The Prince Exercise in Lesson 4 is a powerful one because it gets to the root of what blocks many people from creating the life they want. What blocks many people is a sense of unworthiness.
I have had to face this issue at times, and you probably have to. You want something, but you are not sure you deserve it. It is vitally important to affirm that you do deserve the things you want for otherwise you will not allow yourself to have them. Your sense of justice and fairness will not allow you to have something you feel you do not deserve. Or, if you do allow yourself to have it you may sabotage your enjoyment of it in some way.
By thinking of yourself as a Prince you begin to create another idea about yourself and who you are. You create an alternative to images you have of yourself which have been limiting you. If you want to achieve something and you think of yourself as a Prince then you are more likely to allow yourself to achieve it than if you only think of yourself as, say, a plumber, house wife, computer guy, or whatever.
When I first got into writing it was by little bits and pieces. I had a hard time getting myself to actually sit down and do it even though writing was something I really wanted to do. I eventually realised that I thought that people who wrote were Writers and I did not think of myself as a Writer. It was not my job. I thought of myself as a “techie”, a technical rather than a creative type of person. My way into writing was initially to only write about technical topics even though I had a fascination with Spiritual and Self Help material for even longer than I had been interested in technical things. Eventually I realised that I was limiting myself by who or what I thought I was.
Thinking of myself as a Prince, like in the Prince Exercise, helped me break out of the shell I had put around myself. It helped me break through self-imposed limitations. After all, a Prince can do whatever they want! A Prince can be a writer if he/she wants! Right? Having created a different idea of who I was, different possibilities emerged and different capacities and abilities awoke to meet these possibilities. My creativity started to flow and has come along in leaps and bounds ever since.
The Prince image is a powerful one. A psychologist would tell you that it is an archetype, which means that it holds a pattern of thoughts and feelings which can outwork into our daily life. It does not matter whether you are male or female, you can still benefit from the Prince exercise as archetypes are, in essence, genderless. It is very powerful to choose to work consciously with a positive archetype; otherwise the negative ones we may have picked up through life could dominate. Negative archetypes are things like The Victim, Lost Child and Rejected Lover and so on. By replacing that sort of image with the image of a Prince our lives change for the better in a deep way.
You can change your life for the better in profound ways using the Prince Exercise which Bernard has so beautifully offered us. I hope you use it and get wonderful benefits from it.
Blessings,
William M.