Life Metaphors We Live By

Welcome to Step 2 of the LifePath Mapping process I am providing in this blog over this next two-three months. (You may see the previous post from the calendar below for Step One.)  All of these techniques can also be found in my 2018 book, Your Life Path (Skyhorse Press), and in the LifePath Mapping workbook you could download for free from the panel on the right in this blog site.

I invite you to respond in your life mapping journal to the following prompts (Or, you might wish to print out this post and write your answer in the open spaces below, compiling these step by step pages in a notebook.):

1A) What is a human lifetime like? Close your eyes and imagine/ name an image that represents for you a human lifetime:  What image or metaphor comes to mind? (For example: Life is a Journey…)

1B) How/ why? How is YOUR life like the image or metaphor of a human lifetime you have imagined?

2)  What are the typical stages or phases, if any, of a normal human lifetime, whether or not they are typical of yours?

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The first two prompts above allow you to express a Life Metaphor that feels appropriate to your Life Path. Prompt #3 reveals a Life Course Schema Model that feels appropriate to your current mindset.  The LifePath Metaphor and Life Course Schema Models you have identified—though these could vary in different phases of your life or even now, according to different archetypal facets of your personality outlook—may reveal quite a lot about how you presently conceptualize “where you are at” as well as how you might be feeling about where you are at in your LifePath today.

These two cognitive models of your LifePath are often closely interconnected.  For example, an “Up and Down” LP Metaphor such as Life is like a Roller Coaster or Hiking Up and Down a Mountain is often–though not always–associated with a Cyclic Life Course Schema (e.g. seeing life as organized by decades or seven-year cycles).  A Journey sort of LP Metaphor, by contrast, is usually associated with a Linear Stage Model Life Course schema such as a sequence of five or more specific stages from Childhood through Old Age.

What about YOUR models of a lifetime? Do you see a connection between your LifePath Metaphor and your Life Course Schema model?  You may wish to journal further about this in your journal, or below.









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images are from pixabay.com

These two models or images reflect something about your cognitive outlook as you embark upon your LifePath Mapping process. In Joseph Campbell’s terms at this stage (as explained in his The Hero With 1000 Faces book), you are “Approaching the Threshold of Departure” upon this LifePath Mapping process as a rites of passage or Hero Cycle adventure.

Stay Tuned!  Next: Step Three—Compiling a list of your LifePath Shaping Events.

Your Life is An Epic Journey

 

 

You are a mystic life adventurer! But you know that, right? This month we will explore the Life Metaphor Life is an Epic Adventure, with the archetype of Mystic as our ally and guide.

James Hillman, archetypal psychologist, wrote in Healing Fiction about the healing power of your own Life Story. He made a distinction in his therapy practice between a “case story,” which a person brings to the therapy process, and a “soul story,” which a therapist can help the person to identify and own. The case story is just the facts, the weave and warp of situational events that have added up to where a person feels himself or herself to be in life.  But those same facts, told in terms of their meaning, their impact and significance to the person’s sense of life purpose, goals and desires, comprise the soul story instead.

With Life Paths I will introduce a technique I call the Parallel Myth technique. This method will provide a way to transform your basic Life Map—charting your significant, shaping experiences and their relative impacts on the person you have become—into a soul story. As a short version here, let me invite you to simply think about some Epic story in a novel, film, play or myth form that you have always identified with.  How? Why? What about that story or one of its key protagonists reminds you of your own life and your own epic life adventure?

Now then, write a brief, synoptic story that merges the story you have identified with and meaningful facts from your own life. Assign yourself a protagonist’s name, and write this synoptic story in third person, highlighting your own most dramatic challenges, successes, loves and dreams. Write a page or two encapsulating your life experience from the perspective of this ‘merged’ storyline.

I like to remind my life mapping clients and students of the following awareness:

You are the stuff that myth is made of, and myth is made up from the stuff of your lives.

Now then, go forth and prosper!

I welcome your insights and I invite you to share your stories. Let’s enjoy a conversation!

Expect and Accept the Best

This is such a profound life metaphor we are focusing on this week: Life Is What You Make It. Every word in this schematic formula carries great potency:

LIFE is what you make it.

Life IS what you make it.

Life is WHAT you make it.

Life is what YOU make it.

Life is what you MAKE it.

Life is what you make IT.

I invite you to circle one of the above, and ponder.  I choose: Life is what YOU make it.

