Under Their Spell: Fairy Tale Meditations
Fairy Tales are both stories and symbolic poetry. In them our ancestors pass on to us the patterns of our own evolution.
Enter in, and let the Dreamer awaken in you its wise, healing and transformative symbols.
The Goose Girl: Love and the True Self
Follow the symbolic journey of a young girl, who in order to gain love first adopts a false self. Then, by entering an oven and telling her story, she becomes able to be her true self before her partner.
Fairy Tales and Archetypes
What are archetypes? And how are they present in fairy tales? Archetypes are abiding patterns from our evolutionary history, a kind of material memory. They arise, are activated, and are imprinted, at various stages of our life’s journey. Fairy tales represent these archetypes and their times of arising and imprinting.
"The Cat in the Hat": Externalizing Inner Conflicts Through the Imagination
The modern children’s story “The Cat in the Hat”, while not strictly a fairy tale, has fairy tale qualities. It also provides a more apparent example of something that can be less obvious in fairy tales: that the imaginative world of the fairy tale, and the dark forest or underworld, is a way to make more sensible to us our own more hidden inner souls and their conflicts.
The Frog Prince:
Time and Development in Fairy Tales
In other edisopdes we meditated on how place and landscape are symbolic in fairy tales. “The Frog Prince” will show us that time also is non-literal and symbolic. More than being hero-quest stories, fairy tales symbolize developmental life transitions.
Where the Wild Things Are
Untying the Knots of the Soul through Imaginative Journeys:
This contemporary fairy tale describes a boys efforts to resolve inner conflicts arising in family life by taking an imaginative journey. We will use this tale to meditate more on the ‘story’ aspect of fairy tales: the arising and resolving of conflicts, both inner and outer.
The Devil's Three Golden Hairs: Conflicts with Culture
The fairy tale “The Devil’s Three Golden Hairs” symbolizes some fundamental conflicts humans have when coming into this world: conflicts with the established cultures and traditions. This fairy tale also offers beautiful examples of ‘parallelism’ in fairy tales for us to consider.