When looking for the deep story of your life – when looking for the shape that can give coherence to your experiences – it’s always a good idea to have a sense of what the overall sweep of life can be. It’s not just a question of being born, working, and growing old. Neither is it a case of where we end up physically. It’s a question of what we come to understand within that span of time. Sometimes we tell ourselves the stories of our lives, and often we’re not correct about those stories. And that’s a real pity because what we tell ourselves becomes what we believe.

People occasionally turn up at my counseling practice telling the “Woe-is-me” story, which may in fact be accurate up to that point in their lives. Yet just because unfortunate things have happened does not mean that failure is always in the future. “I just can’t seem to do anything right,” said one woman. Well, she’d made some mistakes, but the real problem was she couldn’t see what to do next so she could leave those mistakes behind.

Fortunately for us the literature of the western world for the past 3000 years has been pretty clear about what it is we can grow to become if we take up the opportunity to go on a life journey, and it shows us this in a series of Archetypes. We’ll all start life as trusting Innocents – that’s us as a children. At some point we’ll become disillusioned Orphans, and then we’ll go out on our own as Pilgrims looking for meaning. If you’re reading this you already know what it means to explore the world for meanings that others may not accept. Yet we all know that sometimes that search can be long and hard, and full of mistakes. It’s worth the trouble, though, because when we find a meaning we can truly believe in we become Warrior-Lovers or fighters for peace. These are the people, the great and the not so well-known, who will campaign for what they believe in and for who they love. And as they do so they become something better still. They become those who can inspire and motivate others, and direct them. They become Monarchs. This is a little like the truly excellent team coach, who brings out the best in others but doesn’t actually play the game on the field. And we all know what a huge difference a good coach can make whether it’s in the Olympics or the Little League. The Monarch eventually will transform into something still better, the Magician. A Magician doesn’t change the world through direct action, but through knowing what to say so that others will hear it and take responsibility for themselves. These are the Nelson Mandelas, the Martin Luther Kings, the Jane Goodalls, the great writers and thinkers. The peaceful transitions these leaders brought about seemed impossible at the time. Yet they made it happen. And this can also be you. In fact it probably already is you, at least part of the time, on those occasions when you know exactly what to say to your friends and loved ones so that they can hear what they need to hear and change their minds, or change their energies, into something productive.

If we return to the example of the woman in my counseling session, once she knew about these archetypes she was able to identify herself as a Pilgrim. She wasn’t a “failure”, so much as a work in progress, and when she saw this she was able to gain her courage back and keep up the search for a meaningful life. Not long afterwards she found work that she really believed in, and was on her way to living the Warrior-Lover archetype. Without a knowledge of these archetypes, though, she might have never made that transition. The Pilgrim stage is a difficult one. Sometimes people give up when a little knowledge could help them.

All this information about these six stages has existed for thousands of years, contained in our greatest literature, our myths, and our folk-tales. The trouble is we’ve forgotten how to understand those stories.

So let’s take a look at a story we all know and see how it shows people going through these six archetypes. Let’s look at Cinderella. Grimm’s Fairy Tale, not Disney’s is the one I prefer, since that version is closer to the authentic tale. In Grimm’s tale Cinderella starts as an Innocent child who becomes an Orphan. Her mother is dead and her step-mother is cruel. When her father goes on a trip he asks the whole family what they want. The step-sisters want fancy dresses. Cinderella asks for the first thing that knocks his hat off as he rides home (Disney leaves out this part, and a lot more, as we shall see). So the sisters get their dresses and Cinderella gets a hazel twig. Now, if we know the tale we’ll recall that she goes straight to her mother’s grave and plants it, and it grows into a tree. It’s a symbol that tells us that even when we’re stuck in the ashes of despair, even when we think no one loves us, we can gain real strength by contacting that basic sense of having been loved by our parents and knowing that we are loveable now. This love is what will give us the courage to overcome despair and to love ourselves – and that’s something that can’t be done by buying pretty dresses.

When the Prince announces the ball everyone wants to go, even Cinderella. Her step-mother tells her it’s out of the question and anyway, she can’t go until she’s sorted out all the lentils that the step-mother pours into the ashes to try and keep her quiet. Cinderella doesn’t hesitate, she calls up her friends the birds, and they sort out the lentils in no time. Cinderella goes to her step-mother, shows her the lentils, and still gets a resounding veto as a response.

What’s important is that Cinderella doesn’t give up at this point. A white bird arrives and leads her to the hazel tree on her mother’s grave. There she sees a dress entirely of silver, hanging in the branches, like ripe fruit. Cinderella is linked again and again to trees, birds, and fruit – so whatever it is that’s happening here it’s pretty obvious it has to do with natural maturation. She’s also linked to the maternal love she once knew. And that white bird? It suggests that when we are determined to do something ideas occur to us that would normally never pop into our brains. It suggests the way we can mobilize the Unconscious by trusting our inspiration.

