hello everyone and welcome to module five of finding ourselves in fairy tales today we are going to finish up our exploration of the fairy tale heroins journey and we're going to talk about The Return part of that Journey the third phase and probably I have more questions than answers at this particular phase of our journey but um I I hope that what I'm offering you in this lecture will provide lots of fruit for discussion in our live session so I am just going as always to get my screen set up here and then we will begin okay so let's get started module five of the program the usual copyright notice you've all seen this before so I won't dwell on it part three the return and just a reminder of our learning objectives for this module that it's about integrating the various stages and the challenges of the fairy tale heroin's Journey Into Your Own Story into the story of your own life and identifying what the return means for you so let's just think about the return in a general way for a moment it can for sure I think be the most challenging part of any Journey and really I think it's probably the easiest to mishandle the questions that we have to ask ourselves are things like where or what are you returning to and with what because it's not always obvious it always Bears some reflection and who is the self that's returning who are you now now that you're returning and you know sometimes it's easy to get stuck on the path sometimes it's easier to keep on journeying to keep on traveling um return requires a commitment it's it's not really an ending but it's a commitment it's a choice and it's an effort so I think it's always worth bearing that in mind it sounds easy you know oh this the hard part of the story The Road of Trials is over but really I'm not entirely sure that that is the hardest part of the journey figuring out what it was all for and what you have leared from it what you've become as a consequence of it is pretty tricky too so just a reminder as always when we're talking about the return and the third part of the fairy tale heroin's Journey that we can apply this fairy tale heroin Journey model that I'm proposing to the whole of a lifespan or we can apply it to individual segments within a lifespan and we've talked about that in the discussions for the other modules but in these lectures just to try to keep it straight I am focusing in on it in the context of an entire lifespan we can talk about it in any other form um in any other application in the zoom chat so in the last two modules just to recap we've been looking at our beginnings and then we looked at some of the challenges we Face along the path through the first of life we looked at the the shape of our road of Trials we looked at separation from the mother um other initiatory times allies and antagonists the tools and gifts that we are given we looked at the nature of the archetyp of feminine that we encounter in our lives and navigating relationships and navigating motherhood or or not so this is very much about the first half of life in my conception of it this is kind of the building growing phase in the eyes of the world this is about finding yourself in the world it's more than just finding your persona but it's about situating yourself in the outer world that is of course and we've talked about it inner life going on but really it's a building time and at midlife our Focus begins to turn inwards rather than just outwards it's not that the outer life becomes unimportant it's just that there is an additional weight of inward looking that comes upon us at midlife and I'm going to be talking about that um in the rest of the the lecture and this is a process of um inward looking of a search for meaning and purpose which continues through menopause and on into elderhood so in the context of the fairy tale heroins Journey which spreads across a lifespan midlife in my conceptualization of it is the beginning of the return so in this module I want to focus a little bit on midlife tiny bit on the second half of life um not much because the second half of life is a big subject and the subject of another program but just to set it in context so aspects of the return whatever form it takes I would say that the return in fairy tales is always in some way Redemptive and often can be translated into an idea of finding a sense of purpose and meaning and before I go on to these specific aspects I think it's just kind of worth thinking about some of the ways that fairy tales end and the extent to which it it kind of affects our conceptualization of the return sometimes the heroin goes home bearing a gift goes back to her original home I mean bearing a gift and I'm thinking here of stories like the story of mother holder where the young girl um goes down the well in search of a lost spindle apprentices herself to Mother holder does good um gets the spindle back and is also coated in a shower of gold which she then takes home to her um um mother or stepmother I can't remember in that story so often she does return home bearing a gift transformed in other words sometimes she goes on to a new home especially if she's been married and then the original home is left is Left Behind forever often there is a lesson learned as well as a gift earned um if you'll forgive the bad poetry there's wisdom that has come upon her but there are also dark endings and H chrisan Anderson specialized