The Sovereign Archetype – And How It Develops

I’ve mentioned some of the qualities of the Sovereign archetype already. However, there are many more essential qualities of sovereign energy which manifest in mature adulthood.

Perhaps top of the list comes confident leadership. That means leadership in your own life, leadership in your children’s lives, leadership in work or business, in the family, and in society.

As you know, there are different kinds of leadership. The kind of leadership that a Sovereign in his maturity offers is what I’d describe as “heart centred” leadership. This means a kind of leadership that acts for the benefit of everyone in the kingdom, in the sovereign’s realm, whether that be the Kingdom of family, workplace, business, home, society, personal circles, or anywhere else.

As well as leading, the sovereign King is responsible for holding the vision for his kingdom. To ensure his citizens thrive and his kingdom grows, and his citizens are happy, every King must have a vision.

Maybe that vision takes the form of a mission statement for his business, or a strategy for child-rearing, or a plan for establishing better relationships with his partner, family and friends. Often the King’s vision reflects the personal mission of the Sovereign: that which he feels drawn to do so he can fulfil his life purpose. One of the most important challenges for a sovereign King is knowing what his life purpose really is.

I see the third main role of the King as “holding the wounds of his kingdom”.

However you interpret the word “kingdom”, there always needs to be someone responsible for holding things together in times of difficulty. And however you interpret the word King, that responsibility is what we are talking about here.

Just as the sovereign Kings of history held together their realms during times of famine, plague, war or disaster, so we modern-day Kings are responsible for holding together the world in which we live, move and work, when difficulties or disaster strike.

For a man who is truly in his power, holding the wounds of his kingdom comes naturally: he sees it as a part of his role in life. And yet at the same time he needs to hold his own wounds – be they emotional, physical or spiritual. In the end, the King is the one in the kingdom to whom the citizens look for support and nurture, guidance and strength, when they are under stress or finding life difficult.

To this end, therefore, Kings need to find a way in which they can develop their own support network – perhaps by meeting with other sovereigns in a group where they can get the support required to go back into the world with energy strengthened and renewed, knowing that they are not striving to lead in isolation.

Maybe you feel the picture I’ve painted above is unrealistic. I’d prefer to label it idealistic and visionary, because for a man who is fully in his sovereign power none of these things is difficult.

For when a man embodies King energy, he somehow finds it natural to fulfil all these roles and functions. Sure, it may not always be easy, but he can do it with a certain natural grace and an innate sense that he can indeed fulfil the demands of kingship.

With all that in mind, you can imagine, I’m sure, most of the qualities that a sovereign needs to embody. As a starting point consider these: authenticity, courage, integrity, confidence, a strong sense of self worth, the ability to form and hold a vision, compassion, fairness, the ability to take the right decision for the greater good, understanding, open heartedness, a sense of justice and fair play, empathy, open-mindedness, strength, and resilience.

So this leads to an interesting question: how are these qualities to be developed so that somebody can step into their true kingship?

I mentioned earlier that archetypes appear to be some kind of template or pattern innate in the human system. Does that mean, therefore, that everybody has a template of kingship within them? And if so, what does it take to switch it on, so that sovereignty is manifest in an adult man? More to the point, maybe, why does there seem to be so little sovereignty, so little mature leadership, in the world today?

For most of us, I would suggest, sovereignty is strangled or even killed at birth. Beyond this dramatic language, what I mean to imply is that we are not raised in a way that encourages the expression and development of sovereign qualities.

Alice Miller, one of the 20th century’s pioneering child psychotherapists, painted a beautiful picture of the potential that lies within each and every one of us when we are born into the world. She used a quote that she took from one of William Wordsworth’s poems: we come, she said, into this world “trailing clouds of glory”.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come.

I take this to mean that every child born into the world has a potential within them to achieve greatness in every way: to access a level of power and presence more magnificent than anything we can generally imagine.

With that goes the potential to shine so brightly that everything we do and everywhere we go is touched by the essential goodness and purity of our humanity. As we shall see, the true King also holds the potential to retain a connection with the higher forces around us, the energy of the planet, and perhaps even a sense of being part of humanity’s collective spirit. However, as you might have observed, few people on the planet shine this brightly.

So let’s go back to childhood and examine what might get in the way of the expression of our Sovereign being, our King energy.

Continued here.