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Attributes of a Personal Myth.

Attributes of a Personal Myth.
Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph.D.

A Personal Myth (PM) is

 A loom on which I weave the raw materials of daily experience into a coherent story (Feinstein and Krippner)
 What organizes my experiences of the world and determines or influences by what categories I will engage the world’s matters.
 What draws me to what I imagine to be true.
 What frames the “als ob” or “as if” quality of my life. The
“as if” quality of my days comprises the mythic principles I live by.
 Always evolving and continually assessing what is working and no longer working for me in my self-definition.
 What can harden or calcify from an organic living quality into a rigid dogmatism that is closer to a cadaver than to a vital life principle.
 What reveals what I believe about myself and the world; it will influence what I believe to be true.
 Related intimately to my organic bodily being and emanates in part from my incarnated presence in the world.
 An inner guide, an inner guru that can open me to larger forces in my interior life and the exterior world.
 What embodies a quest and every quest harbors a question or is motivated by a central question. Each of us must find that question on our own journey, not on someone else’s travels.
 What carries a vitality that is measured in large part by its capacity to and for change.
 Actively engaged in the formation, de-formation and re-formation of my personal identity, which may be the central task of our adult years.
 What carries psychic energies that become concentrated along the plot lines of particular guiding narratives.

A Few Examples of Writing Meditations
Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph.D.

1. We live our lives in large measure through assumptions we make about ourselves and others, including the otherness of the world. Describe an assumption that gets you out of bed in the morning, that you begin your life with each day. In what ways does this assumption serve you?

2. Describe an assumption that no longer serves you, that is an albatross around your neck, but which you have not succeeded in stripping from your way of thinking and seeing.

3. Our PM reveals itself in what we dedicate ourselves to. What is the compass, what is it set to, and in what direction do I want to give my life purpose? Describe one or two compass setting that I adhere to in order that my life have meaning and purpose. Do I detect within what I serve a whisper or a cry for change, such that my life story would need to bend or torque in a new direction? Describe such an impulse with as much detail as possible.

4. Where and by what means do I seek joy in my life? What do I gravitate towards in order to rekindle a sense of joy and wholeness in what I do and in who I am? Describe small or big ways in which I discover joy and with it, an identity with myself and the world.

5. Transitions are on-going in our lives. We are constantly shifting purposes, beliefs, attitudes, knowledge, relationships both personal and professional What transition seems to be asking for more attention right now in my life? Describe its origin and what relation you are developing with it.

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