in these you know with his um little match girl dying in the cold and his little mermaid fading back into the sea um because her prince won't love her The Red Shoes um Karen having her feet chopped off and then dying and so on so he had a a kind of partial for darker endings and indeed they're not all um obviously Redemptive but and sometimes we have Revenge um as a consequence as as a kind of ending so the heroine um marries her prince in the case let's say of Snow White um but Snow White's stepmother is made to dance in Red Hot Iron shoes so these are all kind of aspects of fairy tale endings but they don't but not all fairy tales and their endings relate to the return in the way that I am proposing it but I just wanted to lay out some of those different kinds of ending that we see in many fairy tales what we're looking at really is a kind of return to the self as I think of it so the handless maiden I'm going to talk about that in a little while as so we'll come back to that and even stories that we've referred to certainly in some of the discussion sessions of um stories like fiter bird that old Blue Beard type story where the young woman actually before she marries fiter who is the um the Blue Beard equivalent after she finds the bloody chamber and um basically has her brothers burn him alive in his house uh she she goes back home herself she has kind of come into herself she's uh learned to trust her own wisdom and her own instincts and then she goes home again so in many cases the ending of a fairy tale can be seen as a return to the self and often in that precisely in that context what happens just before the ending of the fairy tale is that the heroine is in some way either woken up or recognized for who she is by the usually by the person that she's going to marry but not always so for example Snow White and Sleeping Beauty both wake up from their deathlike sleep they're both awoken they've had the kind of long sleep in which transformation is happening under the surface and then they wake up and then knew um fairy tales like donkey skin um or all kinds of fur um fairy tales like Grim's Goose girl uh they're all restored to their rightful places they were princesses who were dispossessed and who were in disguise but they are recognized by their prince and restored to their rightful places Cinderella's slipper um fits her and it identifies her as the woman from the ball it enables again the prince to recognize her the heroine of the Wild Swans um wants her brothers have their shirts on and are transformed back to men again from swans she can finally speak and defend herself so there's this sense of a Awakening of recognition that comes prior to the return and that's quite an important thing uh I think in fairy tales they seem to be the ones where the heroin is waking up they really seem to be telling us that that although it's okay to sleep for a while and although that sleep can be transformative things can be happening in the background eventually we must wake up eventually we have to become who we truly are are and we really need recognition for who we truly are in many many cases so moving on to these different aspects of the return the return to self which I've just been talking about is the one that I really want to focus on in this session I want to focus on it in the context of individuation and although I've argued that individuation although Yung said that individuation is something that begins really at midlife and continues through the second half of life I've always seen it as something that begins earlier actually it's just that it start all starts to ramp up a little bit at midlife and continues through the second half of life but that concept of a return to the self and the archetype of the self as Yung had it that return to a sense of wholeness of completeness uh again of um of understanding who it is that we are and being recognized for it it's worth just looking at the concept of home as well in this Con anation when we talk about returning home home to what home to ourselves um or home to a specific place and finally it's a return as well not just to ourselves but to The Wider world around us and I'll just spend a few minutes at the end talking about that so midlife um the fairy tale heroin marries or some other way settles down but her story doesn't end there something wakes her up again and she goes searching for herself and this is what happens to most of us at least once as we approach midlife so most of us in those largely unfathomable years between our mid-30s and our mid-40s will experience more than one morning when we'll likely lie in bed wondering how we've suddenly suddenly managed to wake up um in somebody else's story uh we'll feel as if we've tripped and fall and all of the way out of um our own life and crash landed in somebody else's and the story that we've been living in that neat and tidy narrative that we've spent so long constructing to explain who we are and how we got here begins to disintegrated all of those old certainties to the extent that we had them begin to fade away and and this happens for many of us just as we were beginning to imagine that after all the turmoil and strivings of our 20s and 30s is after all of our um trekking down the road of Trials we might finally begin to think of ourselves as grown-ups and might finally be begin to be settling into some kind of