The Wisdom of Folk tales: the Princes and the Pea

By on September 9, 2009 in Spirituality

This, on the face of it, has to be one of the most absurd fairy-tales of all time.  A princess cannot sleep on a bed with one hundred mattresses because a pea is at the very bottom, making her uncomfortable. And this is supposed to be a good thing?

Well, if we read the tale literally it is absurd, that’s for sure.  But how about if we read it as a metaphor?  Ask yourself this: What is it that keeps us awake at nights? Worries, usually.  And sometimes we tend to try and blank out our worries by ignoring them, or covering them up.  In this case it’s with another mattress until there are a hundred of them.

Perhaps the tale is telling us a simple, but powerful truth.  We can’t cover up what worries us.  We may want to stuff it under the mattress (or under the carpet, or try to avoid it with alcohol, or with outlandish behavior, or addictions …).  But it always reminds us it’s there.  It keeps us awake at nights, and it haunts our resting hours.  The Princes becomes, in this interpretation, not a spoiled kid but a symbol of the way a pure heart can be troubled.

And which of us hasn’t gone to bed at night with moral issues left unattended?

To regain the pure-hearted version of ourselves we know exists we may have to drag that bed out, take it to pieces, and remove the pea. Then we can be fully at peace again. Are you ready to do that?  That’s the question, isn’t it?

About dr.allan.hunter

Dr. Allan G. Hunter was born in England and completed all his degrees at Oxford University, emerging with a doctorate in English Literature in 1983.  For the past twenty years he has been a counselor and a professor of literature at Curry College, Massachusetts.  He is the author of seven books, including Stories We Need to Know; Reading your Life Path in Literature, (Findhorn Press: 2008), and most recently of The Six Archetypes of Love: from Innocent to Magician, (also from Findhorn).  He has written two books on using writing for self-exploration, The Sanity Manual and Life Passages (both from Kroshka/Nova Science Books). 

He works with individuals and organizations to show how at any one time there are six archetypes that we can choose to live, and how we routinely stay in one of these because we don’t know what we’ll be like if we allow development to happen. His insights have been enthusiastically received by Business groups, Human Resources professionals, Counselors, and Educators and they offer a new way to understand personal and professional growth – one based in 3000 years of the western world’s cultural history.

To learn more go to   allanhunter.net

or

www.therapeuticwriting.com 

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2 Responses to The Wisdom of Folk tales: the Princes and the Pea

  1. mydomainpvt September 9, 2009 at 8:58 am #

    this is really beautiful and true.

    Wish you love, peace and happiness.

    Trisha

  2. Word_Bandit September 9, 2009 at 12:17 pm #

    All fairy tales and myths are about the psyche, and about integration.

    As Joseph Campbell reminds us, we've left these things behind as childish, yet the psychic result is neurosis and fragmentation.

    It's not the truth of a story that should be important, but the meaning we're able to find in it, that is, the meaning in ourselves that the story leads us to unearth.

    You've done a great job at meaning making with the little entry.

    Thank you.