← Jung On Purpose Podcast by CreativeMind
Jung On Purpose Podcast by CreativeMind
Embracing Your Inner Magic: The Magical Child Archetype
00:34:24
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- [00:04]
Narrator
Welcome to Jung on purpose with CreativeMind, hosted by Deborah and Dr. Rob Maldonado, creators of the NeuroMindra coaching method based on Jungian psychology, non dual spirituality and social neuroscience. Join us each week as we explore personal growth for purpose seekers and the incredible inner journey of becoming your true self. Let's get started.
- [00:34]
Deborah Maldonado
Hello, everyone.
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Narrator
Welcome back to another episode of Jung on Purpose.
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Deborah Maldonado
I am Deborah Maldonado.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
And I'm Dr. Rob.
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Deborah Maldonado
And we have another juicy episode for you today. We're going to be talking about archetypes and the concept of the magical child archetype. So we're going to dig deep into that and give you a little preview of one of our new programs we're launching in January, this new system we developed based on the family system field that most people operate in. And we're gonna talk a little bit about that today, too. Before we begin, though, I do wanna remind you, if you are not subscribed to our podcast, please do so. That helps us a lot, reach more people. And if you're watching us on YouTube, please subscribe to our channel so you get all the content from us every week. All right, well, what is the magical child and how is it different, Rob, than the inner child work that a lot of people do in pop psychology? You know, it's very common, very popular. But how is the magical child different? And I know we, we have to define some things, but that's kind of what I wanted to start with.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with the way some people work with the inner child and those kind of methodologies, modalities. But our approach is more closely aligned with Jung's definition of the. The magical child. As an archetype. As an archetype. So the archetype, we can define it as a pattern that we're born with already. It's, in other words, it's part of the psyche. It's an integral part of the psyche.
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Deborah Maldonado
Like a universal pattern. Like, everyone gets a magical child.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
That's right.
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Deborah Maldonado
It's like an Oprah. You get a magical child and you get a magical child.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Very much so. But then we, as we experience our life in a particular way, let's say, part of that process becomes obscured by our individual experience. And so that the, the universal archetype then resides in what Jung called the collective unconscious. And it's kind of buried underneath our personal experiences as children. And again, there's nothing wrong with that because this is part of the process that we're going to explain, like how that happens. And what we need to do to reconnect with the archetypal energy of the magical child.
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Deborah Maldonado
So the magical child, just to be clear, is not a character. Like you don't have a little being inside of you. It's a concept and it's a force of energy that represents possibility, imagination, creativity. It's that like if you around a baby, they're, they're filled with wonder, filled with this openness and, and play. And then we kind of learn the rules of life. We go to school, and then it, we learn not to be so playful, not to be so creative and follow the rules. And I mean, I, I, there's a, of course, a reason for that, because if we all were magical children, we'd have a bunch of Peter Pans running the world. But we, we do need a balance of it. So initially we do need to suppress that archetype in a way to survive and learn how to function in the world. But there is a time when we can actually reclaim it.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah, that's a good way to put it. So the, the first principle is that this magical child archetype carries the original blueprint of all the potential that we have as individuals. So it, that's an amazing idea, right, that we're born with a particular destiny, a particular kind of set of predispositions. Of course, we know that from genetics as well, but here Jung is talking about a, a universal archetype that, that provides for us kind of a path for our development.
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But not only our physical psychological development. It, it's pointing towards a spiritual development, a transcendent kind of aspect, because the archetypes have that, what he called the numinous power and numinosity. It denotes kind of a spiritual, magical essence. Almost like when people experience these psychedelic drugs or rituals where they get a glimpse of something beyond the ordinary.
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Deborah Maldonado
So it's almost like we were packaged. We get this package as we're born of all this potential. And our magical child contains our purpose. Would you say? Like our purpose based on our genetics and predispositions and talents, is something like kind of the keeper of our purpose. And depending on some people live their purpose as children and become, you know, their whole life is about their, their talent, but it's very rare. And most people go through the traditional schooling and, and find a practical career and, and work, you know, hard for someone else and never have the, and then they feel like their dreams aren't met. But it's almost like there's a part of us or a bigger part of us. That is, we're prepackaged with the ability to create something more like have an extraordinary life versus just an ordinary life. So we're. It's built psyche already as we're born. It's not something we have to seek or cultivate. It's already there very much so.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
If we look at the big picture of Jung's overall philosophy of mind and, and also the eastern way that he borrowed a lot from or, or learned a lot from, it's almost like the. There's this, this larger intelligence that we're acknowledging and the individual begins to disappear in that. Because the individual, the way we define it in the west is very artificial. First of all, no one is an island. We're all part of this collective experience. And everything that we express comes from that collective language, Our, our genetic inheritance. We are born into cultures which are collective experiences already and express our lives through these collectives. So the individual.