stability just at the moment when you know what we want what we're supposed to want and what we actually do want might be beginning to line up Along Comes midlife gate crashes the party and breaks it all open again now you can try to wave midlife back down the Garden Path uh but it'll come again it'll get you eventually because I think at this time of life profound change is both inevitable and irresistible and that's what the fairy tales that I'm going to talk about today are telling us so I'm not going to tell you that this isn't bewildering at midlife but it's necessary um it's a natural passage from one stage of life to another and once upon a time we used to call that TR that time of transformation in midlife a midlife crisis recently it's become better known as midlife transition and this change in terminology is actually quite useful because not everybody undergoes an acute crisis at midlife midlife transition implies a process which is much more the reality I think for most of us it might be a short process or it might drag on and on or we might experience a kind of sequence of times of turmoil interposed with Karma moments it happens both to men and to women but for women then this period of midlife transition coincides with per menopause and all the physical cataclysms that so often characterize that time of param menopause amplify the experience for women of dislocation and disruption so it's a period of uh intense existential angst of soul searching as we begin to question and ultimately to discover who we believe we really are and what we believe all this life is for the positive side of all this upheaval is that that whenever it occurs and in whatever form the midlife transition has a developmental purpose and that purpose is quite simply to wake us up like Sleeping Beauty like Snow White from our long sleep to wake us up so that we can begin to become the person that we were always meant to be so in a sense the midlife transition really is a midlife Awakening so wherever it occurs and in whatever form that developmental purpose is something always to bear in mind now there are a a lot of um complicated things going on at midlife and I don't want to depress those of you who haven't got there yet those of you who've been through it I think will recognize this list um just to give some indications of the kinds of correlates of midlife that have been identified in psychological research particularly things like a decline in overall satisfaction with our lives a sense of a loss of purpose or a sense that life has no meaning um profound shift in values very often in the things that we think matter and this seems to be a natural process that happens to almost everybody to some degree no matter how you had lived your life in the leadup to it what is interesting um I think is that there's quite a bit of research that shows that although people do have a kind of slump there's kind of a U-shaped thing going on so gradually as people approach midlife their kind of Happiness um and well-being goes down and kind of plateus but then research shows that it always goes up again afterwards it always goes up again there is life after midlife for sure but it is a challenge time it's a questioning and a searching time and um the first story that I want to talk about is a strange old Siberian story which beautifully illuminates this time of profound change and this is a story which opens my next book Wise Women which is out the beginning of October 2024 it's a story about a woman and a man a oneeyed man who've been married for a very long time and every day at dawn the man walks out of the house and he doesn't come home again till the evening and he's done this forever it seems his wife has absolutely no idea where he goes or what he does all day one day she just can't bear it any longer so she follows him and she watches as he strides into uh a forest and sits down on a log and he stays there all day so she looks at her husband and she looks down at her feet and she thinks I just I'm just not doing this anymore I have no idea who this man is I have no idea what life I'm living here so she returns home packs up a few small belongings and she leaves now she hasn't walked very far before she meets a giant as you do and without saying a word to her the giant picks her up slings her over his shoulder and runs with her up to the top of a mountain where he deposits her in a cave and goes away again so she's cold she's frightened she wished she'd never left home she's crying when she hears a voice say look up look up and you'll see the skins of birds above you and sure enough when she looks up she finds a basket hanging from a hook and inside that basket is a coat made of crow skins but it doesn't fit her so she is distraught again and crying when she hears the voice say again look up look up and you'll find the skins of animals above you so she looks up and hanging from another Hook is a coat made of Foxy skins and this time it does fit her so she puts it on she's warm she feels courage she decides to make her Escape while she can and she starts to trot down the mountain before the giant returns she stops to drink at a bowl of water halfway down the mountain and to her surprise she see that she's grown a pair of russet fox ears carries on down the mountain has this sense that something somebody is behind her so she looks back but all that she can