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“Tis a pleasant thing to play the fool in the right season.”
— Horace
Your mind is a story-making machine. At any given moment it is running stories about who you are, what you deserve, and where you are headed — in your conscious mind and beneath it.
Left unchecked, those stories run the show. Archetypal Advising uses mythology, depth psychology, and narrative metaphysics to help you actually see them — and work with them.
Unchecked stories slow you down, sabotage you, or leave you reaching for meaning your mind cannot find — a hollowness that no external success seems to fill.
Archetypes are the building blocks of all human story. By surfacing the archetypal patterns at work in your life, we free up the processing power your mind has been using to run them unconsciously.
Clarity. A renewed sense of purpose and connection. The tools to track your own story — so you are living it, instead of it living you.
In the Tarot the Fool is card zero. Emptied of expectations, unencumbered by the past, only through such ‘empty-headedness’ is there a hope to take the leap into a new journey. Often it is our ‘wisdom’ that holds us back, and nowhere do we feel more like experts than in the stories of our own lives.
The only hope that you and I have at making Archetypal Advising successful is to willingly choose to be The Fool. For when we are freed from our certainty the world becomes nothing but possibility.
A 90-minute conversation designed to turn over the stones of your past and your mind. What is hiding beneath them? The questions are crafted to reveal not just what you remember — but how you remember it.
Between sessions, I draw your Narrative Map and write the opening pages of your Personal Mythology — a physical record of the symbols, archetypes, and storylines shaping how you see the world.
The second 90-minute session moves into the present. Using your map and mythology as foundation, we surface what story-material is currently active — with the help of Tarot as a symbolic tool, not a fortune-teller.
We close the stories that drain you, identify the ones worth carrying forward, and create Landmarks: small daily practices that anchor the new stories into lived experience.
Most people choose to continue. Monthly or bi-monthly sessions to track your progress, adjust your landmarks, and navigate the new terrain as it emerges. Includes dream analysis, synchronicity tracking, and an annual review of your Personal Mythology.
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
— T.S. Eliot
I am not a licensed therapist. I don't have a credential on the wall. What I have is a decade of self-directed obsession across mythology, depth psychology, philosophy, and the hard sciences — and a genuine love of people and story.
I started in biotechnology. But an elective in my junior year — Myths and Mysteries of the Tarot, taught through Jungian psychology — opened a door I have been walking through ever since. It led me to Jung, Campbell, Eliade, Frankl, Whitehead, and further into the intersections of quantum physics and comparative mythology.
I was drawn to the mystical — but constitutionally allergic to the 'woo-woo.' My science background demanded rigor alongside the wonder. The tension between those two things is where this work lives.
The night my grandfather died, a poker game was dealt Wild Bill's Dead Man's Hand. I had spent years studying Jung's concept of synchronicity in theory. That night, I could not dismiss what I was looking at. That event became a question — and that question became the spine of Archetypal Advising.
Ryan asks deep questions. He is insightful in his interpretations of people, history, and literature, weaving together a magical, mystical story line that captures and draws in the reader. He causes his audience to think outside the norm to entertain new perspectives.Ellen G.
Ryan's Archetypal Advising was one of the most transformative and insightful experiences I've ever had. He understood me more deeply than anyone else in my life at that time, and his guidance gave me clarity and perspective that proved invaluable for setting expectations about my future.Joseph C. — Archetypal Advising
I read every message personally. You'll hear back within a few days.