Like Vader, we all hide behind masks that protect us from the harsh, sometimes toxic outer world; and as with Vader, healing means learning to remove the mask, to return to and reveal our truest selves.
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Inside the Walls:
An Enneagram Analysis of Stranger Things
The Enneagram reveals nine ways the ego hides our essence behind a mask — like Will Byers hidden in the Upside Down, looking out at the world through the walls of his own house, waiting to be found and freed.
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Turning the Wheel:
An Enneagram Analysis of Lost
An ancient wisdom tradition with roots in Sufi, Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist mysticism, the Enneagram is a fitting lens for viewing and understanding the characters of Lost, and maybe — by seeing ourselves in their stories — uncovering our own secret strengths and wounds.
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Mark Twain and the Folklore of Day and Night
A look at two parallel ways Twain uses folklore and superstition in his works, and what this split says about the author himself.
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Yokai: The Folklore Roots of Pokémon
When Pokemon GO! released in the summer of 2016, it wasn’t my first encounter with a breed of monsters and ghosts unlike any elsewhere in the world: yōkai, the supernatural creatures of Japanese folklore…
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‘Fighting the Long Defeat’ : Nature and Grief in Tolkien and Medieval Poetry
Especially in The Lord of the Rings, medieval ideas of nature — from its decline and hostility to culture, to its own suffering alongside us — color Tolkien’s writing, where they ultimately develop into a reconciliation between wilderness and hearth…
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Sorrow and Light:
Reflections on Rewatching Lost
Characters, not mythology. Mystery, not answers. Five years after Lost’s polarizing finale, I look into the eye of the Island again. How I felt then, why I drifted away from the show, and what I saw when I came back to rewatch it — all six seasons — for the first time since “The End.”
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