With New Eyes, or Look Again! The Value of Creative Re-Visioning

[First this week, THANK YOU to all of you who have been following and especially for those registering your ‘Likes’ for recent posts.-Linda]

Writing and particularly for me, journal writing, has been a lifelong refuge and treasure.  I kept as many as four journals going at a time through my college years, and I have kept a dream journal as well as a writing journal active for over 50 years.  Early on, I addressed my journal Itself as a Friend (Dear Friend would start my entries).  It is this long practice of journaling that has sustained my lifelong interest in writing and has led to several academic journal articles and to date, four published books (the first two academic and the last two, mainstream).  

My just released Better Endings: A Guidebook for Creative Re-Visioning (Central Park South Publishing) includes journaling pages so that you, too, as the reader can engage with the magical art of journaling that can open new doors of self-discovery, insight, and future envisioning.  The journaling prompts, included blank journaling pages,  and chapter topics presented in Better Endings truly can guide you to explore and reflect upon key values and events of your own Life Story: past, current and to come.

I have personally ‘beta tested’ every theme and journaling excursion offered with the Better Endings chapters.  Part One introduces topics that let you have fun practicing creative re-visioning with movies, fiction, and historical events.  You will get to write your own ‘better endings’ for movies or stories whose endings you have always disliked and to reflect upon what it is about these stories that lead you personally to want to rewrite these conclusions.  This is not at all about improving upon the screenplay or writing but about developing your own sense of ‘creative license’ to re-envision (or re-view) any story to explore its open possibilities.  If you can practice re-visioning a fictional story or an historical event, so too can you look at your own life story events (past, current and to come) with this same creative license, allowing you to imagine and mindfully explore your own open possibilities! After all, you are the composer, editor and key actor in your own Life Story.  In fact, that is what Part Two is all about.

Part Two gives you, the reader/ journal writer of Better Endings, the freedom to reclaim your own creative license; to re-vision and flexibly reflect upon the ‘shaping events’ or Turning Points of your own Life Path. Topics include:  What If?, Second Chances,  Silver Linings, Loss and Recovery, Big Moves, and Your Best is Yet to Come.

The value of creative re-visioning and journaling your reflections is that it opens your intuitive awareness. It can help you arrive at a sense of more meaningful closure and purpose with regard to your significant life events, situations or relationships, so you may approach new choices with greater understanding and clarity of intention.

Better endings are not necessarily happier ones, but they can lead to New Beginnings!

images are from pixapbay.com

If you would like to explore these themes in your own life, pick up a copy of Better Endings: A Guidebook for Creative Re-Visioning.  (You can click on the embedded links here or on the right panel cover image to be routed to Amazon, or you could order through Barnes & Noble or any other major retailer site.) It is available as an eBook (but if you choose this, please do create your own Better Endings Journal and do the journaling), or as a softbound or hardcover version. I welcome all reviews, comments, and questions!

Welcome to A New Year of Better Endings — with “The Descent and Re-emergence of Theseus”

Welcome to a new year at Better Endings for Your Life Path! This year I will modify the process by returning to the principle of Better Endings, which was the focus for Year 1 of this blog. This time I will be pairing this principle with astrologically appropriate monthly archetype characters. The process will be as follows, from week to week each month:

Week One: A popular or fictional story that reflects a Better Ending involving the monthly archetype as a protagonist;

Week Two: Inspirational quotes or positive postulates pertaining to the monthly theme;

Week Three:  A Life Mapping self-discovery ‘better endings’ technique relating to the monthly archetype;

Week Four: A personal story or stories (yours are invited!) applying the monthly archetype in a ‘better ending’ scenario.

Check out the Weekly Topics tab or see below for a list of astrologically appropriate Archetypes. (The Archeypes are arranged in this wheel according to their energetic stages as I: Origination, II: Maintenance, III: Dissolving; as described by Dr. Charles Bebeau).

Better Endings is a positive personal growth and development principle by which you may either find the lesson, value, or opportunity within any life situation or by which you can constructively “re-vision”  a story or plotline that leads to a different, positive outcome as a result of your imaginative reframing. You can apply this principle to fictional stories and films, but you can also apply this constructive approach to your own life situations and choices.

For the remainder of November then, let’s get started. As we have but two weeks, for this month I will truncate the process with two different topics per week according to the sequence described above.

