Questions from James Hollis
1. How has life been unfair to you and what was your interpretation of this, the message that you internalized?
2. Where does this archaic message show up in your contemporary life areas of being stuck? How do you read your life as the manifestation of invisible forces? Where does this archaic message about unfairness show up in your life?
3. Where have you been blessed or fortunate apart from what you may or may not deserve? In that, is there perhaps a message or a summons?
(Questions 1-3 help you differentiate between archaic voice that will become your fate if not made conscious, and a genuine destiny based on your natural talent.)
4. What have you done with that privilege or blessing? Is there an agenda that attaches to that?
5. Where am I rigid and resistant to change in my life? (Try to remain disinterested and nonjudgmental, but its good to be descriptive.) What is the rigidity or resistance defending against?
6. Where am I blocked by fear?
7. What is the fear beneath the fear? (Many times the fear accessed by consciousness goes back to archaic voice. What is the archaic message underneath the current fear?)
8. What do you think is your primary learned fear, a fear acquired as a result of being in whatever environment you were in as a child?
9. Where was my father stuck? Where was my mother stuck? Where does this show up in my own life today? (Think of one example of each and where it shows up in your own life today. You could be repeating where a parent was stuck, or compensating for it, or caught in some kind of treatment plan for where the parent was stuck. This can be more subtle than it looks.)
10. Where do I avoid conflict and in so doing am refusing to grow up? (Track the wiring again what’s the fear there? We do this internally also. One has to bear discomfort, esp. conflict within oneself.)
11. What are your reflexive, controlling patterns? Which one in each of the two categories turns up chronically in your life?
The Six Strategies
(We all use all 6, but usually two are automatic patterns that repetitively show up.)
1. Overwhelm: Others are powerful and you’re not. Stay out of harms way. These strategies include patterns of avoidance, forgetfulness, procrastination, splitting, dissociation, projection, repression, the hermit recluse
2. Power Seeking: You will seek power over your environment, prestige, money, position. Power seeking can also be counterphobic and reactive, charging into that fear to gain power over it. For example, doctors are much more afraid of death than others are.
3. Adaptation: Give the world what it wants, being nice. This is very common and found in everyone. Codependency, compulsive congeniality, compulsive niceness when one needs to stand up for oneself. All of these are a removal of free will and always based on a power inequity complex, a fear of abandonment and internalization of unworthiness. I have to be very good perfectionism.
4. Inferiority Complex: Existential unworthiness. A very dependent person who subsumes self to a creed, an ideology, a person, or an institution.
5. Narcissism: Seeking control over the world by seeking power over others. Ex: parent who lives through the accomplishments of his/her child
6. Anxious Solicitation of Approval, Affection, etc. from Others: This is the most common of all. There is a crude urgency to it. Will usually choose relationships with people who are relationship-impaired or neediness will become a burden that pushes that person away. Addictive behaviors are all about anxiety management of fear of abandonment. TV is the chief addictive behavior.
Repetitive Patterns
You want to think about where you are on automatic pilot, where the repetitive patterns are. What kind of archaic voice makes me ___?
1. What triggers these behaviors? What areas of life do they show up in? What are the characteristic situations or people that produce that kind of reaction?
2. What is the secondary gain? What is that self-defeating behavior trying to protect you from?
3. What is the task that you have to address now that you know this issue? The task is going to involve at some level taking on the thing you fear, not in a counterphobic way and it will be unpleasant.
4. Where do you need to get permission? Where, emotionally speaking, do you lack permission? Risk is critical to growth. You have to seize the permission to risk. Anxiety comes from risking who you are. Depression comes from not risking, from being stuck in a place you’ve outgrown. The first child is usually the one co-opted by parental problems.
5. What were your enabling, empowering fantasies about yourself as a child when you were in some contact with yourself, what was your fantasy of yourself? Reconnect with what was visionary within yourself as a child not just wish fulfillment but being in contact with your own vision. DO NOT SKIP THIS QUESTION!
6. What have you always felt called to but didnt attempt for whatever reason? Concentrate on the ages of 0 to 15 years old. At 16 one has become a creature of the world.
7. Where is that possibility of the unlived life lurking in your life? Where does that energy lurk as possibility in your life? Some things are tied to age and no longer possible, but thats not what is meant here. What continues to resurface in your life or haunt you or pop up on the screen concerning the life not lived? Recognize that time has left behind certain possibilities, but if you look at them symbolically you may find you can apply them. For ex, Jung wanted to be an archeologist. Reframe in light of contemporary reality. Look for analogs where those values may be applied. What fired your imagination as a child? What stirred you? What interested you?
You can count on the instantaneous appearance of all the reasons why you cant. Those voices will be there. But think abut regrets at the end of your life to find the courage to confront those voices. Remember to look for analogs. Its a trick of the ego to get caught up in literalism. Where is the discovery and deepening part?
8. What is my calling for the next stage of my journey? It has little to do with job or may have little to do with relationships. For ex, managing energy level with outer tasks. You have new things on the horizonthe fulfillment of self. You can include specific tasks, i.e. There’s an area of life Ive always wanted to . . . .
9. What new life is wanting to come through us? We are the instruments of inscrutable divinities. Adapt a new attitude towards your own history. Begin a progressive engagement with your own mortality. Chippewa saying: I go about worrying about my petty things and all the while I am carried by great winds across the sky.
Do not underestimate the power of fate. The first five questions deal directly with fate, which is impact, influence, delimitation, and frequently constricting ones destiny. The middle 10 questions deal with blockages and being stuck.. The last 5 questions deal with destiny, teleology (the unfolding of a plan) and potentiality. Observe all clues that come to you that intimate a larger summons. You can create a life and at the same time, life is creating you. Consciousness assists destiny in the face of fate. Life is lived in the warp and weft of the two.
Additional Questions from Dr. James Hollis
These are the questions he gives in his book Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth in Modern Life
1. What is your vocation or calling as opposed to economic livelihood?
2. When did your childhood end?
3. When did you leave home? Have you left home?
4. How do your dependencies manifest?
5. How do you repeatedly hurt or undermine yourself?
6. Where are you stuck in your journey?
7. How are you still carrying Mother and Father?
8. What fears block you?
9. What is the unlived life that haunts you?
10. What on the invisible plane supports your
life on the visible plane?
As I mentioned in my talk, I think SoulCollage® cards are a great resource for helping to answer these questions. I am the one who believes . . . followed by As a result, I sometimes depend . . . . is a great question to ask Committee members to help discover what some of your beliefs and dependencies may be. I look to my Community and Council cards to see what on the invisible plane is supporting my journey. Asking Committee members about fears is another great thing to do. And like I said, I suggest making a SoulCollage® card for the unlived life or a card that expresses what you feel your vocation is or your natural abilities are.