see is her own snow tipped red bushy fox tail and by the time she's got to her Village again she is pure Vixen she's a fox she sees her father about to go fishing and she thinks okay I'm going to go to my father's house that's you know that's a safe place it's a place I know it's familiar and it will be warm in there but every time she tries to step through the door of her father's house her head turns aside and the rest of her body follows this happens again and again until eventually she turns around and leaves again walking across the snow ladened fields to the new Fox life which lies Beyond now when I first came across that story and it's very difficult to find uh in an English translation but when I did it it really gave me shivers because you know I mean clearly in highlighting this story I'm not suggesting that in order to bro progress at midlife you need to leave your husband or even to leave home um physically leave the place that you live in that's not what it's about but like but like so many fairy tales this one provides a powerful metaphor for the journey stage that we're living through the Journey stage of midlife the woman gives in to that sudden but strong Instinct that compels her to walk out of her old life she's lost sight of herself living as she has done the same same way every day year after year she stopped asking questions and she's stuck in a rut a meaningless rut and one day she realizes it so she walks away from her old life crashes into the Arms of an unsuspecting giant unexpected giant who propels her into a new story and that really is what it's about it shows us that at certain times of our life and particularly at midlife we need to think about the story that we're living in and at some point it's going to fade away and we're going to be forced to adopt a new one because that's what growth is that's what's supposed to happen to us as we continue to grow through our lives and at midlife it is true that many of us will find ourselves growing out of Partnerships or friendships or jobs that seem to be holding us back and at time at this time of turmoil I think even those of us who's relationship survive will feel compelled to leave something behind to shed a load that we didn't realize had become such an unbearable burden and at some level at some point we won't be able to help ourselves we'll feel the very strongest urge to shrug it off to step Across the Threshold to put one foot in front of the other and to just walk and even if we have no idea where we're walking to we'll Trust in whatever we think Fate To be or whatever we think God to be or a chance encounter with a Stony faed giant to point us in the direction of that new story to point us in the direction of The Rebirth of our s to point us in the direction of a return to ourself so the foxom in this story she walks away um and once she's left she can't go back her head tells her she should take shelter but that um strange new Fox body of hers is preventing her no matter how fearful she is of the consequences of this choice that she really didn't quite plan to make in this way um that wisdom of her new animal Fox body insists that she can't go home again she can't go back to what she was she can't unsee what she saw or unfe what she felt when she watched her husband sit on a log in the middle middle of a forest all day so she shifted into a new phase and she's in the process of coming home to her instinctual embodied self and I think it's an Embrace of the wild woman archetype that comes knocking at our door in midlife asking us to kind of trust our own inner knowing again our own instinctual self so in that old Siberian Story the foxw woman's midlife transformation is represented by the acquisition of a new skin and like her we might need to try on one or two before we find the one that feels comfortable and that fits this new rapidly evolving self but we always have to shrug off an old skin first we always have to leave an old skin behind and this can be a fake skin uh one that we've constructed of dead flaky cells a crusty old um Persona skin that we've grown too comfortable in one that's rigid and constraining and won't let us Flex our wings and that shedding of a skin is an exquisitly tender process I think it Reveals All of the fears and all of the vulnerabilities that we've allowed Ed it to cover up over the years and in losing the skin we also lose our Illusions but when it's gone at the same time we feel better we feel lighter and the loss of that old comforting skin gives us Room to Grow again so that brings me to Story number two and I have to say I don't think I've ever met a a woman who when the conversation turns that way doesn't in some way or rather identify with those old European fairy tales about part human part animal female creatures who slip their skins and when we think about this story think again about the wild woman archetype um so let's so I'm sure most of you know this story but just pretend just for a moment that you're you're standing on a long white Edge of the World Beach in the western islands of Scotland if you've never been there it doesn't matter you can imagine them and you're stiring out onto a calm Star Spangled sea and it's there on the night of a full moon that you might if you're very lucky catch a glimpse of a sky just once a month she surfaces very slowly from the flood tide she slips out of her seil