November’s persona Archetype, related to Scorpio, is that of the DESCENDER. A well known mythic story that expresses a ‘better ending’ scenario involving a DESCENDER protagonist is that of Theseus and the Minotaur. Allow me here a Better Endings summary of this classic tale:

Theseus, son of King Aegeus of Athens, sailed to Crete, the domain of King Minos, who kept within a deep labyrinth a monstrous half-man/half-bull Minotaur.  King Minos, whose own son had been assassinated at the Athenian games, demanded of Aegeus that seven men and seven women would be sent every seventh year to be fed to and devoured by the Minotaur, in order to spare Athens itself from Minos’s wrath. Theseus’s quest on the third of these sacrificial voyages was to kill the Minotaur and rescue his compatriots.

Before entering the labyrinth, from which noone who entered had ever emerged, Theseus encountered King  Minos’s daughter Ariadne, who was immediately attracted to the young hero. Ariadne gifted Theseus with a skein of golden thread she had woven, by which he would be able to find his way out of the labyrinth with his compatriots after defeating the monster, asking only for Theseus to take her with him back to Athens.

Theseus entered and descended into the depths of the dark, winding labyrinth, unwinding the skein of thread as he proceeded.  At the core in the deepest recess of the maze, Theseus engaged the Minotaur, manos a manos. After a terrible battle, Theseus succeeded in killing and beheading the beast, grasping the Minotaur’s bull head in his hand.

Theseus rescued the Athenians and led them back to the surface, out of the labyrinthian maze. Not as taken by Ariadne as she was with him, Theseus and his men boarded the boat without her and sailed to Athens, victorious. Yet Theseus erred; he had told his father he would change a black flag on the boat to white had he succeeded.  King Aegeus, seeing the black flag instead, assumed his son had been killed and attacked, but Theseus’ own forces defeated Aegeus, killing him such that on Theseus’s return to the shores of Athens, he was crowned King earlier than would have otherwise occurred, succeeding his father. Theseus ruled as a just and heroic King, remembered by many as the heroic founder of Athens, for many generations.

all images from pixabay.com

Many archetypal-psychological interpreters of this phase of Theseus’s mythic adventures see in the Labyrinth the deep recesses of the Unconscious. They note that the Minotaur was born to Minos’s wife, Queen Pasiphae, after she had coupled with a Bull sent by Poseidon when Minos vainly requested the Bull in order to claim his own godly pretensions; but he had failed to sacrifice the Bull as Poseidon had demanded. The Minotaur thus was the embarassing consequence of Minos’s indiscretion to the gods. He is the product of human hubris and guilt, lodged deeply in the Unconscious.

Do you have a Minotaur lodged between your own higher nature and archetypal ‘crew’ members of your archetypal cast? Do you have the courage to confront the Beast and rescue your Allies as a strong and responsible Self? Meeting this challenge allows you to reintegrate and strengthen your Self through your descent and re-emergence from the Labyrinth.

Transforming Self-Limiting Beliefs and Personal Myths: A List of Prompts

Until I sat down to generate this week’s Better Endings prompts for writing, talking about or contemplating how to transform self-limiting beliefs or personal myths, I had not realized how extensive such a list can be! Here, then, is just a sampling for you to use, modify, or add to. I invite you to practice creative revisioning for a Better Endings scenario. I welcome your Comments and insights and please feel free to share your stories or journaling results.

I. Negative Self-Talk:

• I’m too {small, short, tall, young, old, skinny, heavy, etc.}
•  Noone will ever love/like (etc.) me…
• I could never do/be _______
• I can’t possibly quit {smoking, drinking, expressing anger, etc.}
• I would have, but…
• I could have, but…
• I should have, but…
• I always ______, because…

II. Negative Other-Postulates:

• That’s just how he/she/it/you/they is/are.
• He/she/it/you/they will/could never ______, because…
• Don’t be so…all the time.
• Forget it!

So, enjoy converting these negative postulates to positive statements or scenarios/ dialogue, etcetera. One fine technique is to write positive affirmations countering one of these that bothers you most, fifteen times a day.

Merry Christmas and Better Endings to All!

Related articles

• Countering Self-Limiting Beliefs with Better Endings (“Riddikulous!”) (betterendingsnow.com)