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Is more of a. Like a social construct that we hold onto, but it. It's nowhere to. To be found in reality. It exists more as a. As an idea.
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Deborah Maldonado
So what's interesting is like, the second point is about how do we. How did the magical child get lost?
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It wasn't lost. It's like still there. But how do we lose our connection to it early in life? Like we talked about that, that it's a natural development of the ego, like you said. And we basically create roles and character roles and we become the, you know, the hero or.
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The victim in life or the creative person or the pleaser or the nurturer. And we have these kind of characters that we, even our profession, we're the. We're the smart kid or we're the cheerleader. Like all these roles that we play when we label something and we label ourselves as something, that means that nothing else, it can't be anything else. And so the magical child contains all possibilities. And so when we decide we want to be this character to survive, it's like all the other possibilities go away.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah.
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Deborah Maldonado
And that's. I think in midlife, that's where people get confused because, hey, I'm a responsible business person and I'm a father and I have to take care of the bills who are my family and support them, or mother taking care of my kids. And I can't go off and create something creative and do something that's my passion. Like, there's no room for that because we have. We feel like we're so identified with the role.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. Because one of the big challenges in that early developmental period of zero to nine.
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And there's really good research now from neuroscience that this, this early period is really a formative period of language development, cultural acquisition, learning kind of the rules of how society and the world works. And that those early experiences become the primary focus of the brain, the brain, mind to adapt to its environment. In doing that, let's say from the Jungian perspective, he would say at, at this early point of our lives, we're developing what he called the Persona, the mask that we wear, the role that we play in society. It stays with us for a long time because.
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That'S the game we're going to play.
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Deborah Maldonado
Doesn't it like become like the center of our consciousness, conscious awareness? It's like the sun that we revolve around that becomes a center of who we are, identity and everything else is just formed around that center. And, and again, once you pick a, pick a lane, when you pick a Persona, you can't be anything else because there's a conflict. And so the ego's always trying to uphold that Persona, even if it, you've outgrown it.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
It's very much about adaptation and socially fitting in and survival, of course. But for us humans, culture is like the water that we swim in. We don't even see it anymore. We just think other people have culture, but not me or not us. But every society has a cultural, a cultural norm or set of norms that give the individual those guardrails of what is proper behavior. How am I like a lot of.
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Deborah Maldonado
People talk about their values, like write your values down and, and that's, you know, a typical life coaching thing to do is to look at the values and follow them. And it's a great way to kind of what you're for and what, know what you're not for. But I like the idea of these adaptations are not wounds, they're not brokenness. They're actually think of them as a survival intelligence within us that is helping us, you know, conform to life and survive because we don't have like financial power or spiritual power yet that we know of to, you know, create something outstanding and extraordinary. We have to fit in. We have to be fed, we have to obey our parents. We have to fit in with society in order and then we break away. But it's a survival intelligence. It's not something that is, we would refer to as something damaged in us. It's something that's acting very much like a healthy mind. If we don't have that, we do have those problems. If we're not adapting well, absolutely.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
There. There are these developmental challenges early on because we're, as children, we need to learn how to play, first of all, because play gives us that interaction with others, and we get to try out different masks, different roles in a playful way. Meaning we're. We're pretending, in a sense, and defining what fits for me. How does it feel good for me to. To behave and to act and to self identify? It becomes like an internal narrative that we start to develop as well. Those things then challenge the childhood imagination because we can't remain in that imaginative, playful state as we start to enter those school years, right? We start to go to pre kindergarten and kindergarten and first grade. Then the challenge becomes different. It's. I'm no longer within the family field. I am entering this cultural field of others, and how do I relate to others and how do I identify myself in this larger landscape? And that really then kind of prompts the individual to put away that playful, childlike aspect of the mind and start to identify. Identify with their Persona, their.
