By, Carol S. Pearson.

Welcome to my new website. I’m particularly thrilled about it because it allows for blogs and reply platforms in three areas of the site: with the blog, with events, and with news/press, so now I can have more regular engagement with clients and readers of my books.

My plan is to blog regularly and also to invite guest bloggers who share ideas and knowledge that complement my own. Themes to be addressed include:

• Awakening the hero and heroine within to thrive personally and make a difference;
• Recognizing and learning from archetypes and mythic themes as they affect our contemporary individual and collective lives;
• Developing narrative intelligence/story savvy to become smarter, freer, and more fulfilled; and
• Using the power of archetypal images, subpersonalities, and stories to transform one’s life and one’s world;

Over a number of years, many people have shared with me ways in which my work has helped them in their professional or personal lives or otherwise expanded their thinking. Some have expressed contrary views that I’ve found helpful in expanding how I was thinking about a subject, while others have provided examples of how they had applied my theories to their own work. Sometimes, when people share how they have used what they initially learned from me, I get excited because they are applying in areas and ways I never would have thought of on my own. It cheers me to discover how the work that is the subject of this website has developed a life of its own, moving beyond me into the world and the future.

Writing can be a lonely business, so getting feedback keeps me energized and at the keyboard. I look forward to making it easier for people who want to provide such feedback to do so, or just to ask a question. But more than that, my desire is to have this site and its reply platforms generate dialogue, and with that, new ideas and practices that can make an even bigger difference than my work can do alone. I hope that you will participate if this is of interest to you.

This is also an important time for me, since my new book, Persephone Rising: Awakening the Heroine Within, will be released on October 13th, with advance orders being taken now. Earlier in my professional life, I wrote The Hero Within and Awakening the Heroes Within and developed an instrument with my colleague Hugh Marr (the Pearson-Marr Archetype Indicator®) to help people discover the archetypes within them. As I moved into leadership roles, I wrote a number of books about leadership, business, and marketing, and also created an instrument to assess archetypes in organizational cultures as a way of understanding them. All the while, Persephone Rising, was incubating within me. I became interested in the mythic story of Persephone and Demeter many years ago when many of my most cherished dreams were coming true, but suddenly I was faced with a devastating loss. Identifying with this mythic story strengthened me then and in difficult times since. Its archetypal narratives also have helped me to realize my dreams and ambitions. Over time, I’ve recognized that this story also speaks to people whose losses, goals, and achievements have been quite different than mine.

While originally I used the term hero generically, I also have come to believe that both sexes— over not just centuries, but millennia—have cultivated somewhat different human attributes. Contemporary society is in danger of undervaluing the characteristics associated with women at a time when they are needed to complement those associated with men. The subtitle of Persephone Rising: Awakening the Heroine Within does not imply that this book is for women only. Rather it emphasizes the qualities women have held dear or that have been forced upon them as the ones most needed at this challenging period in history, but without denigrating those that have been cultivated, by choice or compulsion, in men. In that way, it is a manifesto that speaks to the heroine in every woman and in the men who partner with them.

I believe that Persephone Rising is the most important book I’ve written thus far. It places the challenges faced by us as individuals today within the context of those larger looming threats the world is facing as well as the great human accomplishments that can assist us in addressing them. All that being said, it is a hopeful book and, I’ve been told, it is rather fun to read. It offers a way of facing personal and collective difficulties with a light heart and an optimistic spirit.

I look forward to reading your responses and learning about the ways Persephone Rising resonates in your life and how you might apply its ideas.Carol