skin and she dances on the beach with Slender human legs and and you might also hiding behind a rock catch a glimpse of the hungry eyed fisherman who wants her for his own so out he slinks and he steals her seal skin preventing her from returning to the Sea and forcing her to remain in her human form marry me he says to her bear my children stay with me for seven years and then if you still want me to I'll let you go except of course that he doesn't and so trapped in a body and a life that she doesn't fully belong to unable to return to the cool salt water which made her and sustained her she begins to fade she begins quite literally to dry up and just as she's on the verge of death her daughter finds the seal skin which her father has hidden away in his boat house the suy puts it on and she sinks back into the sea away she goes back to her natural element back to her true self again now in Europe such um skin stealing stories are ubiquitous in Croatia it's the story of a wolf woman whose Pelt is stolen by a hunter and I reimagined that story um again the opening one in my collection Foxfire wolfkin some years ago in Ireland and Sweden it's a Swan Maiden more often than not whose feathers are stolen by a Covetous man um but that Union between human man and shapeshifting woman isn't always forced by a skin theft there are countless stories in which a shape shifter chooses to remain in her human form so that she can voluntarily enter into a relationship with a man uh these known as animal bride stories so a man wins her love they marry um for a while they live happily she Bears children and then one day the husband disrespects her wild animal nature or violates a Prohibition that she's laid on him the wife reverts to her animal form and she leaves sometimes but not always taking the children with her but just like the skky the shape-shifting woman's task at this time is to find herself again to regain that authentic knowing natural wild self that has been suppressed during the years previously so again we have this rising up again of the wild woman archetype at midlife and these stories showing us that change that will come and I think the suy story really does resonate particularly with women at midlife because at midlife I think so many of us do begin to feel faded and lost as if we've been uh imprisoned in a situation where we can't find a way to fully belong uh where we can't find find a place to properly be and you know who Among Us hasn't felt at some point as if we've been exiled or banished from our natural element that wild creaturely side of us Stripped Away um to satisfy an excess of civilization and there are story and so these stories of of animal woman shape shifters I think are also stories of Yearning they stories of yearning for a part of ourselves that we feel we have lost or maybe a part of ourselves that we might once have had but never properly knew and again that is our own unique authentic fully embodied instinctual knowing self and that's what we're returning to beginning in me life that's what these fairy tales are suggesting to us and you know it's no surprise to me I don't think really that that these stories are so persistent so powerfully today because I don't think I've ever met a woman who at some point in her life felt as if her skin hasn't been stolen or in some other way lost and we can lose skin in so many ways we it can be taken from us or with duplicity or with violence or as I did during my corporate years as I wrote about and if women are is rooted we might shrug it off in order to to put on a false skin that doesn't really fit us that doesn't really reflect who we are as we follow the wrong path in life as we follow a path without heart one that we know we shouldn't be walking but we do for whatever reason um and in early adulthood I think you know as we try so hard to conform to what Society requires of us and as we try so hard to have it all because that's what we're told we should do most of us will become disconnected from that female body wisdom and instinctual life and that's what we're regaining midlife um because no matter I think how determinedly we might try to to turn away from the truth at midlife we're faced with another call it's a call to wake up and find a skin that finally fits to wake up from from the half sleep of our everyday existence and to begin to live that full authentic life that we were born to it's about growing into or finding a skin that we can flourish in because this period at midlife of questioning um sometimes breaking but always remaking ourselves and digging deep to find our own inner resources if we allow ourselves to trust in that process we'll be a period of ripening into ourselves and return to ourselves and that naturally follows on from those early outward focused building years so we might need to travel quite a long distance before we do find the skin that fits us and before we can learn to be comfortable in it but first we have to commit ourselves to the idea of a new story that new story that's beginning to rise up inside us the story that we will follow during the second half of our life almost always I think we'll need to re-evaluate the roles that we've played and that we've allowed to Define us in our relationships some of us like that brave Fox woman might make a break for Freedom others will manage all of these deep changes while remaining in a