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Full Description

The inner child harbors your utmost joy and your deepest wound. Your relationship with the child archetype is likely colored by how your actual childhood was, but the child archetype is neither good nor bad. She has the potential to be both and everything in between.

Every one of you has the child archetype within, and this archetype is tied directly to your survival. Whether you are trying to grow and move past a painful history or somehow preserve the golden years of your youth, a deeper understanding of the child archetype is life changing.

The innocence of the child brings both the joy of wonder and the danger of gullibility. The child craves belonging yet desires nothing but independence. She wants to grow up and be responsible while trying to stay young without a care in the world. The key to unleashing the child’s imaginative power is in balancing these natural, paradoxical instincts.

In this self-guided online audio course, Stacey Couch opens up the amazing universe of the child archetype. She describes how to balance your inner child using play and imagination.

When you are able to balance your relationship with the child archetype, you are able to more easily and brilliantly tend to your survival needs. Furthermore, when you understand how your inner child rules your behavior, you can break free of many unmet needs – the need to belong, the need to fly free, the need to be counted on, the need to be taken seriously. So many of these needs stem from an unbalanced relationship with the child archetype.

In the second half of the course, Stacey uses fairytales and stories such as Thumbelisa, The Singing, Springing Lark, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and many others to show how these themes play out in six different expressions of the child archetype. Caroline Myss identifies multiple patterns of the child archetype in her work on Sacred Contracts. In this online class, Stacey Couch details and compares these six main patterns: Eternal, Orphan, Magical, Wounded, Nature and Divine.

Bonus Session!
This course includes a bonus session with helpful tips on how to select your unique expression of the child archetype.

What Is Included
This course includes a PDF course workbook with guided self-reflective exercises to help you integrate the material contained in the course. There are eleven pre-recorded audio sessions. The sessions are available for streaming or to download and listen to offline.

The first five sessions of this extensive child archetype course cover the following aspects of the child archetype in a broad picture:

• The three paradoxes of the child archetype
• The double-edged sword of the power and gullibility of innocence
• Managing the urge to grow up and stay young that happen at the same time
• Balancing responsibility and play
• Navigating belonging and independence
• How play is a necessary survival skill
• How the power of the imagination makes a healthy inner child

The second six sessions of the course relate to the specific expressions of the child archetype. In this series of sessions, you can listen to each expression in any order to learn:

• The depths of the Eternal, Nature, Magical, Wounded, Divine, and Orphan Child
• How specific fairytales and stories give us insight into the patterns and motivations of each archetype
• The way each child archetype relates to the three paradoxes outlined at the start of the course
• Where each child archetype uses her power of imagination to unlock her potential
• The fully emerged light aspect of each child archetype

Course Outline

Session 1 – Three Paradoxes of the Child Archetype
Session 2 –  Shadow of the Child Archetype
Session 3 – Light of the Child Archetype
Session 4 – Play as Necessity
Session 5 – Freeing Your Imagination
Sessions 6-11 – Expressions of the Child Archetype
BONUS: Tips for Selecting Your Expression of the Child Archetype

What You Get Out of this Class
When you find yourself saying, “Stop being so immature,” you’re likely guarding against the gullibility of the child in you. On the other hand, when you state that you “don’t want to grow up”, you are fighting against the natural pull towards responsibility inherent in every inner child. Society teaches us that life is about growing up and getting over the neediness, co-dependence, selfishness, and irrationality of the child. However, this life can feel stale and disconnected. Other people who never give up the innocence, light-heartedness, playfulness, and wonder of childhood find themselves constantly fighting against cultural norms. In this course, you’ll discover that it’s not an either/or choice, but a healthy balance between these instincts.

A cautious life independent of anyone can feel closed off and cold. A reckless, happy-go-lucky life co-dependent on others can feel ungrounded and unproductive. Realizing how our own child archetype responds to and views the world helps us navigate questions of independence versus belonging as well as responsibility versus playfulness. The gift of the child archetype is the ability to balance the maturity and wisdom that age brings with the open-minded and carefree nature of our youth.

By learning to balance the motivations of the child archetype in you, your imagination is set free. Your imagination is a powerful, soul faculty that drives your creativity. The child archetype wields the imaginative powers with great skill. When she is balanced and in the light, you can use your imagination to play, work, create, love and live as you were born to.

What are Archetypes?
Archetypes are universal patterns of power that coordinate how we think and feel. All we have to do is say “angel” or “hermit”, and instantly, others know what kind of person we are talking about. This is indicative of the amount of power that each archetype contains. The Greek origin of the word “archetype” comes from the words archē, meaning “beginning or original” and typos, meaning “pattern, model or type”. Thus, an archetype is the original or first pattern from which all others are made. On the other hand, each survivor has a light, positive side that unlocks the power of our soul. Learning to co-create with the light side of the survivor archetypes is the key to living an authentic, empowered life.