The King Within – And Introduction
There is a resource of power, authority and leadership, inside you; a magnificent energy of which you are probably not aware right now. This resource is an archetypal energy that lives within you: the archetype of the King, or Sovereign. (An archetypal energy is simply a part of your personality: we’ll discover more about that in a moment.)
Your Sovereign archetype, which we can call the King Within, is an inherent part of your humanity, a latent force awaiting activation, an energy which will transform your life, a gateway to parts of yourself that provide leadership, purpose, direction, self-love and much more.
Indeed, the King Within is a source of joy, of authenticity, of integrity, and of the fullest expression of your true masculine essence. It’s the part of you that nurtures all the people within your kingdom, whether that be your business, your family, your society, your inner world, your home, and any other aspect of your world for which you have responsibility.
It’s the part of you that holds the vision for your kingdom and determines the path you take through life. It’s the part of you that holds a sense of purpose or mission, allowing you to express your unique gifts and talents in a way that allows you to live a meaningful life. This is where a deeply felt sense of living the “right life” comes from.
It’s the part of you that raises children with compassion, that keeps calm and takes charge in a crisis, knows what to do in all circumstances, and can hold not only your own emotional wounds but the emotional wounds of those who live in your kingdom.
It’s the part of you that can connect deeply with the world around you, bringing appreciation of the natural world and a sensitive awareness of all living things on the planet, as well opening you up to the value and fragility of the Earth itself.
And it’s the part of you that may, one day, become a wise elder to whom others turn for counsel, support and advice. This is the part of you that can initiate adolescent boys into manhood, young men into mature adulthood, and mature men into elderhood. It’s the part of you that can greet death with a smile, knowing that your life on this planet has been worthwhile.
But for most of us – men and women alike – the inner sovereign, the King in men, and the Queen in women, is a force that remains only a potential energy. Regrettably, most people die without having gained access to a fraction of their true power and nobility.
Podcast – The King Within
I imagine, however, that the very fact you are reading this means you don’t want to become one of those people who die without having accessed their King, their innate and true power. And of course for you, right now, it may require an act of faith to believe that your life will change in ways both imagined and as yet unimagined, if you do set forth on a path to explore your King within.
However, over the 20 years or more that I’ve been working in the field of personal development, I’ve come to see that finding and embodying The King Within is the single most powerful technique available for improving the quality of your life.
With that said, I invite you to join me on an exploration of sovereignty: what it might mean for you, how you can access it, and what you might expect to happen in your life as you explore this particular archetypal energy.
However, before we go into our exploration of what it means to be a King, there are some other matters to look at.
Video – the Sovereign Archetype (King or Queen)
Why Is the Sovereign Archetype also called the Heart Centred Leader? Watch the video to discover why.
What is an archetype?
You can think of an archetype as a blueprint for the human machine. In other words, it’s a kind of template for certain ways of being in the world, certain ways of thinking, feeling and behaving, which are laid down in our genetic code.
The idea of archetypes as “templates” that can allow the expression – in the right circumstances – of particular behaviours, thoughts and feelings is based on the work of many depth psychologists, starting with Carl Jung and continuing all the way through to the present day.
And there is a good reason for such blueprints to have evolved. In a hostile or challenging world, our very development as human beings would have been much more successful, and our chances of survival much higher, simply because our brains contained these potential ways of expressing the different aspects of our personality.
Such blueprints would mean that learning how to be in the world, how to find our place in human society, and how to interact with other members of our own species would have been a much easier task.
This is because many of our behaviour patterns would effectively be pre-programmed within us, lessening the burden of learning that we face as intelligent, complex, social primates. And you can imagine that this would always have been true, even in societies considerably simpler than the one in which most of us now live.
Over the years, various psychologists and authors have produced different models of the archetypal energies within each of us, but the one that seems to resonate with the majority of people is Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s description of four archetypal energies: King Warrior Magician and Lover.
So let’s take a brief tour through all of these archetypes right now. We start with a look at the King archetype, and how it develops, before we move on to discuss the Warrior, Magician and Lover. This will show how each of these archetypes relates to the King archetype, and how the King archetype should relate to them in a mature, masculine man.
And although this book is intended mostly for men, I believe the archetypal system is broadly similar in women, and that the Sovereign Queen in women is just as powerful as the Sovereign King in men. Of course, some aspects of how archetypal energies are expressed may be different in women and men, but in general, they serve the same functions.
As we move through these four fundamental archetypes, I am going to offer some alternative names which my colleague Marianne Hill and I have devised for the archetypes. These new names give a slightly different perspective on the old archetypal names which can be misleading, or even, especially in the case of the Warrior, laden with judgements that obscure the usefulness and purpose of each archetype. They are: King – Heart Centred Leader; Warrior – Action taker; Magician – Transformer; Lover – Feeling body
Continued here.