marriage or long-term relationship for mothers if it hasn't happened before that Severance from the old self will often occur when children leave home but however the shift happens what we're looking for at this time is nothing less than ourselves nothing less than returning to ourselves who we are deep inside now there's a third story that I'd like to focus on for a little while which illustrates this process of finding ourselves at midlife and that's the story of the handless maiden now I've talked about this story a good few times in responses to some of your comments and questions in the um in the live sessions and that's because I think it is such a powerful story and it it's quite a long story and it's not quickly or easily summarized so if you're not familiar with the overarching plot please do just pause the video here and go and look it up there are plenty of versions on the web so that you can see what I'm talking about here and one of the reasons that I'm so obsessed with this story is that unlike many fairy tales it kind of has chapters it's not just one episode in a life or one part of a life it's about quite a large ch of the first half of life so we see the handless maiden as a girl at home with her parents when her father cuts off her hands as a result of a bad bargain with the devil then we see her leave home Journey on and marry a king a kind King who makes a silver Pair of Hands for her to replace the ones that she's lost and with whom she has a child another chapter we see the that King leave to go to war and we see the devil step in again trying to trick the King's mother into killing the maiden but the King's mother sees through this the old woman sees through what is happening here and sends the maiden off leaving home again leaving her second home this time sends the maiden off with her child into the forest and it is in the forest where she stays for seven years that magical period of time that we see so often in fairy tales that tells us it kind of identifies a magical period of time that's in the heart of the forest is where we see her grow her own hands back all by herself so I just want to read you that section from I think this is the Grim's version of it the old mother tied the Queen's child onto her back and away she went weeping she came to a great wild forest where she fell to her knees and prayed then an angel appeared to her and led her to a small house on it was a small sign with the words here anyone can live free a snow white virgin came from the house and said welcome Queen and then led her inside she untied the small boy from her back held him to her breast so that he could drink and then laid him in a beautiful madeup bed then she said how did you know that I am a queen the white virgin answered I am an angel sent to take care of you and your child the queen and her son stayed in this house for seven years and were well taken care of and over time her chopped off hands grew back so that's just such a beautiful image of her finding herself again finding her hands growing herself back in nature over a period of seven years and of course at the end for those of you who don't know the story The King comes back from war goes on his own seven-year quest to find her again and they they have another marriage ceremony so they get married twice so it's a beautiful story because it just keeps on giving um and it keeps on it keeps on telling us that we must even if somebody makes us a pair of fake hands we must grow our own hands back and we must do this at midlife um Mary Louise Von France wrote about the story in the feminine in fairy tales and has some lovely lovely takes on it she she talks about it reflecting the way that women cut off their own hands to live through powerful and creative men that they need to go into the forest into nature to live by themselves as a way of regaining themselves regaining their creative power so the child in the story she argued represents the feminine creativity that only the woman herself can find and nurture and um she talks about the queen having to dive very deeply to find her own resources she has to go deep and she has to go dark and when she does sets off courageously Into the Heart of the Dark Forest there is help for her in the form of the guardian angel but the guardian angel is taking care of her while she does the work self so in that Forest we can think of the handless maiden as finding herself in touch with the wild woman archetype inside her and that deep instinctual nature because she's close now to the Natural World she's left the castle for the cottage she's left Society for the Wild and it's a it's a humbler place but it has everything she needs to heal and to grow so it's about authenticity about being true to yourself free of artifice or self- delusion and somehow she finds herself at home in that forest and at home ultimately in herself and again Von France um in in her discussion of the story thinks of that that seven years of solitude in the woods as comparable to that of religious Mystics who seek communion with God through nature um but really what they were doing FR says is kind of finding their own inner relationship to God and she is suggesting that the handless maiden is is a search a search for the self that is bound up with a search for meaning um that's a search for purpose and of course Yong described the passage into the second half