This is a very empowering affirmation.  Since life is what I make it—and because often what I make OF whatever happens in my life is the catalyst for further development or change—then I have the freedom to create the life I choose. I accept that the response-ability is first and foremost on my own shoulders, although it may require my willingness to cooperate and collaborate also with others.

A good friend of mine, Denise,  shared a similar statement this week to “Life is what you make it” to express how she approaches creating a positive life from day to day and altogether.

“Expect and Accept the BEST,” says Denise.

That followed from a statement I had mentioned of: “Expect the best, and accept the rest.”

“No,” Denise replied emphatically. “Expect AND Accept the Best!”

Notice how this slight tweak in wording alters the underlying paradigm. If I expect only the best of myself, then I will not accept anything less and I can proceed with confidence in the pursuit of my goals and the fulfillment of every task and endeavor. If I expect and accept the best from others or from the unfolding of events, this means I will look for and see the best in everything that occurs, even when this means I might need to alter my interpretation or perception so I can learn a valuable lesson or decide to forge a new relationship with some person or situation.

Now of course, I can expect the best of myself in the moment and gradually come to a greater understanding of what my best may be. When I expect the best of another, this means I will allow the other to also be doing the best they can in the moment, and then I can respond accordingly, with flexibility and mindful awareness.

Life is what I make it has helped me as a postulate this week to reconsider how to take positive action in the direction of fulfilling a very important (to me) life dream. Since life is what I MAKE it, I must and can take action rather than waiting unrealistically for others to take action on my behalf. ‘What Can I Do Now?’ has become a mantra this week that has led me to a revised plan of action for working on a vital creative project.

What can YOU do Now because your life is what YOU make it?

I welcome and encourage your comments, life insights, and stories!

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Postscript: When I shared a draft of this blog with my friend Denise, she reminded me I had left an important aspect of Expect and Accept the Best unstated. I asked her to email me a statement about this crucial element, and here is what Denise shared:

“So expect and accept the best. Accepting the best, I think, is the key. But if I’m working in partnership with spirit then my best may be less than what spirit is offering. Acceptance and compromise keeps me on the right track.” – Denise Naughton (author)

Life Is…But a Dream

Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Gently Down the Stream

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

Life is But a Dream

This verse, with such a lilting melody that English speaking children have heard and sung since childhood, carries a profound truth. Is our waking reality any more substantial than a nightly dream or daydream? Our everyday reality as we perceive it has a quality of projection to it, so that the coherence we perceive is constructed rather than real; it is a mapping of our experience according to conceptual systems that we develop through socialization and language acquisition processes. Language sorts our perceptions according to cultural categories and habitual experience. Even our sense of Self, of who we are as persons over a life course, is constructed by the brain or Mind, weaving together disconnected moments as a seamless stream of consciousness, even though with multiple threads of attention and attitudes—including archetypal MULTIPLICITY–our sense of self could more accurately be described as diverse and disjoint or multiplex.

So, Life IS but a Dream! Such potentials open up with this awareness, so long as we learn to recognize how bound we can become to fixed ideas and habitual, self-limiting behaviors and beliefs.  Since life is a dream, we can change our life by altering our perceptions and attitudes. We might just as well MANIFEST that which we intend to realize, being cause via our mindful choices rather than the effect of our responses to others’ choices, for instance.

Since Life is But a Dream, then you might just as well dream deeply and dream BIG.

How is your life like a Dream? Is it a “dream come true”?  Would you change anything about your life if you could? How might you choose to alter your waking dream life?

You can work on little things as well as big things in modifying any fixed elements or patterns you have established by recognizing these and choosing to implement changes. For example, last week while in a contemplative, “receptive” mode at night, I had an impulse that told me I could “save nine years” of life by no longer drinking soda drinks. It was a very clear impression, so I made an inner agreement and have not imbibed a soda since, nor do I intend to any more. This one slight adjustment to patterns I have established in this life-dream scenario could make a big difference down the road.

Since life is but a dream and YOU are the Dreamer, this opens opportunities for LUCID awareness that empowers you to create the life you choose to live in every aspect, moment by moment as well as on the largest canvas.

Good Dreaming to you!

Using Life Metaphors as Positive Affirmations

Life Is… A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY! This is our Life Metaphor theme especially for this week and throughout the rest of this month of November.  A Golden Opportunity means, you have the freedom to be creative in your life, every day and always! There are opportunities around every corner, every turn in the road.  Setbacks are opportunities for change or a new direction. Hardships offer lessons, opportunities for new growth, new vistas.

