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An old woman stands at the mouth of a cave and asks a girl to milk her deer. Would you like to learn how to run a deer dairy?

Learning begins when the learner is confronted with an unusual situation or a problem she can’t solve. In the shadow, the learner looks to others to provide the right answer before she starts. In the light, she begins with what she knows and then tests solutions out.

A Celtic god shining like the sun stands in a throne room announcing that one of his names is “Samildánach”, meaning “skilled in all the arts.” Do you believe him? Can only gods be omniscient?

Learners have an insatiable desire to know more, regardless of the task’s futility. In the shadow, the learner is concerned about looking smart and being the expert. In the light, she delights in learning for its own sake. She becomes the universe learning about itself.

A friend just divorced and is financially ruined. She hits the road again, this time to learn Italian in Italy. She has no plan. What counsel would you offer? Do you think it’s a good idea for her to keep wandering?

Learning requires leaving the comfort zone and traveling into unknown territory. In the shadow, the learner stays where she knows all the answers. She lets fate determine her path. In the light, the learner ventures out to mold her destiny.

People with the student, dilettante, and seeker archetypes have the natural drive to learn. Learning is not only memorizing information but integrating and putting it to use. True learning is both receiving AND creating knowledge.

In this Information Age, the student, dilettante, and seeker archetypes are more important than ever. The plethora of online classes, free videos, and endless articles make learning easy. The learner exposes herself to as much as possible. She hopes to absorb it all by osmosis. Instead, she becomes exhausted, overwhelmed, and lost.

When studying on auto-pilot, the learner slips into the shadow of these archetypes and never actually knows anything. Like the musician who collects instruments she never plays, the shadow learner fails to make use of her education.

This class, “The Learners,” makes obvious the inner workings of the learner’s mind. What once was instinctive now becomes deliberate. Through Stacey’s teachings, learning is no longer something that “just happens.” Learning becomes an intentional, mindful process that the learner directs via her specific archetypal imprint.

Travel with Stacey from the ancient Greek’s love of learning to the explosion of information in the Age of Enlightenment; from Rumi’s search for treasure in Egypt to the Norse god Odin’s teachings about wisdom; and from the cave of the Dream Makers to the cycle of experiential learning.

The student, dilettante, and seeker are commonly confused because of their shared affinity for learning. In “The Learners,” Stacey Couch teaches how to clearly discern between them. Stacey expertly details each archetype’s gifts, so you know how to leverage their brilliance.

Included:

In this online class, “The Learners: Student, Dilettante, Seeker,” Stacey Couch gives an in-depth definition of the light and the shadow of the student, dilettante, and seeker archetypes. Stacey describes the main themes of each archetype, so you can recognize and tell them apart. Through story and myth, you get concrete examples of each archetype’s expression, teaching you to identify these archetypes in yourself and others.

You receive a course workbook which includes journal questions and summaries of key points. This deepens your knowledge and understanding of which archetypes you are working with at any given time.

ALSO IN THIS COURSE! Spirit animals of the archetypes, and prayers for each archetype.

Stacey draws from fairytale, mythology, history, academia, and spiritual teachings, old and new. The good news is that you don’t need to read or watch it all. Stacey synthesizes, extracts, and adds to the content, making it easily accessible.

Stacey’s teachings are excellently researched, and she includes a host of resources across a wide range of disciplines. All the information is organized in an elegant, accessible format.

This course opens the door to these archetype’s vast universe. By outlining the key themes and showing how they play out, Stacey makes the material understandable and engaging.

The Student

The student archetype has a gift for transforming experience into knowledge. She is able to pick up information from multiple sources, think it through, and move to intentional, wise action. In the light, this archetype goes beyond collecting facts and becomes an author of knowledge. She knows how to think for herself.

She works in a holistic way using many forms of intelligence. To the student in the light, intelligence is not just in the mind, but in the heart, body, soul, and cosmos. A large part of the student’s work is learning how to access these multidimensional forms of intelligence. The student practices metacognition and thinks about her thinking, but she also thinks about feeling, intuition, and divine messages.

In the shadow, the student carries the negative qualities of the parrot. Learning is flawlessly repeating back what she’s been taught. She lives by the creed of memorization and rote practice.