of Life as a spiritual passage for a spiritual journey uh the second half of life is a spiritual journey and that's also what this story and particularly Von Francis commentary on it seems to be suggesting to us this is what we do at midlife we return to ourselves we're return to a sense of meaning and purpose so just a question for you what what is the self we find at midlife and of course that really is for each of us to know for ourselves it's not one that I can answer for anybody other than myself and it to but to me it's very it's very much tied up ultimately with a sense of purpose with a sense of meaning and a sense of what James Hillman referred to as calling that self is what we're returning to that self that has that is a unique way of expressing what it is to be human in this world that unique self that has a gift to offer this world if only we'll allow it to grow and to incubate in the seven dark years in the forest and of course that is the purpose of individuation in yung's perspective to know all aspects of ourselves to integrate them ws and all to know ourselves now again I don't want to spend any significant time on this but just to say that midlife is the Gateway to the second half of life it's kind of a long Gateway because it's midlife and then it's menopause which is a whole other big initiation of its Zone um the two often entwined midlife and and menopause and then we begin the journey to elderhood and I wrote about the second half of life and the ways in which fairy tales illuminate the second half of life for women in these two books first of all my book heude uh reimagining the second Al of Life which was published in 2022 and Wise Women which is out in October 20124 and in these books what I'm doing is looking at the archetypal older women in Miss and fairy tales from Europe and identifying their nature identifying the tricksters and the truth tellers identifying the mentors and the creatrix identifying the old women who are Guardians and Protectors of the land the old witches that you don't want to mess with um so there's a real really wide variety of stories of older women in European myth and folklore and that really inspired me when I when I found them and what they do for us I think is they again they illuminate this journey by offering us kind of the the role models that the culture doesn't offer us so if you ask our culture today what as an elder woman can I be what should I be we're not going to get any good answers if you say what am I for it'll be to sit in a corner and shut up and let let us all let all the rest of us get on with business these stories tell us something different that that's not what Elder women are for and I think it's really really important to know that but again as I've said this is a whole other program I just want to draw attention to it as in midlife we begin to return to ourself and in elderhood in the second half of life we begin to bring out that unique gift and wisdom for the sake of Earth and Community now okay sorry I'll just go back a bit there I haven't got quite got back to the yet and and I do just want to say that when we're talking about a return at midlife and I mentioned this very briefly at the beginning when we're talking about a return home we can think about coming home to the self but we can also think about coming home to a place we can also think about coming home to The Wider world that we live in coming home to a place in the bigger picture and for me this has always been important because yes our story is about us but it's also we play a part in the story The Wider story of the planet of this beautiful anabat Earth that gives us life and particularly in a world where we where the Earth is so challenged and where so many things are broken really I think that it is important for us to see situate ourselves inside that bigger picture and also begin to wonder how we can return to a sense of belongingness to the planet to our places to the land that gives us life and of course for those of you who've read the book you'll know that this is the journey that I talk about in if women Rose rooted uh my um my 2016 book which specifically looked at what I called the Eco heroins Journey Don't I've got haven't got another slide on that yes I have there we go and I this really was a woman's Journey out of the Wasteland of modern society and the Machine inside which we can conceive of ourselves as living to a place of nourishment and connection and to a profound sense both of belonging to and responsibility for the places where our feet were planted so this book um has become a a word of mouth bestseller and I think that's because it really reflects the growing and deep-seated yearning of Western women for a stronger sense of connection to our ancestral stories and traditions because what I do in this book I look at I look at the women in um particularly in Celtic but um also relevant to the broader European landscape cultural folk landscape I look at these old stories to show how it is women who often are the ones who are connected in this way so my argument here and my argument that we also need to return not just to ourselves to a sense of belongingness to the planet is because the stories that Western Civilization has encouraged us to live by for the past few centuries have been stories of progress Limitless growth more more more is the kind of primary purpose