Introduction to The Archetypal Lens Blog (Part 1)
A Biographical Account Of Why I'm Starting This Blog
Why an archetypal lens? Why are such lenses worth wearing? Why write about them? And last but not least, why should I be the person writing on this topic?
I've been asking myself these questions throughout this winter, and this, my official introductory post for The Archetypal Lens blog, is my best attempt to answer them. I hope that by doing so, not only will I become clearer on the aim of this project, but as a reader, you'll be able to discern clearly whether this is a blog for you.
That's the goal. Now, let's get to it.
Exploration Is My M.O.
The first thing you need to know about me and this blog is that I am, by nature, an explorer, and, as a result, this blog's nature is exploratory. I'm a lifelong learner, and while I've gained some wisdom from my experiences in my 51 years, I am not an expert in archetypes.
In fact, I don't consider myself an expert in anything.
Instead, I've taken the path of a generalist, a guy who synthesizes a wide variety of information into something unique. You may get some of the information I present in this blog elsewhere, but it won't be put together in the same way I do it. That's something I can confidently guarantee because it’s something people who read (or listen to) my work often tell me.
Having said that, I've delayed launching this blog for several weeks because I take the media I share with the world seriously. The last thing I want is to give people the impression that I've got all the answers.
Thus, while I intend to impart some wisdom here, I believe this blog will be as much of a learning experience for me as it is for you. My writing process—and the process of my life—is driven by my innate curiosity. As someone who has spent the past two decades teaching English in Japan, I believe that the best teachers are also the best students, and vice versa.
Speaking archetypally, I've managed to keep alive the Divine Child in me, and one thing you'll find in my writing is I'm often willing to let him dance, squirt gun, and boobytrap his way across my pages.
You might have even caught a glimpse of him if you had your archetypal lenses on. If not, don't worry; he'll be back. He's never far away, and after going through a challenging period of drug addiction in my mid-20s when I lost touch with him, I know that my life—and my writing—depend on keeping him around.
For this post (and part 2, coming out in a few days), I will give a biographical history of "putting on archetypal lenses." This will clarify who I am, where this blog is coming from, and where it may go. No, you won't see me mapping out my posts beforehand with a flow chart. Excel spreadsheets, I damn you!
To conclude this opening, as someone who has been blogging for over a decade, who has one overly long philosophical novel under his belt, who went to a top journalism school and then was a newspaper reporter for several years in my 20s, and who has been writing since I penned some rather gory version of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" in early elementary school in which a bunch of birds bit people, including Mean Joe Green, “in the buns”, well, I know that not only do I always find something in the process, but I'd like to think I have a good time along the way and so will you.
With that brief bio out of the way, let's get into some details about my recent journey of putting on a pair of archetypal lenses and watching my world transform.
Learn The Archetypes and Find Your Voice
"Study and get to know archetypes and work with them. In a few years, you'll begin to find your voice."
Those words were shared with me in December 2018 by a creative counselor I'd been working with for a few years to face some common mid-life issues for a man in the early 21st century—marriage difficulties, lack of meaning in my career, the challenges of fathering two children—and some less common ones—a neurodivergent brain that sometimes expresses itself in what I now call "BryPolar Condition," an adult life of using addictive substances and behaviors to manage this condition and living as a foreigner in a country with a totally different culture and language than his own.
And while I didn't know it then, I'd also been experiencing several years of a powerful Pluto transit in the sky through Capricorn. That tiny but transformational planet went over my natal Mercury in 2008-9, and then, from 2014-2019, my Sun, North Node of the Moon, Jupiter, and Moon. Add in the typical "mid-life crisis" transit of the Uranus Opposition around age 42, and well, the 2010s was a decade of change for me, but not one I’d like to go through again.
So yeah, I'd bitten off a reasonably challenging piece of the pie, but at least my life wasn't—usually—boring. Scratch that. While the 2010s were an intense time, I felt an increasing sense of unease and, yes, maybe even boredom as the decade wore on. Was this all life had to offer? What was the point of any of it?
The details of my journey learning the archetypes are hazy, but I can give you the broad strokes. Soon after that call in December 2018, I picked up two books.
The first, Carl Jung's "Man and His Symbols," didn't land. Do not worry, Jung lovers. I recently reopened the book, and it is making more sense this time. For whatever reason, I just wasn't ready for it then. I hope to write about what I learn from it in future posts.
