The Heroes Journey

THINKING TOOLS – Models and Frameworks

The essence of the heroes journey is how to live a meaningful life or one you feel called to do. This puts you into a mind space where you are driven to “produce”, “direct” and “script” the life you want to lead. If you don’t find a reason to take leadership of your life you are more likely to be unhappy, feel lost or confused as to what your life is just a collection of problems to cope with. You have been separated from your spirit. As a result, you feed your body and not your soul.

It was Joseph Campbell who pointed out that, the Heroes Journey is something any us could feel “called” to do to realise a dream or deep intention. He used Carl Jung’s idea of archetypes to map out the underlying structure behind religion and myth. He demonstrates that all life stories have the same pattern which he named the “Heroes Journey” or the “monomyth“. He saw religions as “containers” for the essential truth. “They are the claim – not the pearl.“

“To find your own way is to follow your own bliss. This involves analysis, watching yourself and seeing where the real deep bliss is – not the quick little excitement, but the real, deep, life fulfilling bliss.”  – Joseph Campbell 

You can see the elements of the Heroes Journey quite clearly in films such as “Star Wars” and “The Matrix”. Other examples are “The Simpsons”, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”, “Groundhog Day”, “Labyrinth”, “Field of Dreams” and “The Lion King”.

You find yourself using the language of metaphor and archetypes as symbols of what you feel and observe. There are times in your life where things are not exactly the way you want them to be. You feel the normal flow of events in your life is not feeding your soul and you sense a “breakdown”. You feel you are “hitting a brick wall” or “can’t seem to get over” something. Everything changes when your have clarity and can tell yourself an alternative story. What is this “brick wall” and what possible ways can you “get over it”? Life can then take you in another direction. Others may not understand you, but you feel compelled to do it because it makes perfect sense to you.

When seen as a “movie” there is a performing self (your Inner Actor), a witnessing self (your Inner Scriptwriter and storyteller), an observer self (your Inner Director) and a passionate self (your Inner Producer).  The result of combining these contributors to your life’s experience is to create a “generative self” that lives the Hero’s Journey.

The elements in the Heroes Journey outlined below and follow the definition used by Reg Harris

1.The Call

 When you feel compelled to take action.  Eckhart Tolle wrote in the Power of Now that the primary role of the soul is to awaken, grow and evolve. When we feel ‘called’ to grow and bring more life energy into the world, we are compelled to act by a challenge, a crisis, a vision or an unmet need. We may feel that something is lost that needs to be regained, renewed or healed. This is not a call to buy a bigger car or television set, it is something that demands courage, that takes you beyond your ego self. If you refuse the call because you don’t want the hassle or are afraid of failure then the longing stays in your heart.  It is often why people leave a well-paid job to rescue donkeys.  The “call” of the soul never goes away.

2. The Initiation

Crossing the threshold to take the plunge. When you respond to the call you are committing yourself to travel a new path. You have left your comfort zone and are now in the change zone. You are now walking in a new territory without a map. You are consumed by uncertainty and unpredictability. This makes things risky, difficult, challenging and sometimes painful. But there is no turning back, so you muster your inner resources of determination, passion, resilience, and love to drive you on. If you did not think you possessed these abilities before you seem to have the power to generate them now. You are pulling aspects of yourself from deep inside yourself that you didn’t know existed. You discover who you really are. This was my experience when I went to work as a VSO in the Solomon Islands in the 1970’s.

3. The Challenges

Being tested to overcome barriers. You are now having to face your ‘demons’, the things that seem to have the power to block your journey, even threaten your very existence and those you care about. You often perceive this demon to be ‘outside’ you, but it is the fear that lies ‘inside’ you.  You are now having to “face facts” and overcome your fears. It may be your anger, addiction, depression, illness, frustration, grief, guilt or shame.  This is what makes the challenge so difficult.  The ‘demon’ is holding a mirror to reveal how your ego self is stopping you finding your true self. What makes something a demon is your relationship with it.

4. The Resolve

Surrendering yourself to what’s inevitable. This is the point at which you accept things about yourself and it is the non-acceptable that is holding you back from being your true self.  It starts with the realisation that it’s about what you do. Others may be a source of inspiration and an example, but you need to learn and grow from the inside-out to achieve your own transformation. You may be holding down a difficult job and be seen by others as successful and professional, but you still feel unable express your true self and this creates feelings of stress, anxiety, pressure, and self-criticism. You now have to change to connect your conscious mind with a larger consciousness that allows you to access what Robert Dilts describes as “a greater confidence, deeper understanding, more subtle awareness and increased capacity”

5. The Transformation & Revelation

 Experiencing a new way of being. To change yourself from the inside-out involves more than an intellectual exercise.  Knowing what to change and how to change requires more than understanding (thinking intelligence), it needs you to be in the right mood state (emotional intelligence), the right body state (somatic intelligence) and awakening to a purpose bigger that you (spiritual intelligence). It is during times of great struggle or injustice that you find a reason for creating something new.

6. The Atonement

 Finding new meaning in your life.  This is the point which involves critical reflection on the experience and assessing what you learned about yourself. What differences can you observe in the way you see things and behave now, compared with where you were before you set out on the journey? What skills and abilities did you develop?

Reg Harris interpret’s a person’s life as a Heroes Journey. The separation from a familiar world and being initiated into a new one, where the old ways of thinking and acting are altered or eliminated enabling you to achieve a new level of consciousness, skill or freedom. On returning there is renewed confidence, perception and capability with all the respect, rights and privileges that the new status conveys. These are the rites of passage.

In a sense, every sustainable change we make creates a new pattern of experience and a new reality. Every love lost, every birth or death, every new job, school or relationship forces us to shift our thinking and perspective on life and do something different as a result.

Understanding these patterns can open us up to pure knowledge and self-realisation. We then become stronger and more capable as we achieve wisdom, growth, and independence to become the person we really want to be, someone who is at one with the world around them.