Why focus on positive or “Better Endings” Life Metaphors?  A metaphor is a cognitive scaffold; it allows us to orient ourselves to the images and to the PATHWAY represented therein. As a Golden Opportunity, life is OPEN in all directions; nothing is set in stone; everything is rich in rewarding choices.

Can you think of times in your life when you have realized how life is a Golden Opportunity? Maybe when you graduated from high school or from college? Suddenly the “world is your oyster” (another positive metaphor”: you could take the job of your choice or travel to live in a setting or location full of rich possibility! Or perhaps your marriage or the birth of a child brought joy to you in the awareness of life’s infinite potentials.

On the other hand, is there a situation in your life right now where you might be feeling “stuck” or “pinned down”? Those are also metaphoric scaffolds. You can apply a positive Life Metaphor as an AFFIRMATION. Look at this “stuck” situation and replace it with the repeating mantra: “Life is a Golden Opportunity”! As a creative exercise, repeat this affirmation; write it or say it aloud or inwardly 12 times, while gently focusing attention on your situation.

Do you begin to see some light ‘around the edges’ of your stuck situation? What OPPORTUNITY is implicit, even if heretofore hidden, in your present set of conditions? This is a question ripe for active imagination, contemplation, meditation or prayer.  Ask inwardly to be shown, how might this situation offer a Golden Opportunity?

What can you be doing in your life Now, to manifest this opportunity?

As you arrive at some insight, you can journal about it or talk about it, or create a poem or artwork to ILLUMINATE and to remember and reinforce your new awareness.

For me, I can acknowledge feeling stuck in a particular situation that I have not felt I have much control over, lately. But, Life is a GOLDEN OPPPORTUNITY! So, I will maintain faith that things are as they are meant to be, Now. I will look for the opening, for the opportunity to ACT in a manner that may release the potentials I long to realize; the Gold at the end of the Rainbow!

I welcome your thoughts and comments about this theme. How is YOUR life or a specific situation you have been feeling stuck within actually or also a Golden Opportunity?

 AND:

Synchronicity Sharing:

Isn’t this image and thought below a beautiful awareness that highlights how life is full of possibilities?

This artistic image with words about how Life is a Golden Opportunity is reposted from Mandi of Caged No More, who reblogged it on Nov. 14 from Mimi’s blog, Everyday Positive Quotes (Nov 15, 2014: http://everydaypositivequote.wordpress.com/2014/11/15/new-beginning/ ). Mimi’s title for the post is: New Beginning!

 

Life Is… Your Golden Opportunity!

Welcome to Year Two of Life Paths for Better Endings.Here we explore approaches to Life Mapping and other self-help modalities to help you enhance your Life Path by envisioning and manifesting “better endings”.  Two key concepts that are helpful for establishing a positively oriented Life Path–i.e.one that will empower you to realize your Life Dream–are Better Endings Life Path Metaphors, on one hand, and active imagination to harness the strengths of your own unconscious archetypal character strengths associated with the Life Themes you have already developed in your life experience.

This year, I will be inviting you to creatively explore these two elements of anyone’s Life Path in some depth. Each month we will explore one Life Path Metaphor that frames a positive orientation, and each month we will encounter and get to know one  of 12 Universal Archetypes that were first introduced into Archetypal Psychology by Dr.Charles Bebeau–along with his wife Nin and co-teacher Debra J. Breazzano–at the former Archetypal Academy in Boulder, Colorado. These Twelve universal archetypal character figures exist at least unconsciously in everyone, though the form and prominence of these twelve will vary from person to person.

As we experience recurring Life Themes, or KINDS of life events in our lives, we develop strengths–or, sometimes, challenges or inhibitions–with regard to specific aspects of these 12 primary archetypal character modes. For example, if you are aMother, you may be strengthening your Nurturer archetypal character traits; or if you are a teacher, the Teacher archetype may help you to enact this role in the classroom.According to CHarles Bebeau there are also astrological associations with these Twelve that derive from Sumerian mythology and astrology. So, we will focus on the Archetype each month that corresponds mainly with that astrological period.

So, let’s get started!

