but am only now delving into the full 9-hour lecture series, "Advanced Energy Anatomy," by Caroline Myss. Several people have recommended it to me, and in listening to it today, I felt compelled to actually transcribe a few highlights I found particularly powerful in the chance that it resonates with anyone else.

Here's the link to the series on Amazon or Audible.

Essentially, it's all about the idea of confronting the archetypes in yourself and others. Are you seeing the world through one of these four primary archetypes: the child, the prostitute, the victim or the saboteur? When you're decrying, "That's not fair," consider that you might actually be experiencing the world right now through the lens of the victim archetype. "I just need to find someone to take care of me," that is most likely the child archetype. "I can't take a risk and try what I really want to do because I'd lose my security," that's the prostitute talking. "I don't have time to do what I really want," consider that the saboteur.

It's fascinating stuff. Might be too hooky spooky voodoo for some tastes, but if you're interested in the idea of what energy you are bringing to a situation (positive, expectant, hopeful versus fearful, miserable, anxious), you'll probably dig her work.

Here's the excerpts from part of her thoughts on vocation and relationships.

"When you're born, imagine that your spirit splinters -- your many faces of God -- splinter into all directions. And that life is the journey of collecting your splinters....With that in mind your archetypes are below the surface of everything you do because there is always an opportunity to absorb another one of your fragments. There is always another opportunity to find out where there is a part of you that is not within the whole. The journey of becoming conscious means that you can absorb those fragments consciously. You can look at someone and you can realize, you and I are in this relationship because we carry a fragment of each other's soul so let's relate to that as symbolically as we can because then this way we won't get any scar tissue. And we can avoid taking a dynamic personally.

"For example, you're in a career or in a job or in the workplace. From a practical level, everybody is going to experience some of the following standard operating procedures on the earth. Every one of us will know what it's like to envy somebody in the workplace. Every one of us will know what it's like to compete with somebody, to want their job. To feel like what they're doing is more important than what we're doing. Every one of us will have power plays with people in the workplace. It happens. It's a natural part of life. The purpose it serves is that you are put opposite someone who has a piece of your soul. From a symbolic point of view, I am not talking about possession.

"I'm talking about being with somebody who is holding an energetic pattern of yours that you need to fill out your whole, and that by being with this person your energetic emptiness is activated and you know that because you are not responding to that person in an empowered way. Whenever you respond to anybody and you feel disempowered or you feel victimized, when any of those four archetypes are present [child, victim, prostitute, saboteur], then be mindful that you are in the presence of somebody who holds an aspect of your spirit or your soul. And that the way of resolving that is to recognize, 'I'm feeling victimized, this person has some gift in him that can help me heal my victim.'...

"[In terms of the need for experiencing betrayal]: Betrayal is the archetypal experience in life in which a paradigm of power needs to fail you on the outside of your life so you can look for a deeper level of power on the inside of you. Betrayal will always look like this: 'I didn't deserve this, this wasn't just, this shouldn't have happened.'...When an act of betrayal happens if you understood it symbolically, not through your victim, your victim will be the first to scream, 'betrayal!' and then the rest will kind of follow in line -- but if you understood the voices of your archetypes better and understood the process, meaning specifically this: You are on a spiritual path....That means you have to go through transformation and metamorphosis....Ask yourself this, what opportunities are emerging in yourself that you really should explore? What feelings, what intuitive feelings are coming forth?...What is your spirit developing a passion for? Don't be afraid to articulate this. Part of you will be, because part of you knows that as soon as you give voice to your spirit, that voice is never quiet again....

"Where are you sabotaging yourself? Become conscious of what you are doing to sabotage yourself....I promise you can find at least five places where you are sabotaging what you think you want in your life. Identify the excuses you give yourself....One person said to me once, 'I'm very much afraid of success,' which for me is one of the most preposterous things I ever hear in my life. 'What do you mean you're afraid of success?' Rather, I looked at her and I said, 'No you're not. You are afraid of responsibility. Because if your job did become the least bit successful what terrifies you is that you'd have to change your lifestyle. You'd have to get up early and put in more hours. You couldn't spend that much time on the couch anymore. You'd have to actually work. And she said, 'That's absolutely right. I don't want to work that hard.' Where she wanted to work hard was that she wanted her mind and her fantasies to have a career. Her fantasies were employed. They didn't pay much, but a fantasy career, you can get high on a fantasy career, on imagining what you could do. And then if you find someone to blame as to why you're not doing it, you're sort of semi-employed. Because it's like saying, 'I'm very talented, you have to take my word for it. But if it wasn't for them, you'd see my talent.'

"This is where you need to have a serious conversation with yourself, quite frankly, on a regular basis and evaluate, how are you contributing to the furthering and birthing of your vocation each day -- and how are sabotaging it?...Finally, remind yourself that if you are feeling frustrated. If you feel like you have a passion to do something else it's probably because something else is waiting for you. And if you have that kind of energy, and you don't know where to go tomorrow then you look at what you're holding on from yesterday that needs to be let go of, including the fact that you may not be willing to let go of anything. And if you aren't willing to change, let go or be mutable, then the thirst and the desire for what you have may never materialize for you. And on the other hand if you are -- truly, you have no idea how rich, how deep and how extraordinary your potential is, because you have yet to meet it....