Cinderella goes to the ball, as we know, three times. Each time she has a better dress than before; first silver, then gold, then jeweled. She flees three times. Clearly Cinderella is acting as a Pilgrim who goes out and finds what she wants – the Prince – and yet, like so many of us, she’s afraid to believe she’s found him. She leaves the ball at midnight, halfway between two days, symbolically at exactly the point when she’s changing. Like most of us, when we’re changing and becoming someone new we get scared. It’s a temptation to slip back to our old familiar place. But notice – that sense of feeing loved even though her mother is dead is what propels her forward. We can all become capable, confident, and dazzling if we truly believe we are loveable and worthy, but we have to feel that every day.

The Prince now sets out to look for her. He becomes searcher for what he needs, a Pilgrim. Unfortunately the wicked sisters try to fool him. The oldest sister cuts off her toes, squeezes into the slipper, and claims him. Now, the Prince isn’t stupid. He can see the difference between the sister and the Cinderella he danced with, but he is a man of his word. He’s promised he would marry whoever the shoe fits, and he can’t back down now. This is his great strength of integrity. On the way home the sister’s feet bleed, the prince discovers he’s been fooled, and takes her back. He tries the next sister – and she’s cut off her heels so she can get her foot into the slipper. What a symbol that is! In a world where more and more women resort to plastic surgery, and where extreme dieting and eating disorders are in no danger of dying out, we can only feel sad for these sisters – because they are exactly like those women and men who want so desperately to look good rather than to be good. As we all know, the tendency is not just physical – women sometimes feel they have to stifle their minds and act dumb simply in order to appeal to men.

The Prince notices he’s been fooled and comes back one more time. The step-mother tells him there’s no one else in the house, but he insists. Not only is he a man of his word, he’s determined, also. And so he sees Cinderella, places the shoe on her foot and declares he will marry her. In Disney’s version Cinderella is so cute that we have no trouble believing this. Yet can we imagine the Prince turning up at the family castle with a penniless girl covered in soot, telling his father he’ll marry her and no other? When we think about it this way it’s clear that the Prince has been on his own Pilgrimage and he is now ready to fight for what he believes in, if he has to. He’s a Warrior-Lover, and he couldn’t have become one if he hadn’t met Cinderella and gone on the pilgrimage to find her. He looks for her three times just as she went to find him three times. They are, in fact, equals at this point.

So they marry and become King and Queen eventually. In terms of the mythic value of the tale she is from low on the social register, he is at the top. She is linked to nature, he is linked to power. In fact, when they marry they are the perfect fusion of opposites, of yin and yang – which is important because the good king, like the good leader, does not value people just because of their birth. People are valued because of who they are in themselves. Moreover, the Prince knows that when he and Cinderella danced at that ball they were more than just two people. They became something special. After all, it’s not where you came from that matters. It’s who you are when you are with those you love that matters. Each of us has had some less than stellar experiences in our lives. But those aren’t important when you find the person you love and the cause you love. What counts is who you are right now. This is what the Monarch archetype knows.

And the sisters? We’re told that the same birds that helped Cinderella, the doves, go and find them and pick out their eyes. That’s pretty harsh. The sisters judged only by appearances, and so it’s symbolic that they forfeit their eyes. In fact their punishment is deserved because they tried to mislead a Pilgrim on his way to discovering truth, and that’s a true crime against the human spirit. Anyone who exploits the best impulses of another for his or her own gain is offending against humanity.

The last words of the tale, of course, refer to Cinderella and her Prince: “They lived happily ever after.” It’s as if the tale is saying that when we honor our Pilgrim explorations, when we stick to that course and have the courage to become Warrior-Lovers, then it’s not just our happiness but the happiness of the whole kingdom that results. And that’s the work of the Magician. Miracles happen and we aren’t quite sure why, but if we’re wise we acknowledge them and give thanks. When a king and queen are truly happy it means the whole realm is happy, just as when Mom and Dad are happy its likely the children will be happy also, no matter what small worries may come their way. Happiness is surely a miracle, a marvelous everyday miracle, but not the less valuable for all that! The story makes the hint clear – this is a kingdom of peace and respect, and of love, too. That’s pretty impressive.

Innocent, Orphan, Pilgrim, Warrior-Lover, Monarch, and Magician, they’re all in this, probably the best known and best loved of all folk tales. If we pay attention to the story we can see how to live our lives to the fullest. But we can’t decode these valuable lessons if we only know the watered-down Disney version. In Disney’s movie everything is solved by a fairy godmother. I promise you that if you sit and wait for a fairy godmother to make everything better you will wait a very long time indeed. Cinderella did not wait; she acted. The story shows us what she did – she reached into her soul and believed in her actions, and she didn’t hesitate. She knew she had to be at that ball and she made it happen. And when once she took that risk, once she was at the ball, she set things in motion she could only have dreamed of if she’s stayed at home.

The wisdom of the ages is waiting for us if we care to pay attention. Deep stories will always have real power to guide us.