- [13:21]
Deborah Maldonado
I remember there's a quote that said one day you were riding bikes with your friends and goofing off, and you didn't know that that was the last day, that you never knew that was the last day. And then we kind of turn into like, pre teens and we, oh, we're, you know, we're cool now, and we have to act like. Like young adults and. And everything. And then our center of focus isn't our family anymore. Like you said, the center of focus becomes this larger field of influence, which is our social field. And. But the formative years, those early years, are really the foundation of that development. But one of the things that we talk about in our system is that the family experience early on, it does shape us, but they aren't the cause. The cause or the way we change is going on the archetypal level. We access that magical child. It's not like I have to heal the childhood so that I can access the magical child. It's like, no, I have to remember, Remember who I was, remember that beautiful creativity that I had. And we do have those moments, you know, when my niece and nephew were little and we used to watch, you know, the Disney movies together, and it was like kind of that imagination, playful kind of thing I got to revisit again or playing games with them. We get into play again as a parent or an aunt, a childless aunt gets to play with your niece and nephew, and you get to, you know, dabble in that play again. Like, we're reconnecting to it just a little bit, but, you know, we don't want to do that as adults. We have game night maybe, and it's like a little bit of that. We're still trying to hold onto that in a way.
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Narrator
Like, we.
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Deborah Maldonado
We know it, but we're not really fully embracing.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. Particularly mammals. All mammals have that play period. Uh, if you notice puppies, cats, any. Maybe all animals, but definitely we see it in mammals. They're playful. It's a way of them practicing the skills that they need for life. So we can think of that playful period in our. In our childhood is preparation for social life. It's giving us some of the tools, some of the things that we need. But yeah, the Jungian perspective gives us such an interesting way of looking at the family. For one, we can think of the child projecting the mother and the father archetype onto the parents.
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Deborah Maldonado
Yes, we talked about that in the previous episodes.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. So the child is seeing the mother and the father through this godlike aspect of the archetype. And it's an incredible way to bond. And it really accounts for the way we bond with our parents that we see them as much more than their individual selves. All right. Or their Personas, in other words. But we can also think of it of going the other way, that the mother and the father also project the magical child archetype unto the child. So they see all these expectations in all this potential, all these possibilities in the child. Right. They want to. They. They wonder what's. What's she going to become? Is she going to be a doctor, scientist, great artist, something like that. And it's. It's an amazing way that nature has of bonding the parent to the child as well, so that the parent cares of the child and make sure that they survive and grow up and get to live.
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Deborah Maldonado
I heard a story once. One of my friend's colleagues said when his child was born, he said, I only thought of one word. He's like sitting there as a baby's coming out possibility. And that's what we all. And I know you had mentioned when you were working with diagnosing children with autism and disorder. I meant neurodivergent disorders. You said the parents kind of like. It's like you took away that magical child a little bit from them or there was some kind of almost like taking away like all their hopes and dreams in a way of what that child could be.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Oh, absolutely. There. There's like a grieving period when children have a particular diagnoses that kind of knocks down the parents dreams of all their, that child's potential to realize all that possibility that I was dreaming of for this child no longer applies. Now I have to take care of these medical or developmental issues.
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Deborah Maldonado
But we should as if you do have a, as a parent that maybe it's just to be conscious of that there's still possibility that that disability doesn't limit someone. You know, it can like kind of holding that for the space for the child.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah, that, that was part of the work that I was participating in is what does, what do the parents need at that point to see the child as potential again instead of, you know, because the, the reality is they, they need the diagnosis to receive the treatments. But you also want to acknowledge that this is still a kid that needs your love and attention and all that potential communicated to him or her.
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Deborah Maldonado
Well, when I was first starting reading self help books, before I became a coach and did this type of work, introduced to young, I was. There's a lot of books that label you as oh, you're codependent or you have low self esteem or you have a insecure attachment style. And so all those labels dampen us because everyone talks about the damaged child, but no one ever talks about the magical child. And we have to remember that there's potential in all of us. And no matter what happened to us in our life, that potential is still there. It's hidden from us. But it doesn't mean it's not there and you don't have to create it. You could step into it by deciding you know who you're going to align with is this limited story narrative. Or you're going to align with your potential and possibility and that will dictate your life.
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Narrator
You've spent years building success and achieving what others would only imagine. But yet something deeper is calling. A desire for work that's meaningful, transformative and rooted in who you really are. At CreativeMind, we train professionals to guide others through real psychological transformation using Jungian principles, Eastern spirituality and social neuroscience. No cliches, no surface level tools, just depth, structure and purpose. Our ICF accredited Jungian Life Coach training program provides a profound professional training in small cohorts that includes personal transformation with a dedicated coach and powerful tools to help you guide others in a deep, lasting transformation. Step into that next chapter of your personal and professional evolution. Join us by visiting creativemindlife.com and speak to an admission specialist today. That's creativemindlife.com.
