5.3- The Mirror & Two Creatures
🌱 How This Activity Helps Women Psychospiritual Leaders:
This journal activity helps women in leadership access deeper self-awareness by engaging the symbolic and emotional language of story. Through the character of Nyx, leaders are invited to reflect on the inner tension between giving and guarding, care and control, and the many masks or roles they carry often without question.
The imagery of the mirror, frog, and scorpion invites a deeper look into the shadow self those unconscious patterns, inherited roles, and emotional wounds that influence how women show up as leaders, lovers, mothers, and daughters. The ancestral themes, elemental symbols (earth, sky, sea), and the twilight realm suggest a psychospiritual connection reminding women that true leadership comes not just from the mind, but from the integration of story, shadow, and soul. By journaling after reading the story, women can explore their own inner dualities when they act like the “frog” (empathetic, self-sacrificing) or the “scorpion” (defensive, reactive), and what part of their unconscious shadow may be driving those patterns. This reflection supports balanced, authentic leadership, grounded in inner truth rather than inherited roles or burnout-driven habits.
THE ACTIVITY:
Read the following story and reflect on the imagery and symbolism. Write it in your journal or workbook.
Nykira’s Daydream
Nykira known as Nyx by the few who really knew her sat slumped at her desk, eyes glazed over, the cursor blinking back at her like a question she couldn’t answer.
Emails piled up. Deadlines loomed. Her phone buzzed with a message from her partner unread. She hadn’t replied to the last three. The kids had argued all morning. Her chest was tight. Her smile had become something she wore, not something she felt.
She was exhausted beyond tired, beyond fixing.
In that still, unbearable moment, her mind slipped.
And she daydreamed…
She found herself walking through a twilight realm, half-lit and silent, suspended between chaos and cosmos. Time dissolved. The noise disappeared. Wind stirred around her like ancestral breath.
She came to a familiar space a quiet room that looked like the living room from her childhood, yet softer, older, sacred. In the centre stood a tall, ornate mirror. Perched atop it were two creatures:
A frog, green and wide-eyed.
A scorpion, still and gleaming.
Nyx stepped closer. Inside the mirror shimmered shifting images of herself:
- The Daughter, who never wanted to disappoint.
- The Mother, who gave endlessly, even when empty.
- The Lover, pulled between longing and distance.
- The Leader, armoured in efficiency and silent pressure.
She watched herself try to juggle it all work, care, connection until even her reflection looked blurred and brittle.
Then, the image vanished. In its place, words appeared, glowing like breath on glass:
“We all act like frogs and scorpions at different times, in different ways depending on our shadow.”
The frog spoke:
“You give, and give, and vanish from your own care.”
The scorpion whispered:
“You protect with power but sometimes sting too fast, too hard.”
Nyx felt the truth land deep in her bones. These creatures weren’t just symbols they were parts of her. Fragments shaped by her past, her lineage, her survival instincts. Her overgiving came from love but also from fear. Her sharp edges came from strength but also from pain.
In that moment, she saw clearly:
Leadership wasn’t about perfection or proving.
It was about presence.
It was the sacred act of remembering who you are beneath the roles.
It was a return not to who others needed her to be, but to her whole self.
The frog and the scorpion nodded, then disappeared.
And in the mirror, she saw a new image:
A woman of water and fire.
Soft and strong.
Wounded and wise.
Not broken just becoming.
A soft knock on her office door startled her. She blinked. The screen still glowed. The emails still waited. But something in her had changed.
Write a new ending for the story.