Archetypes are your energy guides to your highest potential. The nature of your archetypes is both intimate and impersonal.

Viewed through the heart, they are personal enough to be called companions. Viewed with the mind they are impersonal, symbolic patterns that serve in the energetic organization of your spiritual evolution. Working with your archetypal patterns is a way to become conscious of yourself, the effects of your actions, and the need for choosing wisely every day.

You have four constant archetypes at work in your life.

The Four Archetypes of Survival: Child, Victim, Prostitute, and Saboteur.

The Child: Guardian of Innocence
We most easily identify with the Child, and this archetype establishes our perceptions of life, safety, nurturing, loyalty, and family. Its many aspects include the Wounded Child, the Abandoned or Orphan Child, the Dependent Child, the Innocent Child, the Nature Child, and the Divine Child.

Regardless of which aspect of the Child you relate to most intimately, this archetypal pattern brings you to meet the guardian of your innocence. The Child helps heal, repair, and teach you what you need to care for in yourself.

The Victim: Guardian of Self-Esteem
The Victim archetype may manifest the first time you don’t get what you want or need; are abused by a parent, playmate, sibling, or teacher; or are accused of or punished for something you didn’t do.

The core issue of the Victim is whether it’s worth giving up your own sense of empowerment to avoid taking responsibility for your independence.

The lessons associated with the Victim archetype demand that you evaluate your relationship to power, particularly in your interactions with people with whom you have control issues and need to construct personal boundaries.

The Prostitute: Guardian of Faith.
The core issue of the Prostitute archetype is how much you are willing to sell of yourself—your morals, your integrity, your intellect, your word, your body, or your soul—for the sake of physical security.

The Prostitute archetype can act as a guardian that awakens you to situations in which you must decide to “take up your bed and walk.” Once you get away from a circumstance that costs you too much –money, energy, dignity, or time—lasting transformation is possible.

The Saboteur: Guardian of Choice
The Saboteur archetype is a neutral energy within you that usually makes itself known through disruption. It can sabotage your efforts to be happy and successful if you are not aware of the patterns of thought and behavior that it raises in you. It can cause you to resist opportunities. The Saboteur is the mirror that reflects your fears of taking responsibility for yourself and for what you create.

You can silence the Saboteur with acts of courage and by following your intuition.

The core issue for the Saboteur is fear of inviting change into your life, change that requires responding in a positive way to opportunities to shape and deepen your spirit.