The shadow student archetype needs questions with a single correct answer. For her, there is nothing better than acing a test immediately after she learns something. The student in the shadow is extrinsically motivated by the rewards of good grades and diplomas. She craves a tidy learning environment that teaches her to learn to test rather than testing to learn.

The Dilettante (also the Polymath and Generalist)

People get confused by this archetype’s name. “The debutant?” they ask. No. We’re not talking about the young aristocrat making her first appearance at a ball.

The dilettante archetype is also the polymath, the Renaissance man/woman, the walking encyclopedia, and the generalist. Archetypes don’t tell us how educated or gifted someone is. They simply reveal patterns of human behavior. Throughout history, polymaths and dilettantes were equally as likely to be called charlatans. The names have come into and out of favor, but the patterns of this archetype remain the same.

This is the amateur – the person who delights in many things. The dilettante archetype in the shadow has a superficial knowledge of many things but doesn’t know one thing well. The dilettante is the classic “Jack of all trades, master of none.” She enthusiastically starts many projects and finishes few. She easily falls into information overload. There are too many great things to learn in the world!

In her power, the dilettante archetype guards against the culture of specialization that causes myopia. She cross-pollinates different disciplines bringing unique solutions to wicked challenges. She is better than the specialist at abstract thinking. The dilettante’s talent for using deep, far-ranging analogies reveals that she is far from superficial. In fact, the opposite is true. The gifted dilettante discerns the deep, underlying design of a situation when no one else can.

The Seeker

The seeker archetype wanders aimlessly and endlessly. Ask her what she’s looking for, and she may not know. Drifting anchorless, the seeker struggles to find her place and purpose in life.

To find direction, she needs to name what she seeks. By setting off on a literal, material world search, the seeker archetype becomes the consummate world traveler. If she stays close to home and embarks on an interior search, there is still some “thing” that she is after. This need to find something concrete in the world – such as a partner or career – is essential to this stage in the seeker’s journey.

The seeker encounters hardships that threaten to derail her and traps of complacency that tempt her to settle down early. She finds comfortable oases to rest but must be wary of staying too long. When she finds what she’s been looking for, something remarkable happens. The path changes beneath her. What the seeker thought she wanted becomes something else entirely. She finds that she is not who she was when she started out.

In the end, the seeker discovers truths about herself and about others. This leads her to universal truths about the way the world works. Like the boy in Paulo Coelho’s tale The Alchemist, she gains unexpected wisdom and returns full circle. The seeker in the light learns that what she was looking for has always been under her feet.

Course Outline:

This four-part pre-recorded audio course covers the following:

Introduction to the Definition of Archetypes (for beginners)

Session 1: The Student Archetype

• The story “Why the Parrot Repeats Man’s Words”
• Ivory tower (kind learning environment)
• Learning for the test
• Connection between sin and life lessons
• The auto-didact and street smarts
• The story “The Dream Makers”
• Constructivist theory
• Real world (wicked learning environment)
• Testing to Learn – Experiential Learning Theory
• Learning styles
• Emotional and intuitive intelligence
• Spirit animal of the student

Session 2: The Dilettante Archetype

• Definition of dilettante, amateur, and polymath
• Other names for the dilettante
• History of information explosion
• Shadow of superficiality
• Loose ends and information overload
• Rise of specialization
• Power of the generalist
• Spectrum of polymathy
• Spirit animal of the dilettante
• The story “The Coming of Lugh”
• Modern dilettantes
• The spiritual dilettante

Session 3: The Seeker Archetype

• Cycle of the seeker archetype
• The story “The Man of Bagdad”
• Realizing something is missing
• Vincent van Gogh’s search
• Norse god Odin as wanderer
• Naming the search
• Elizabeth Gilbert’s search
• Spirit animal of the seeker
• Obstacles of hardship and traps of complacency
• Re-orientation of the path
• Finding truth
• The story “The Conference of the Birds”

Session 4: Discerning Between the Learners

• Five things the learners have in common
• Summary of Caroline Myss’s three-column model
• Mundane and sacred learning
• Walking each archetype through the three columns

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.