Our first Better Endings Life Path Metaphor, that we will focus on from now until December, is:

Life Is...Your Golden Opportunity

So allow me to introduce this metaphor by reference to a very meaningful envisioning experience in my own life, one that propelled me to develop the entire approach that this blog–and the book, Life Paths, that it serves to introduce–represents.  Some fourteen years ago, while I was experiencing what I called at the time a “mid-life crisis,” I went seriously inward for several months, asking for inner guidance.  Was I to remain in an academic career (I’m a professor of cultural anthropology and linguistics in Colorado), or should I quit to focus entirely on my creative writing “calling”?  One morning the answer came through in the form of a clear “wake-up call”.  Plastered before my eyes inwardly was a square white sign with bold black letters, that said:

YOU HAVE THE RESPONSIBILITY

TO REALIZE YOUR DREAMS

NOT JUST FOR GETTING BY

What a gift! This inner message changed my life.  It told me that I have an OPPORTUNITY to realize my dreams, and that I should aim always to fulfill that opportunity; YOU, TOO!

So, what is YOUR Golden Opportunity? What are you here to REALIZE or to FULFILL that will meet this responsibility to manifest your LIFE PURPOSE, your LIFE MISSION, your LIFE DREAM? How can you establish a LIFE PATH that will keep you true to this Responsibility to REALIZE YOUR DREAMS?

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This week, I invite you to actively CONTEMPLATE, TALK ABOUT, and/or to JOURNAL about your Golden Opportunity in this life. What IS IT? What are YOU here to Realize? How does this relate to your current life context (job, relationships, spirituality, vocational activities, etcetera), and how can you adjust your life to focus more and more on realizing your Dreams? 

I welcome and will share your Insights (please Comment below) and your Stories!

Later this week, we will continue to explore how your life is a Golden Opportunity! Then, stay tuned  as next week I will introduce our monthly Archetype Ally for November: The Descender. How might these two be related?

Life Paths–Hard Knocks or a Golden Spiral?

What is the difference between a negative and a positive experience? This is a riddle, friends. Haven’t you noticed how, so often, there appears to be but a hairsbreadth difference between an experience that can “break you” or “make you”? In life maps coaching, I see this alot with people. Two people can experience very similar events, like a car accident or an illness, yet their understanding of or response to those events can be like night and day.

Two people who engaged in life mapping are Scott and Will (pseudonyms). Scott expressed a Life Metaphor when he told me twice, “They ought to give me a Ph.D. in the Hard Knocks of Life!” Will expressed a more prosaic, very detailed Life Metaphor, after closing his eyes to meditate on “What is a human lifetime like?” His image: “Life is like a golden spiral with launch pads on various rings of the spiral that propel one to ever higher levels of realization!” Hmm. Two people, two very different metaphors for life. Why, do you suppose? And, does it matter?

Scott’s life map traces a long series of Ups and Downs, especially with Work-related and Health-related events. He went through several years during which he would take a new job, move to where the job was, then lose the job and move back to his parents’. Scott had a car accident in the middle of all this which led to chronic back problems. He confided that with every loss in his life, he increasingly turned to “partying” with alcohol and drugs in an attempt to mask his pain. Life is Hard Knocks, says Scott, and certainly his life pattern conforms with that opinion.

Then there’s Will. Will is a retired pastor from the United Church of Christ. After choosing his religious vocation as a young man, Will graduated from a seminary, married bis best childhood friend and “soul mate”, and then he conducted a successful career as a pastor for some 40 years before retiring, still active in his faith and father of two successful sons. Will’s life map depicts a series of extremely positive events, as might be expected. Still, even Will’s life map records three deep ‘troughs’, widely spaced but difficult times of Descent, in Will’s terms. These were times of soul searching, he said. Dealing with a diagnosis of diabetes, facing his mother’s death, and facing retirement were, to Will, those “launch pad” events along his “Golden Spiral” lifetime that propelled him every time up to the next rung of the spiral.

Both Scott and Will have encountered challenging situations in their lives, though Scott’s life of “Hard Knocks” does appear to have been more characterized by Downs, while Will’s has been more consistently a positive experience. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? To what extent do our Life Metaphors–interpretive lenses through which we frame and interpret life events–serve as self-fulfilling prophecies that, indeed, not only reflect but also perpetuate their own image? Someone says, “Life is a Roller Coaster” and lo, that person’s life does continue to drag the person through a challenging, bipolar sequence of challenging Ups and Downs. Yes, but there’s another side to that picture. If our Life Metaphors serve as mindsets or cognitive schema models that can either enhance or limit our interpretation of life events, then it stands to reason that finding a way to CHANGE a self-limiting Life Metaphor might also facilitate (or reflect) a more positive trend in a person’s life pattern! I have witnessed many persons whose outlooks on life have changed dramatically in conjunction with a consciously created upturn in  life experience.

