You’ve identified your personal archetypes. Now you want to learn how to integrate their highest potential without disowning your own shadow. Here’s one way to do it, one archetype at a time:

1. List 6-10 values for each archetype and then 6-10 opposing values for each archetype.
2. Use the first list as guiding qualities to embody or practice.
3. Use the opposing list as reflective prompts to spot the archetype’s unhealthy patterns, to supervise them, to craft boundaries or restorative practices that are healthy and constructive.

The archetype’s values are a concise, resonant set of 3-10 core values that typically animate the archetype: what they prize and bring to others.

The opposing values for an archetype are 3-10 orientations that sit in tension with the archetype: what undermines, blocks, or opposes the healthy expression of the archetype. Listing opposing values brings them out of the shadow and into the light of your consciousness.

Here’s an example by a client:

Healer archetype values

• Compassion – deep, felt concern for others’ suffering.
• Empathy – the capacity to attune and mirror another’s inner state.
• Altruism – giving time, energy, and resources without expectation of return.
• Service – a steady, action-oriented commitment to helping and tending.
• Presence – sustained, nonreactive attention that makes space for healing.
• Integrity – ethical honesty and congruence between care offered and inner truth.
• Patience – steady endurance for slow or nonlinear change.
• Humility – recognising limits, deferring ego, and honouring the other’s agency.
• Wisdom – discerning what’s needed and when, informed by experience and reflection.
• Boundary stewardship – protecting both self and others so care is sustainable.

Opposing values for the Healer archetype

• Indifference – emotional detachment or lack of concern for another’s pain.
• Apathy – unwillingness to act or sustain effort on someone’s behalf.
• Self-interest – prioritising personal gain over another’s wellbeing.
• Neglect – abandoning responsibility or failing to provide needed care.
• Distractedness – inability to hold full presence with another’s experience.
• Deception – dishonesty or manipulation that betrays trust in care.
• Impatience – rushing processes, seeking quick fixes rather than true repair.
• Pride – letting ego, status, or superiority replace humble service.
• Rigidity – dogmatic approaches that ignore nuance, context, or the other’s voice.
• Boundary erosion – enmeshment, rescuing, or self-sacrifice that damages both parties.

Listing both values and opposing values means you now have a practical, ethical map for bringing your archetypes into conscious life. Focus on cultivating the values that animate their highest expression and name the opposing values, so you notice when an archetype is moving into an opposing value. Practise the constructive list as a lived discipline, with small daily choices that strengthen those qualities, and treat the opposing list as an early-warning repair system that alerts your Sacred Self to adjust behaviour.

• Make it daily: pick one guiding value from each archetype to practice for a week. Track one observable action that shows you lived it.
• Use the shadow prompts: when you notice a reactive move, name the opposing value aloud, pause, and ask what healthier value needs to be restored.
• Design guardrails: set clear boundaries and restorative practices tied to specific aspects of the shadow (time limits, check-ins with a friend, journaling, professional feedback).
• Integrate with ritual: create a short ritual to mark shifting from one archetypal mode to another (breath, posture, a phrase) so transitions stay conscious.
• Reflect and revise: monthly, review how the guiding values felt in practice, and update both lists as you grow.

Commitment to this loop of embodying, noticing, repairing, and refining keeps your archetypes alive and generative without disowning them or idealising them. Start small by listing 3 values and 3 opposing values, be kind to yourself when you experience setbacks, and let this aspect of Body Soul Spirit Archetype Work teach you which values need more tending next.