On the other hand, the second book, "King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine," was just one of those books—you know, the kind where every line seems to speak to you.
When I find a book like that, I highlight much more of it than I don't. This means my highlights are almost as long as the book … at least until my Kindle tells me, "You've reached the limit of highlighting for this book."
(Quick aside: In the digital realm, why are there limits? I'll skip the opportunity to curse out our Digital Overlords; I'm sure I'll get back to those bastards in future posts. Maybe we'll even give them an archetypal moniker. For now, I'll stick with Nonsensical Nincompoops.)
Regardless of my over-highlighting, the point is that the book was my first experience consciously seeing the world through archetypal lenses.
In particular, the warrior archetype really spoke to me. I realized that in my desire to be a "nice guy," I'd disempowered some of my best qualities. This was one reason I was feeling lifeless and unmotivated. Looking into this and thinking about where our culture is, I believe this is an issue for many men like me.
Before I go on, yes, toxic masculinity and patriarchy exist. Too many men have been dicks to women and to each other for too long, and rape and war are two of the foulest curses on the human experience. Still, none of that means that men should discard the Warrior archetype. In fact, the book makes the case that I was living: denying this archetype in men makes men less mature, responsible, effective, and loving.
I gained other insights from that book, and it led me to discover a website called Reclaim Your Inner Throne, which helped solidify these four masculine archetypes in my psyche. So much so that I would go on to create, as part of my morning health routine, a gratitude prayer that included these archetypes. I’ve written about the spring version which includes the Warrior and the winter version which includes the Magician, and I will write about the summer and fall versions this year.
There’s a lot of fruitful material here, so future posts are needed to go deeper.
My Crazy Summer and Fall of 2019
Flash forward a few months. Spring, 2019.
I don't remember how it happened, but something led me to re-listen to a 2018 Russell Brand podcast. In it, he hosted this crazy Danish guy named Wim Hof, who had his own—ahem, method—that he said would re-invigorate your life. As you can see by how I wrote that sentence, I'm usually skeptical of folks who have methods to transform a person's life, especially when they are named after themselves.
Still, something told me to re-listen. Perhaps my subconscious remembered how energetic, playful, and embodied Wim Hof was and told me he was the man I wanted to be like. The long and short of it is that I began using the Wim Hof Method in May 2019, which consists of a daily practice of breathwork, meditation, and cold showers.
I stuck with those cold showers for two and a half years and swore by them. I even did a presentation about them to an adult English class. I don't know why, but I broke the habit last year and haven't had one for several months. My goal in 2024 is to pick up that habit once it warms up a bit. Hold me to that, would you?
Now, I've flirted with meditation for over two decades. And I still don't really like it. But I find it helpful, even though five years later, I've shortened it to a simple five-minute after-breathwork routine, which takes about 15 minutes and has its own meditative aspects.
Looking back on 2019, especially the summer and fall, I'm amazed by how transformational and challenging it was. I don't know if I could have survived without finding that Wim Hof Method.
In short, during those six months, my BryPolar condition was in a "rapid cycling" period, which meant that I'd be up for several days, have about a week of coming down and relative normalcy, and then be down for several days and then a week of going back up through normalcy. And when I saw normalcy, that's selling it a bit short. Most of that time, I was still recovering from the previous cycle and dreaded the next one.
This had all sorts of impacts on my life, but the biggest was on my sleep. When I was up, sleep was nearly impossible. When I was down, I couldn't get enough. Handling that while working a regular 35-hour-week teaching job for Japanese public schools, some side gigs, and regularly attending my daughter's baseball practices and games led to severe burnout and confusion.
When I am up, everything feels exciting and connected. I've described it to some people as like being high on good MDMA ("Ecstasy") because my version of it is that I want to know everything and everyone. I feel this intense state of gratitude and love, and I want to relate with others. Usually.
You see, there are some downsides to being up. One is that because I'm going quickly, I can feel impatient with how slowly everyone else moves and thinks. It reminds me of a section from one of my favorite bits from comedian George Carlin, where he grips at people driving too slow in the fast lane, "Get over on the right, get over on the right!" (Be sure you speed that quote up to about 4-5 times faster than you would usually say it, and you'll be in my "up" brain for a bit).