"Relationships...that's where we are most vulnerable. You don't meet your archetypal energies any more intimately than when you are sitting across the breakfast table from them or sleeping with them, walking with them or paying taxes with them. Relationships are where you discover the deepest part of yourself. So how I'm going to do this is I'll take you through each of the archetypes and describe their behavior so you have a way to identify, what does the child look like in a relationship?...How do you know when you're feeling like a victim?...Your archetypes are the ones doing the dating, you're not. Your archetypes are the ones who meet over a candlelit dinner, and it's your archetypal patterns that talk about what you would like your life to be like. But curiously, it's not until you really get involved intimately with each other that your archetypal energies begin to surface more deeply in you, and they play a far more dramatic role, in that their real deeper role, once they've got you attracted to someone, once the law of magnetic attraction has been engaged, what happens next is the next level of relationship opens up which is the real reason you're together. Meaning this. Let's say that your archetype of the child [connects with] your partner's archetype of a child because you love to play together. You have a ball together, you love sports and you love the outdoor world and he makes you feel like life is fun and he makes you feel like the whole world is such a safe, playful place. And that's wonderful, but at some point the part of your child that has a lot of fear or the part of your child that needs to grow up might meet the part of his child that needs to grow up.

"On the positive side, this is a wonderful opportunity for the two of you to say, we've got to walk down the yellow brick road to Oz, and we've got to grow up. We've got to find our adult heart, our adult brain and a little courage on our way to Oz, and yet what's equally true in a relationship is that that can be so intimidating to suddenly look at your partner and see a child sitting there when you thought you were with an adult. What I tell people is, 'Listen, if you can see his pattern, see his or her archetypal pattern in operation transcending the lovely person sitting across from you.' You might be able to work through the challenges of life realizing that what you are facing is a pattern and not a person....Oftentimes someone [in the child archetype] will be attracted to you because they see a parent in you, at an unconscious level their child seeking to be healed might be looking for parental energy from you far more than relationship energy....[Or] some part of you is the wounded child...and you are drawn to someone who is the parental figure...At some point that relationship will hit rocky waters, and the reason is you are looking for that person unconsciously to make the world safe for you, when in fact, that's your job.

"There is one path that we are consistently on, and that's a path of empowerment and any time we take a tributary off that path or a tributary off that river, hoping that someone else will carry our weight or make our choices for us in this world, that dynamic, that relationship will hit a wall, and you can count on it....Because the mechanism behind a successful relationship is that you allow each other to grow....You begin to realize what's going on here is that we're maturing spiritually, we're maturing consciously, and it's demanding something of us. It's demanding of us how to take more responsibility to make more mature choices in our lives, based on, first and foremost, recognizing the patterns that motivate the choices that we make in life. Now if we move to the next archetype, which is the victim -- relationships are notorious for making one feel like a victim. You feel victimized because of how a person controls you...a relationship is a natural playground for a victim. There are so many reasons for it, and let's start here.

"When you are in a relationship with another person, it goes without saying that you are making an exchange of power. The whole concept of intimacy or vulnerability lies in the fact that vulnerability is based upon a ritual in which you exchange a portion of your power and the other one gives you a portion of his or her power. This is called a vow. A vow is an exchange of power. And what you are saying is, 'I will protect and honor your power, and I give you my power.' This is the difference between a vow and a promise. This is the reason why when you break a vow it brings you to your knees. This is why it's so difficult and the pain is so great when someone breaks a vow and why so often when a person endures that kind of crisis it might take years to recover because they need to recover their spirit. They've got to get their power back. So why the relationship may have broken and that break may be years ago, still they have to retrieve the power....Because so long as their ex-mate has that power, that ex-mate still has the authority to still make a choice for you. You see if you have someone's power, what you actually have is a percentage of choice-making ability in how that person creates his or her reality. This is the essence of vulnerability....

"At an archetypal level, at the deepest level of life, vulnerability is what you feel when you've given your power to another person, specifically the power to create your reality. Now that's what makes you vulnerable. And if in a relationship that becomes so extreme that you, your health, your well-being, your life, your potential, your creative ability is threatened because of that relationship, it'll hit the wall and you can count on it....You are not meant to give your power of co-creation to another person....I encourage romance and I encourage falling in love, nevertheless, change happens. And relationships serve a process of growth long before they serve a process of romance. We're together with people, not just for romantic or love's sake. We're together with them because that person holds within them some fragments of our being which we need to collect and integrate through and because of that relationship. If you feel very frightened in life and you find that you have married someone because of your shadow, because of your fears, you will I promise you, confront your fears in that relationship. And the whole point will be so that you can come to stand up on your own....

"[After telling the story of a woman who was an extreme case of the child archetype in a relationship and broke out to find independence] -- and with all of that what's happening is she is expanding inside and her definition of what she needs in a relationship is blooming entirely, and why I believe her next relationship if indeed she has one will be so healthy is because she has reached a point where I encourage everybody to get to which is the point where you don't need a relationship. And when you reach the point where you don't need one, if it comes into your life, fine, and if it doesn't you'll be fine -- that's when you can afford to wait for the partner that you've been waiting for. When you can develop your primary relationship with yourself. Your first marriage should be to yourself. Your first vows of loyalty should be to yourself. You're the one you should take care of in the primary sense. The first person you should be able to protect is yourself -- provide for yourself.

"When all of those bases of survival are covered, then you can afford to be romantic. Then you can afford to look at someone and fall in love with who that person really is -- versus what that person can do for you. Or how that person can cover your fears up so that you don't have to get to know that part of yourself. The whole idea of becoming conscious is that you're the one who takes responsibility, accountability...for what you create."

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