I absolutely adore Carolyn Myss‘ work, and in particular her Sacred Contracts work. That has been a tool I’ve leverage repeatedly and allowed great insight as I was working my way through the Hall of Mirrors. I am going to assume that if you are interested in this post, you are familiar at the very least with the concept of archetypes and so will not re-explain. I’ve provided links to her work, so if this sparks curiosity please I encourage and applaud the initiative.
During my heavy exploration into the shadow or unknown aspects of myself, I did a lot of work with the archetypes she calls out as her Basic Survival Archetypes. These are the 4 that every human has. She has a marvelous write-up for them available for free here. In the process of working with them, they actually re-interpreted themselves and I wanted to put this down in writing.
While the first to re-define itself was the Saboteur, it is always the Child that I turn to first. Why? Because it is the first, most core, most primal archetype – after all, we are all born with this one front and center. And it is this one that first makes decisions about how best to survive in life. Indeed, it is the Child mind that informs the adult self How Things Are.
I learned quite viscerally as I navigated my own Hall of Mirrors that a great many, in fact all in my case, of the ideas that I had about how life worked, what was expected of me, etc were all things that my child self decided at a young age. The child mind generally goes “decided, tested, verified, stored” and the template is now set. Very rarely does the adult self intentionally go back and take a look at the power templates that the child created.
My brother announced at the age of 6 or so that he was never going to college. My parents figured, he’s 6. We’re not going to get upset, just let life go on and we’ll see how this shakes out as he matures. When I was in Jr High, my mom went back to school and got 2 degrees: accounting, and computer science. My brother was about 11 or so. He suddenly then announced that he decided he would go to college. My parents were pleased, but simply asked what made him change his mind. As a youngster, he looked around and figured out that going to college meant leaving home and never coming back. When my mom went to college, and came home every day, he saw that his younger-child mind decision was incorrect, and so he changed his stance with this additional input.
That is the perfect example I point to as a decision that the child mind makes, stores, and then acts upon as if it was 100% true always. But there are a few things that all children lack, specifically perspective. The older we get, the longer those child mind templates are used and proven true, the harder they are to even recognize let alone change.
With all this groundwork laid, I was having an interview with my child self in a creative writing piece. She told me that she was the Guardian of Faith. Well that was a very different take that what I’ve read about and asked further into it.
Faith is how we believe Things Work. How the World Is. For those who’ve gone through any level of Dark Night of the Ego, what generally plunges someone into it is some level of breakage of this foundational faith. It’s Faith upon which our entire worldview is built. And when a pillar gets shaken, or knocked down, that’s when the ego is plunged into a crisis. A crisis of Faith.
People hear “faith” and think “religion”. Nope. An atheist has absolute faith there is nothing beyond here and now. A scientist has faith that the process of observation will yield reliable and repeatable results if the experiment is laid out right. A passenger on a plane has faith that all the bolts needed are in place.
Now some faith perspectives are surface level and can be broken without plunging the ego into a true Dark Night. Some faith perspectives, when broken, are like shackles coming off – as I described in this post. And some faith perspectives are so foundational that anything which even threatens to shake them can have people reacting as if they are literally being attacked.
My husband served in the military and saw some combat while deployed. He had always had this notion that he was a civilized man, but in the heat of a particularly harrowing moment, he learned very differently. It completely shattered, in one instant, a core foundational aspect of who he saw himself as, and as such How the World Works. He came to face to face with his own dark primal self and it changed everything. It took him years to reassemble himself, and now he works with others as a transformational shaman. But there’s no way he would have ever unlocked this aspect without having his Faith in himself shattered so thoroughly.
So the Child as the Guardian of Faith. I found this renaming to be rather profound, and it made it easy for me to understand what Dark Nights really are and why they can be so radically altering. It also helped me understand that pretty much every single assumption I had, I made as a child. With all the perspective and reasoning capacity of a child. Wow. This means that unless I’ve had the opportunity to learn something as an adult, all my actions and reactions are being guided by the decisions of a child. And this is true of everyone around me as well.
I believe it called itself a Guardian because not only does the mind make these decisions about How the World Works, but also defends them. By ensuring that our core concepts of self are unchallenged, by any means necessary, we are free to move along life’s path feeling safe and secure. After all, children want to feel safe and secure above all else.
By now in my journey toward self mastery, I’ve gained the use of my observer self, which has very much helped give me the ability to hold up these child mind decisions and re-evaluate them with the adult mind – without feeling threatened. Many of them I can change, correct, set aside, or replace. I’ve had the foundational pillars knocked out, cracked, or shaken enough to know that I can handle a “core truth” turning out to not be so true after all. I know it’s not fun, but I can handle it.
Seeing the Child as the Guardian of Faith and what this means on a practical, everyday life level means that adult-me can accept that child-me’s ideas may not be as wise or as solid as the child had assumed. Me as an adult can love the child self for making some strange conclusions, adapt, and move along. These are the new ideas of Faith that Child now guards.
Child – Guardian of Faith – decides early on How the World Works, tests and then entrenches these ideas – protects them from being damaged, especially the most important ones – is concerned with safety and security.
Path of the Individual 