Recognizing Your Journey

We don’t really “take” a journey: we “unfold” a journey. Our journeys evolve organically as a dialogue between ourselves and our world. We act and the world gives us feedback. We evaluate the feedback, explore the potentials, and our journey unfolds. The questions I am most often asked in regard to the Hero’s Journey relate […]

Finding your Bliss

A symbol is “like a mirror swinging out from the mind, able to look back on itself.” In symbols, we can step back from life and see it objectively. We can look back at where we are and where we have been. Joseph Campbell is, perhaps, most famous for his advice “follow your bliss.” In […]

Mythos and Logos

Mythic thought touches the essence of experience: the significance and meaning of life. In our logos-oriented world, we must nurture our mythic side to maintain balance and health. Our lives are filled with polar systems: good and bad, right and wrong, rich and poor, light and dark, conservative and liberal, being and nonbeing. Maintaining our […]

The finger that points at the moon: Using the Journey

To use the journey in life, remember that the journey is a metaphor for a fundamental process of growth and transformation. To focus only on the journey is to lose sight of the lessons it teaches. Recently I received an e-mail from a reader who asked how to use the hero’s journey with clients suffering […]

Translating Campbell for Everyday Life

Ironically, the characteristics that make Campbell’s work rich and compelling are also the characteristics that can make it difficult to apply his ideas to our everyday journeys. Over the three-plus decades that I have studied and used the hero’s journey, people have often told me that they love Campbell’s work, but they have difficulty teaching […]