: I can’t go on forever?
[laughter]Interviewer: Let’s talk one of these. My favorite is the warrior, the most intriguing one, anyway.
Debi: Yes, the warrior to me in this time is most important because a lot of women are stepping into their power. More and more women are starting their own businesses. It’s actually the fastest growing segment in entrepreneurship are women. More women are actually graduating college than men now. Women are not just staying home and having babies anymore, they’re actually feeling that they have a purpose and a mission in life and a career. There’s also they have to interact with this world which is very driven by men and masculine ideas. I see the warrior as not as a fighting the world, but as almost like breaking through the barriers and the conflicts within themselves that are stopping them from expressing who they are.
It’s not about going out and slaying the dragon. It’s going in and saying, “Why do I have this dragon in the first place? It’s not real, okay, let me move on.” It’s more of an internal wrestling with ourselves, an internal battle. Then when that internal battle is not realized internally, it shows up externally. It’s about moving people inside.
I think that women, if they’re not conscious of this warrior archetype, what will happen is that they’ll tend to pull back, they’ll tend to not take a lot of action in their life. They’ll be very risk averse. They’ll avoid conflict. They’ll not want to make waves. If they’re in a marriage and they have kids and these expectations of them of playing a role and they want to do something else, there’ll be a conflict within them and they tend to want to just stay in their comfort zone. The warrior is about a woman’s ability to break free off their comfort zone.
Of course… men have this too, but for a woman, it’s just a different process.
Interviewer: All right. Let’s say this archetype remains unconscious in the woman, what happens to her?
Debi: She becomes very angry, which she might never be conscious of it, and that anger gets projected out there. She sees a lot of frustration. Then when she does, it shall maybe fly off the handle, or she’ll get very depressed because it’s the energy that she’s been sitting on and she’s not using. We all have a natural process Jung has said that we’re all drawn to individuation, we’re all drawn to move outside of that comfort zone. If we don’t, we start to feel either really depressed or pissed off at the world and we’re staying, “These people are stopping me from doing what I want to do. It will feel as though the problem is external.
Embracing the warrior archetype is having this idea that you’re the battles within, and how do I get the strength, the courage and cultivating that risk in life to be willing to make mistakes, be willing to fall on your face and look like a fool for what you love. That idea that something you’re willing to die for and to make a change in your life until you see people that are really making social change have embodied that warrior archetype, unless they’re very angry.
You’ll see a difference with a protestor who’s really angry and upset and feeling frustrated, or someone who’s very inspirational and is lifting the world up. The warrior is someone who’s saying, “Let’s all get together. Let’s all make the world a better place.” Not just blaming and shaming the world for not following what they want or a social position that they want. It’s really an empowering way to approach it.
Another thing that’s really important is that a lot of people face the warrior and they try to integrate it in a masculine way. They’re like, “Well, if I just take more action. I’m a warrior, I’m going to go out.” This is very common in, I don’t want to name names, but a very popular self-help guru who makes people walk on water– I mean walk on coal. Yes, they don’t do that. Walk on fire. The walk at the fat coal walk.
I’ve seen people– I have friends that do this. Let’s punch holes in blocks and all these stuff. It’s not really about that. They just like this masculine idea of what it means to be a warrior.
Interviewer: Kind of like externalize-
Debi: Very externalize and very aggressive. For the warrior in herself, she has to come to terms with the– I don’t want to say the demons within herself, but the things about herself that she’s been hiding and pushing back and being okay with who she is. Being okay with her past, being okay with her mistakes, and fully loving herself, and that what’s going to help her integrate the warrior. Then have an image in her mind, an idea in her mind that she can hold in visualization to connect with that idea, and to aspire to become and make that her new persona versus the little old me who can’t make it in a world, little Mary who can’t make it. You’re going to be this powerful being that has this energy that people are drawn to, that people are going, I want to listen to what this woman has to say.
Interviewer: It reminds me about Joan of Arc or something like that.
Debi: Yes. I think a lot of women are afraid because of this tale, is that she got burned at the stake, is that they’re afraid that if I step out, if I speak up, if I go out of my comfort zone, my family is going to abandon me, my husband’s going to leave or my relationship is going to break up, or I’m not going to be able to go back to the corporate world, the money is not going to be there, and so we tend to want to shrink back and hold back. The warrior really gives us the courage and has us identify with a higher aspect of ourselves that’s not personal that gives us that courage.
Interviewer: You mentioned integration. I know integration in Jung in terms is making the unconscious conscious, and really making it part of the worldview that you inhabit. How does one or a woman go about integrating this warrior archetype?
Debi: I think that what happens with the warrior is that she is alive, and she is powerful, and she is in you already. She doesn’t need to be created in a sense. She’s there. You’re just not conscious of her, and you tend to push her– keep her unconscious. Your ego is trying to, “Let’s not let that cat out of the bag. Let’s keep her unconscious.” What we’re doing is we’re accepting that we’re not our ego, that there’s something powerful. It’s just like the whole saying is that we’re not human beings having a spiritual experience. We’re spiritual beings having a human experience. It’s sort of like that idea is that the archetype when we become aware of her, and we start identifying with her versus our little self that’s been through that little trials and light that think small, it helps us bring that part of us to life. It’s almost like welcoming our divinity and our power back, and it never went away. It’s just that we’re not using it. It’s about that. There’s a lot of precise ways. In 15 minutes, I don’t think we can go through the whole process, but through visualization, working with visualizations, she’ll show up in your dreams. You’ll have a dream of, maybe you’re fighting a battle and it’s a sign that the warrior is trying to activate herself. She’s saying, “Come on, I’m here, use me.” Then also through working with your emotions, like what is stopping you from– what’s the fear of allowing her to be expressive, you embodying the warrior.
Interviewer: Fascinating stuff. I can’t wait to hear about the other three archetypes.
Debi: I know. It’s going to be really interesting. There’s so much to teach on that. Actually, we are going to have an event where we’re going to go through all the four archetypes. It’s called alchemy. It’s coming in January in Hermosa Beach, California, right outside LA. If you’re interested in joining us and going deeper with the four archetypes in person, and really letting her shine in your life and becoming a vision for other women to be empowered by you, definitely check it out.
Interviewer: Well, thanks for that great conversation, and we hope to see you next time when we’ll talk about another one of the feminine archetypes. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you next time.
Debi: Take care.