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Deborah Maldonado
Where what does the magical child really do for someone as an adult. And they want to do, like, integration of this archetype. It really. There's a source of imagination that the magical child has again.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. Because if we go back to this idea of the blueprint of potentiality of the individual, we hope that doesn't go away. Right. It. And it doesn't. It simply, we can say it, it resides or. Or retreats into the unconscious mind. But we know the unconscious, the barrier between the unconscious and the conscious mind is porous.
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Especially through dreams, through intuition, through synchronicities, as Jung says, Through these things, we're always receiving hints as to what we're meant to be doing and what's our potential. But most people, because they don't understand the symbolic language of the unconscious mind, they. They misread those hints. Right. They think, well, that dream is a. It's a great dream. Or, or it's. It's, you know, it's something I. I wished for as a child, but I have responsibilities now, and I have to keep up this Persona and do my social duties. And my friends would laugh at me if I decide to go off on an adventure. The kind of the. The hero's calling.
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Deborah Maldonado
So the hero's never appreciated in his hometown with his own family.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah, that's right. So most people repress or misunderstand the content that's arising from the unconscious mind and do not take advantage of. This is a calling towards individuation or transformation. We know neuropsychologically, again from current research, that around 30 of age, there's a huge transformation in the brain. It's almost like we enter another stage of our life that is completely different than the previous stage. So from nine to about 32 years, there's a lot going on in the brain. Like, we're. We're redefining who we are, we're gaining new skills. Our brain is interconnecting different parts so that there's more synchronicity and interconnection in the brain and the neurons.
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At 32 or 33, we enter into a new stage of development where it's more a. About tapping into our wisdom. It's more about defining what is our purpose in life. And that kind of correlates with Young's idea of individuation, that it begins at a. A certain point around midlife or where midlife begins, where we start to get more serious about, well, what is the meaning of my life? We start to ask the big questions.
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Deborah Maldonado
So it's interesting that in neuroscience, they found the patterns in the brain Shifting at that time, which really is interesting. I know for me, like, I. When I was little, I used to always perform. I used to pretend I was on television. I would have the hairbrush and I would sing, even though I can't sing, but I would, you know, lip sync. And I'm sure all of us people did this as kids, but I just loved imagining, like, I would be an actress or a singer or be on stage, be on television. Like, I love TV and entertainment. You know, typical 70s, 80s kid who was very television generation. And then I kind of, like went on my life and worked, you know, and did all these jobs and went to the corporate world. And when I left the corporate world finally, and I started thinking, I need to, like, put myself out there on the media. And I used to do some things for radio. I used to do a lot of media with the radio. And this was like me talking about my stuff. And I got a tv. Three TV interviews in one day, introducing my love hypnosis stuff I was doing. And I remember being really nervous, but also I looked at myself in the mirror and it was almost like I was seeing that magical child. And I said, little Debbie, we're going to be on TV today. And I almost got in tears from it because it was like, reconnecting to that force of energy that had always been there. And it wasn't about, like, impressing anyone. It was just. I wanted to have fun. And it was so much fun. I loved it. I loved. I used to go on Channel 7 in Denver all the time, and it was just. I was nervous, but I just loved the whole idea of just sharing and the whole television and all that and just playing, like, as a child again. And. And that's really where that imagination and possibility was always there. And so it was just really interesting. That moment, for me is coming full circle again. Like, oh, remember we used to play at this as a kid and now look at us. And I'm sure many of you, like, artists would play with their paints as a kid or do something as a kid, and. And then all of a sudden thinking, I want to go back and get back into that again, or play music or sing or. Or even coach people. Like, people that feel, like, the need to help others. You know, it comes from that early time.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. So here we see the connection with this magical child, archetype to creativity. We know imagination is essential for creativity. And what we're doing.
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When we start to pay attention to these archetypal patterns is reconnecting with our creative spirit, our Creative energy. And it leads to, often it leads to finding our. Getting serious about our true purpose. Like what is it that we want to do with our lives and our energy, our work, or if it, we don't, right. If we say, well, I've invested too much in becoming a doctor or lawyer or something, or my parents, you know, kind of expect me to follow this path, then often there's a, an internal conflict that arises that the, the unconscious is pushing you towards acknowledging and expressing this creative archetype of the magical child. But there's a resistance from the ego Persona that says, I can't do that. I can't.