After completing his life map and reflecting on its patterns, Scott told me at his closing session that he had begun to investigate various spiritual teachings. He was aiming to “make better sense” of his life, so he could “find more balance”. I was happy to hear that Scott had placed himself onto a track toward Better Endings!

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So if you were today fully living the life of your dreams, what Life Metaphor might best mirror your life Now?

Better Endings to you. Linda

Life Path Metaphors We Live By

This week’s Better Endings Life Mapping activity (#3) is to describe a human life according to a key metaphor or image. Is life like a Journey, a Cycle of Seasons, a Mountain or River? Or, to you lately, is Life more like a Roller Coaster Ride? If you haven’t already done this exercise of the week, take a moment to write down an image of what, to you, a human lifetime is like. And, how/ why? Briefly explain how life fits your current image of it.

[Please complete the above activity before continuing.]

Okay then. Now, ask yourself, “Does this image mirror any pattern in my own life?”  I am going to wager that it does. So, if you like, please take another moment to describe in what ways your life fits the image you just described.

[Pause; you are writing again.]

Very good! So, what’s this all about? I call the the sort of image you have just described a Life Metaphor. You might provide a different image depending on what is current in your life in terms of basic patterns, such as how much your life is feeling stable, dynamic, or in chaos. Today’s image of yours is what I will call an “initial” Life Metaphor; before completing a full Life Mapping process. I expect it will shift for you if you keep up with applying these weekly Life Mapping techniques over the course of this year’s blog. So I encourage you to keep a Life Mapping journal that will develop these ideas over time.

One of my own favorite Life Metaphors, and the reason for my use of Anne Wipf’s wonderful painting that I am using as the header image for this site, is: Life is a Carousel or Merry-Go-Round. Round and round I go with the cycles of time–days, weeks, months, years, decades–Up and Down with the flow of events in my life. And as I cycle along with this merry-go-round adventure, I always seem to be reaching out and striving to catch that elusive “Brass Ring,” every time I come around to it again.

How wonderful that Anne Wipf’s great piece of art that is the focal image for this blog, “Carousel,” shows the horses leaping off from their base platform to freedom! It must get pretty boring, after all, for a carousel pony. It must feel like a cage, or like the mountain that the mythic Sisyphus is bound to, rolling a boulder eternally up, and then back down, over and over again as his punishment from the gods.

I imagine these Anne Wipf “Carousel” horses leaping off from their wooden platforms every night when the amusement parks are closed, teaming off together to some rarified, special place known only to themselves. Then, in my imagining, they willingly hop back onto their platform by morning, humble vehicles of divine love that they are, to bring pleasure to the children and adult children who delight in the brief, musical turn of the ride. Where do they go, do YOU imagine?

There is such serendipity and sychronicity I am discovering while producing this site that develops our year long theme of Better Endings. Last week I watched Mary Poppins and I was taken aback to see Mary Poppins and Burt (Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke) hopping merrily OFF from a carousel on horses that leap joyfully through a technicolor valley. Then on Christmas day I went with a friend to see Saving Mr. Banks and learned, to my delight, that the entire story of Mary Poppins is about creating Better Endings that have the creative power to transform bittersweet memories from childhood. (Go see it!) And there was the carousel, in both P. L. Travers‘ and Walt Disney’s biographical lives as well, and their combined creative genius of allowing the horses to leap out from their ‘cage’ in the film, to transport their riders through a magical kingdom where wrongs are righted and sadness gives way to merriment.

Would you alter your current Life Metaphor at all, if you could? Or, would you rather like it to stay just as it is? I would love to share your insights and Comments. And, of course, if you enjoy this, please Like it and Share it with your friends. To receive Better Endings daily by email, simply enter your email address in the Follow box.

Thanks for being out there, and please do share with your Comments and Better Endings Stories!

Related articles

• “Saving Mr. Banks” is Really About Healing the Wounded Heart (getreal.typepad.com)
• City Park’s Carousel is a Treasure (neworleanscitypark.wordpress.com)
• Saving Mr. Banks: Disney at It’s Finest (brickmoviereviews.wordpress.com)
• Grabbing the brass ring (smallpondscience.com)
• Being Human: On the Metaphorizing Instinct (thepoetsglass.com)
• Rat Trying to Get Off Escalator Is Perfect Metaphor For Life (jezebel.com)