Archetype Readings
PETER OCCHIOGROSSO
Certified Counselor
What Are Archetypes?
Archetypes are universal symbols, themes, or patterns that appear in stories, myths, dreams, and human experiences across cultures and throughout history. They represent fundamental human roles and emotions and often take the form of characters, situations, or symbols that resonate with the collective unconscious that all of us share.
How an Archetype Reading Works
Identifying Archetypes: For an archetype reading, the first step is to identify and recognize the archetypes that are most active in your personal chart, called the Chart of Origin. Archetypes include the Hero, the Mentor, the Trickster, the Mother, the Vampire, the Alchemist, the Mystic, the Rebel, and many more.
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Casting your Chart: Once your archetypes are identified, the reader will help you cast your Chart of Origin through an intuitive process during which you will let your higher self determine in which of 12 houses each archetype best serves you. The houses of the chart are based on the 12 houses of an astrological chart.
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Interpretation: The next step involves interpreting how the presence and interaction of different archetypes in the 12 houses can reveal deeper meanings and insights into the roles they play in your life. The significance of the archetypes varies based on which house each archetype falls into when you cast your Chart of Origin.
Personal Growth and Exploration: Archetype readings can be used for personal development and self-exploration. By recognizing which archetypes are more prominent in your life, you can gain insights into your own behavior, motivations, and challenges. This self-awareness can lead to personal growth and transformation.
Storytelling and Art: Working with your own most prominent archetypes can also help you to learn and understand the roles played by the many archetypal patterns that exist in the collective unconscious. In the realm of storytelling and art, archetypes are often used to create characters and narratives that resonate with the audience on a deep, subconscious level. Archetype readings can help writers, filmmakers, and artists craft more compelling and relatable stories. For example, when the filmmaker George Lucas created his enormously popular Star Wars series, he was influenced by the writings of Joseph Campbell, who spent his life studying the function of archetypes as initially described by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.
My experience with Archetype Readings
I have more than 12 years of experience working and teaching with Caroline Myss, from the earliest days of her work with Archetypes and Sacred Contracts. I helped to write her major best seller Sacred Contracts (2001). I also collaborated with her in creating the deck of Archetype Cards used at CMED Sacred Contracts workshops since 2003 as well as her current online class. At her CMED Institute in the Chicago area, I compiled notes of all workshops and created workbooks to help students absorb and digest Caroline's teachings as they developed. I have remained in continual contact with Caroline as her teaching has evolved, so I have a unique perspective on her thinking about the archetypes.
At Caroline's request, I developed a course in Sacred Journaling to help guide more than one thousand CMED participants through their two-year training to become Certified Archetypal Counselors. Few people understand her teachings on the archetypes and the Archetypal Wheels as thoroughly as I do, or know better how to cast charts, do readings, and process the insights that result.
I have been giving private Archetypal Readings and counseling sessions for more than 15 years, and have developed my own approach to working with this profound material, with an emphasis on making it more accessible and direct. By condensing the material, I make it easier for you to learn it in a much shorter period of time. This is especially helpful if you want to use Archetypal Counseling in your professional work as a therapist, counselor, or healer.
I live in Woodstock, 90 miles north of New York City. I occasionally give readings at my home, but I do most of my counseling and consulting by phone and Zoom with email follow-ups. If you already have determined your archetypes, either from reading Sacred Contracts or by taking the oninje class or lattending Caroline Myss's workshops, I can cast your chart and give you a reading in one session. If you need me to help you select your archetypes first, it usually requires two 90-minute sessions to complete this process and give you your reading.
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Most of the people whom I've helped to gain insight into their Archetypes have been extremely enthusiastic about this work, and have remarked on how well it fits with their desire to understand their lives without endless psychotherapy sessions. Many have also said that a familiarity with archetypal patterns has helped them in the work they do as schoolteachers, yoga instructors, life coaches, healers, therapists, artists, actors, writers, and business people. But most of all, they use the insights they learn to see themselves and others in archetypal terms.
