The Hero’s Journey…Into Yourself
What do you expect from life? You can answer that if you know what you want. Knowing what you want should be easy to figure out. But it’s not. I’ve struggled with it my whole life.?
Knowing what you want can be clouded by motivations that move you away from what’s truly important. What you expect from life can be very different than you may think.
The hero’s journey
Joseph Campbell developed the monomyth. He studied mythical stories from many cultures. They all contained universal themes. His book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, goes into all these themes. The hero’s journey has three parts. First, you depart from the ordinary world. Second, you’re initiated by going through trials to learn. Third, you return to the world to serve your community with your new found skills.?
The hero takes an intentional journey into stress. This is what warriors do also. Traditional warriors, such as soldiers, take intentional journeys into enemy territory. Here they literally fight against the enemy to test their mettle as they serve their country. This is a journey into the external territory of the enemy.?
Life warriors use the external territory to journey into their own psychology. Climbing is a great external territory for doing that. You could approach your internal journey, and climbing, with the traditional warrior approach. In climbing, that means you fight against gravity. In life, that means you suppress what you don’t like. Think of all your failures, mistakes, and limiting behaviors. Not nice stuff. Suppress it and move on, right?
No. A better approach is one of fighting with the “enemy.” You focus on learning what failures, mistakes, and limiting behaviors can teach you. You start this process by recognizing that they are essential for learning.?
This approach works well in climbing also. You don’t fight against gravity to climb. You fight with it. You understand that gravity is essential to climbing well. Fight with gravity by relaxing into its pull. That will ground you on your feet so you can use the rock to help you climb.?
Why take the internal journey?
You may wonder if there’s value in revealing all that negative stuff. It hiding below the surface of your awareness. So why bother? Consider this. Warriors are people who aren’t afraid of themselves. There’s value in being courageous in the external world of the enemy. There’s also value in being courageous taking the internal one.?
Life, in fact, is only worth living if you choose to take the internal journey. It helps you answer important questions like “Who am I?” and “What do I want?” Would that be helpful for having a meaningful life? Yes!
Previously I shared Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl shows how meaning gives people a reason to live. Who wants to live a meaningless life? I don’t. Joseph Campbell takes this in a different direction.?
Campbell stated that he doesn’t think people are seeking meaning. He believed that what people are seeking is an experience of being alive.?
It’s both, right? Your mind wants to know why life is as it is. Meaning helps satisfy that desire to know. But it’s the engagement that actually leads us toward meaning. That engagement gives us a feeling of being alive.?
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What do you expect from life??
So what do you expect of life? Perhaps that’s the wrong question. You may recall from the Frankl lesson that he turned this question around. Frankl suggested: It doesn’t really matter what you expected from life, but rather what life expected from you.?
You’re not here to be strictly a taker. That’s what kids do as they learn how to become responsible adults. As an adult, you need to give. Serving others aligns you with what life expects from you. Service leads toward meaning and a feeling of being alive.?
That’s the hero’s journey. It’s also the journey for life warriors. They depart their comfortable lives to answer “Who am I?” and “What do I want?” Then they can return to the world and serve.?
You can’t give what you don’t have. Having the courage to take the internal journey allows you to give to the world what it needs. That’s the warrior approach to life.?
Is life a problem that needs to be solved??
Do you think you’ll ever be able to solve all life problems? Joseph Campbell stated that “Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. You are that mystery which you are seeking to know.” Perfect phrasing for the importance of taking the internal journey.?
Warriors strive to solve life’s mysteries without ever thinking they’ll have final answers. Thus you come to the paradox of life. You strive for the goal knowing you’ll never achieve it. Knowing this, you can relax into the journey. You live for the sake of living, without feeling like you have to resolve all the messiness.?
Frame what you want in the context of what you can give to life. This aligns you with what’s most important. You don’t have to know the mystery of how it all unfolds. Just choose to engage so you can experience life. These experiences create meaning. Then relax and enjoy the ride.?
Practice tip: What do I want? What does life expect?
This isn’t a simple question to answer. Dissect it to find better answers.?
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