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Deborah Maldonado
What will people think?
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. What will my parents think? What will my friends think? Think or it's impossible, you know, that kind of idea, those kind of ideas. So it is an interesting psychology to understand and, and always the key is to pay attention to your dreams. Not. You don't have to follow, of course, everything that you dream about or everything you wish to, you were doing or, or saw yourself doing as a child. But you, you want to acknowledge those impulses because the unconscious, we, the more we understand it, the more we see that it, it's really, it's really powerful. And it's, it's more important to pay attention to the unconscious than to be able to suppress it. Because often kind of suppressing the unconscious becomes the aim of most people. Right. They say, I need to forget about those things and just kind of move on and focus on what I'm currently doing.
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That strategy will often backfire because what you're doing is you're neglecting powerful aspect of your mind, of the psyche that will sabotage or interfere or project itself into your life in one way or another. And it's never pretty when it happens unconsciously to a person because that internal conflict, Jung says, shows up as an external conflict. So it might show up as a divorce, job loss, an accident, something that appears to make a kind of logical sense externally, but it's really coming from the inside.
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Deborah Maldonado
Yeah. And it's always like an opportunity. And then what we see as this tragedy in our life or some terrible event that happens, it's always, there's always, always light in those moments because it's opening up something else. And sometimes we, it's like a harsh reality if we don't, we don't pay attention and we hang on, but we just keep having, you know, these things show up. I was laid off three times. The companies I work with, I worked in the dot com era in the 90s, long time ago, and there was a lot of startup, you know, they would get funding and then they would lose. And I would be in these companies and they would always like, lose their funding and then they lay off everybody. And so I was like. Kept losing my, you know, my position, had to find another startup to be in. And I was like, I'm starting to get the point that the universe is trying to tell me something. And each time I was like, maybe I should change, maybe I should do something else. And then I'd have another job and push that magical child away. But yeah, when we embrace it, we embrace our purpose. It's feeling so alive. Like all the things that we worried about, like our survival, like worries become so small compared to what we're creating in our life. And we're willing to be. Take risks and be stretch ourselves and face, you know, the scary parts of going for our dreams because we have this larger force within us that we're connected to.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. And the, the other aspect of the magical child archetype is spirituality. Not necessarily a religious conversion or anything like that, although sometimes it, it manifests that way, but a, a true exploration of the meaning of your life and the purpose. Right. Often it's connected to purposes, but it's getting in touch again with that inner child in the sense. Jung said something like this. He says a lot of people think that it's about remaining as a child, but he says, no, it's becoming as a child again. In other words, going through building your adulthood self. Absolutely. Building that serious kind of getting your hands dirty with life and work and doing the things that you need to do, but then returning to this imagination, creativity, and rediscovering it. So it's not just to remain innocent and involved with the world, it's getting involved with the world, but then finding your way back to that original dream of what you wanted to do with your life and taking up the call again and making it work for yourself as an adult.
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Deborah Maldonado
Well, if you think about as a child, you don't have a lot of personal history yet, so you don't have anything to stop you. And then over time, you accumulate all this personal history and your narrative around this character you become. And that tells you who you can and cannot be. And so when you're saying that, it makes me think you actually are seeing yourself again in the beginning. Like, almost like you're starting life again without the history. Like, what, if anything, was possible? And here's a really great exercise I always tell our clients, imagine that you were in a coma. And you woke up from this coma but had absolutely zero memory of your past. And you were completely a blank slate. Like, you don't even know who you are. You don't know your name. You don't have any memories. And someone said to you, you can be anything you want to be. You can do anything you want to do. Anything's possible. What would that be? And to imagine living from that place, really, really powerful. That's the magical child energy. So this is great. And this will be a good segue for our next episode next week where we talk about rebirth as an archetype, which is really cool. And especially the end of the year, it's winter here in the. In this hemisphere. So it's the, you know, the trees are falling, you know, the leaves are falling from the trees. Everything's kind of going inward and what rebirth is all about. And our own archetypal story beyond our personal story.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Oh, that's awesome. So, yeah, look forward to that.
- [33:39]
Deborah Maldonado
Okay, well, we'll see you next week on another episode. Thank you for joining us.
- [33:44]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
See you soon.
- [33:46]
Narrator
Thank you for joining us for Jung on purpose with Deborah Maldonado and Dr. Rob Maldonado of Creative Mind. Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast before you leave and join us each week.
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Deborah Maldonado
We'll see you soon.