And then, when I go down, it's like nothing makes sense, nothing is connected, and I'm so physically exhausted that even getting up to take a leak in the bathroom right next to my bedroom feels like Sisyphus on a bad day.
Anyway, the peak of this cycling was the summer and early fall of 2019. Sometime during that period, the teacher who'd advised me to study the archetypes sent me a YouTube video of an astrologer sharing about the upcoming week's astrological energies. I can't remember the episode or topic; all I know is I was instantly hooked.
Now, let me pause there.
It's not entirely fair to my history with astrology to describe it that way. After all, growing up, I'd made a daily habit of reading my horoscope in the newspaper. And while I'd gone "deep enough" into astrology to read about my (Sun) sign of Capricorn and found its description of a Capricorn---conservative, ambitious, business-oriented---well off the mark for me, I still kept reading those horoscopes.
But it wasn't until my mid-30s, around 2007-8, that I began to open to astrology. Like many people who are now much deeper into this ancient practice, that invitation came dressed as a book called "Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View." I learned later that this was author Richard Tarnas' magnum opus. In it, he gives a fantastic overview of how planetary transits relate to life here on Earth. This was another book I highlighted the Hell out of, but this time, no Digital Satan was limiting those highlights because it was a paper copy. Score one for books written on paper!
Anyway, if nothing else, that book opened me up to the idea that there was something to astrology. But for whatever reason, I hardly pursued it, only listening to podcasts about it a few times a year and reading a few things on the topic here and there.
However, once I watched that video in the late summer of 2019, it took willpower not to turn all my attention to astrology. I had this insane goal in 2019 and 2020 of riding my bike 1,000 kilometers per month (I achieved this!), and when I went out for my daily rides, many of those journeys were spent listening to astrology podcasts.
This brings me to 2020. Oh, gawd, must we go there? Indeed, we must. However, dear reader, I'm going to give you—and myself—a break.
You see, I really want to find my sweet spot for how to produce media, be it on my 2024 podcast, the Daily Bryan, or this blog (or other blogs I'm thinking of starting). And one of the things I'm considering is how long my media should be.
I'm a person who likes to go deep, and yes, sometimes this means I go on too long. On the other hand, since encountering the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell in the 1990s and his concept of "follow your bliss," I'm not going to deny myself the pleasure of writing that lights me up just to fit some market dictates or cultural expectation that shorter is better.
Having said that, my goal with these posts is that they run between 2-3,000 words. In addition, I'm committing to releasing at least one per week. These will probably come out on my weekend. I say “my” because, again, I live in Japan and I’m about a half a day ahead of most Americans and a third of a day ahead of Europeans. Anyway, it’s likely that once I settle into a rhythm, my publishing date will be on (my) Sunday evening so that most readers in my home country of America would have the posts in their inboxes on Sunday morning. For most folks, Sunday is still one of the best days for reading long-form content, so this is my idea.
Now, I'd love your feedback about this—does this make sense? Do you have a better idea?
In addition, I'd be very excited if readers took the time to engage with my work, and I promise I'll be a writer who will engage with those who do. This may change if my blog blows up to the point where I need my troop of tripping monkeys to stop their magic mushroom production and begin answering comments for me (won't that be fun! But then who’s gonna get my mushrooms for me?).
Still, for the time being, I promise to engage back. People who have gotten to know me on social media over the years can vouch for me; I like nothing more than to engage with people who engage with me.
Okay, so with that out of the way, this is, indeed, only part one of this post. I’ll publish part two in a few days. It will start in 2020, focusing on my deep dive into the world of astrology with all of its fascinating archetypes and how that dive helped me navigate that very challenging year, leading me to discover the archetypal depths of Tarot cards.
Thanks for reading! You can support me simply by sharing my stuff, by buying me a coffee, by linking to me on Twitter or Facebook by checking out my old blog, by listening to my podcast, The B&P Realm Podcast, or by reading my 2015 novel, “The Teacher and the Tree Man.” You can also find that book in full here, or broken down into four shorter books (book 1, book 2, book 3 and book 4) or you can listen to it for free.
Also, if you want to hear me yak at you every day—or just check in sometimes—about all sorts of stuff, including astrology and archetypes, check out my major 2024 media project, The Daily Bryan Podcast. I’m having a good time over there and hope to “see” you!