Understanding the nature of these agreements is the key to our growth, fulfilment and evolution. Medical intuitive Caroline Myss believes that we can get to grips with the small print of our existence, by learning a new vocabulary - the language of archetypes. Her career of diagnosing illness by looking at the human energetic field led her to conclude that the chakras, our energy centres, contain 'all the data of our biology and biography, and that this energy manifests in patterns of archetypes that affect our lives'.

Psychologist Carl Jung first coined the term as a universal symbol present in the collective unconscious - the ever-present sum of all human experience - to which we are all connected. The big four archetypes are: child, victim, prostitute and saboteur. These are universal with both positive and negative traits, but each of us will have many others, such as lover, virgin, pioneer, pirate, story-teller and trickster, resonating in our lives. The child represents dependency and responsibility; the victim empowerment or lack of it; the prostitute our morality and the saboteur how we deal with change. Without understanding these archetypes, which drive both our unconscious and our intuition, Caroline says we struggle to see the bigger picture of what our contract has in store for us. Traditionally, through ritual and religion, we have tried to make our own contracts with the divine.

Cassandra Eason, an expert on pre-Christian religion, views it as a cosmic bank. She says: "We have always given the first fruits of our harvests, the promise of service and in return asked for blessings." Caroline sees the same exchange across the broad spectrum of everyday life: "Every experience that we have contains purpose and meaning. By finding a way of looking at the symbolic meaning of our experiences, we can face and accommodate the inevitable changes that life brings." Uncovering how archetypes have developed in our lives involves, according to Caroline, "embarking on a journey into the archetypal dimension of life, a dimension of consciousness that contains all of us collectively and, somehow, individually too. The way you express your archetypes is unique to you, but these energies correspond to the archetypes of other people in your life."

Caroline Myss is the author of Sacred Contracts (Bantam, £9.99). For details of Caroline's one-day seminar in London on April 18, call 0208 962 1230.

Mark Winter