Booking an Archetypal Consultation Session
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The nature of archetypes and how they function within each of us.
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How to determine the set of 12 personal archetypes that are most active within you.
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The methodology for using these 12 archetypes to cast charts for personal guidance for yourself and others.
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How to interpret these charts to help you create a course of action to resolve life issues concerning career, business activities, personal and professional relationships, health, and other crucial subjects.
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Single 90-minute session - $150
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Two 90-minute sessions for $250
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Subsequent sessions can be arranged at the rate of $100 an hour
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If you have any questions, please send me an email
Sacred Contracts and Your Archetypes
Have you ever wondered what your mission in life is supposed to be?
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You probably know people who seem to have had their entire life mapped out from the day they were born. You may have envied their sure sense of what they were born to do — their work, career, marriage, and personal goals.
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And yet you have probably also wondered whether that was really all there was to it. The answer Caroline Myss found is that there’s much more involved. Each of us is guided by a Sacred Contract that our soul made before we were born. That Contract contains a wide range of agreements regarding all that we are intended to learn in this life. It comprises not merely what kind of work we do but also our key relationships with the people who are to help us learn the lessons we have agreed to work on. Each of those relationships represents an individual Contract that is part of your overall Sacred Contract, and may require you to be in a certain place at a certain time to be with that person.
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This doesn’t mean, of course, that free will plays no role in your Sacred Contract. At any given moment your Contract may provide you with an opportunity for growth. It can come in the form of a challenge at work, the dissolution of an old relationship or the formation of a new one. As you work with Caroline's book “Sacred Contracts,” you will keep notes on each of the significant Contracts in your life. I recommend that you keep a notebook or journal for just this purpose.
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Your Contract is made up of all these components of your life, yet it can’t be reduced to any one of them by itself. One way of viewing your Contract is as your overall relationship to your personal power and spiritual power. It determines how you work with your energy and to whom you give it. Finding and fulfilling your Sacred Contract also depends on how much you are willing to surrender to divine guidance.​​
Archetypes are ancient, universal patterns of behavior that are embedded in what Carl Jung called the "collective unconscious." Caroline Myss and I created a unique set of 80 Archetype Cards, each individually designed to provide the basic Light and Shadow Attributes of a different Archetype. The deck also contains six blank cards on which you can create your own Archetypes.
The deck comes with an instruction booklet explaining how to use the cards to help determine which Archetypes are most active in your psyche, and how they can lead you to achieve greater insights into your life. The deck is suitable to be used by itself, in conjunction with Caroline’s book Sacred Contracts which I helped her to write, or with any of her workshops and seminars.
New York Times bestselling author and medical intuitive Caroline Myss has found that when people don’t understand their purpose in life the result can be depression, anxiety, fatigue, and eventually physical illness—in short, a spiritual malaise of epidemic proportions. Myss’s experience of working with people led her to develop an insightful and ingenious process for deciphering your own Sacred Contract—or higher purpose—using a new theory of archetypes that builds on the works of Jung, Plato, and many other contemporary thinkers.
Myss examines the lives of the spiritual masters and prophets—Abraham, Jesus, Buddha, and Muhammad—whose archetypal journeys illustrate the four stages of a Sacred Contract and provide clues for discovering your own. Myss explains how you can identify your particular spiritual energies, or archetypes—the gatekeepers of your higher purpose—and use them to help you find out what you are here on earth to learn and whom you are meant to meet. Exploring your Sacred Contract will shine a light on the purpose and meaning of your life. You are meant to do certain tasks, you are meant to have certain relationships.
In coming to know your archetypal companions, you also begin to see how to live your life in ways that make the best use of your personal power and lead you to fulfill your greatest—in fact, your divine—potential.
Both visionary and practical, Sacred Contracts is a bold, powerful work of spiritual wisdom. Without a doubt, your most intriguing challenge in life is to recognize your spiritual commitments and live them to the fullest.
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