of life and of the the what I the myth of the hero that kind of super individualistic often super human hero a story of stories of human separation from but also domination over nature and I think these stories are crumbling they're crumbling all around us and the masculine principle also has dominated for far too long that whole Relentless striving for achievement for production for Domination it's focus on intellectual and rational ways of knowing goal orientated ways of knowing to the exclusion of all else and our feminine qualities of creativity of intuition um of connection and relationality and reciproc all of these qualities that we think of as feminine have clearly been suppressed along with relationality um connectedness not just to our fellow humans but to the other than humans that share this planet with us all of this has been downplayed over the centuries as as kind of an inferior way of knowing but it's not an either or situation it's not intellectual rationalistic ways of knowing or instinctive creative ways of knowing there there is room in the world for both but if women was rooted and that Eco heroin's Journey was very much about bringing us back into full awareness of and knowledge of our our feminine instinctual embodied ways of knowing and again relating this back to what I have just been saying about returning to that and the wild woman archetype rising up in us at midlife So In Those Old fairy tales folktales and myths that spring from literally the ground beneath our feet in this part of the world in the Celtic countries and other European countries they these stories emerge directly out of our relationship with the land and which informed the lives of our ancestors and in these old M and folktales women were the Guardians of the natural world they were the Beating Heart of the land they were the bear of wisdom and the root of spiritual and moral Authority from the tri for the tribe and um these stories that show women as powerful and um having meaningful roles to play in the world I think really transformed my life when I first came across them and they're very very highly relevant to this idea of what we return to when we approach midlife I think that Journey that women the journey that women need to make today is very much one which plants us firmly back into the wider world where we belong grounded and rooted and ready to protect it and we see this in so many of our fairy tales so I think we need to incorporate these ideas into our journey as well as focusing on returning to ourself to our own unique gift to our own unique um authentic way of Being Human in this world at this H so really that's where I'd like to to leave talking about the return as I said I've probably raised as many questions as I've offered Solutions what I'm offering here is a vision from fairy tales for time out at life to connect back to ourselves and to connect back to the world in which we are situated those are the two key aspects of this journey and so to me that that is what the return is and that is what these stories are reflecting back at us in preparation for moving into the new the the quite often quite completely new story that will take us over um and take us through the second half of our lives so it's a very general um perspective that I'm offering because it's so unique really to each of us what what it what it reflects what it represents to talk about returning to ourselves what that self is what our sense of it is is so individual to each of us that all I can really do in the return turn is offer some very general guidelines for perceiving it and so what I'd love to talk about in our live session is how the return um relates to your life and also in your Forum these are the questions that I'd uh recommend that you think about discussing so yes what what does the return mean to you how do you see those two aspects the return to the self and the return to the wider self to The Wider world how do you see them at play in your life if you haven't got to midlife yet how do you see them emerging if at all if you are Beyond midlife did they emerge for you and in what way and then also because we've come to the end of this iteration of the fairy tale heroin's Journey that I've been offering you looking back back at all three sections looking back at the last three modules what Insight have you gained about your own life by working with this model again I'm looking here at an overarching lifespan is there a way that this fairy tale heroin's Journey model also works for you in the context of a particular stage of your life so I'm offering it to be used in whatever way that it is helpful to you I only believe in models to the extent that they are useful and adaptable I hate always that we feel that we have to fit ourselves into a model and it's again like putting on a skin that doesn't quite fit that only constrains us and that is false so if aspects of it don't work for you pick the bits that do and um see where it takes you and as we move on into module six we'll be leaving the fairy tale heroin's Journey that's just one way of working with fairy tales just one way of finding ourselves in fairy tales and we'll go on in the other three modules of this uh program to look at other ways that fairy tales can illuminate our lives and our um our search for ourselves so thank you so much and I'm looking forward to the live sessions