An Ever-Expanding Spiral
Teaching the Journey Pattern
by Reg Harris
Copyright © 2009 by Reg Harris. All rights reserved. This article may not be copied in whole or in part without my expressed written permission. Contact me for permission. Please respect my copyright.
The Journey toward the journey
Since 1986, which was the first year I taught the Hero’s Journey
as a foundation unit, I have tried many ways to describe the
unending, cyclical nature of the Hero’s Journey pattern.
For a long time, I used an ascending spiral, with each loop
representing a journey in life that takes us to higher and higher
levels of consciousness and understanding. Then I added another
diagram, a large journey circle, representing a person’s life, with
a number of smaller circles looping out from it at various points to
represent the many smaller journeys we take during our lives
(diagram one).
Although these images seemed to get the idea across, I was not fully
satisfied with them. For one thing, they implied a movement of
consciousness, of the "I" in which all of our thought and perception
is grounded. In reality, the "I" doesn’t move. It expands.
Then I read something that gave me a new way to look at the process.
In The Hero Within, Carol Pearson writes, ". . . it is not so much
that the spiral gets higher, but that it gets wider as we are
capable of a larger range of responses to life and, hence, able to
have more life. We take in more and hove more choices."
The Journeys in our lives do not form a big circle or an ascending
spiral. The journey taken by the "I" is a process of ever-expanding
awareness, during which we encounter challenges and temptations. We
expand our concept of self to understand and assimilate them, not so
much to confront and destroy them. This insight led to a new
diagram, which is the one I use now.
New image of the journey
When I present the Journey in seminars with other teachers or
teach it to students, I draw a single circle (see diagram two) to
represent the "I", or rather the range of experience and
understanding which we perceive as "I". Within that circle are the
experiences we’ve had, the things we’ve learned, echoes from
childhood that still color our thinking and action, and our personal
mythology (the plot of the story we are living) -- all of which
gives us the perception of who we are. If we are to grow, that
circle must remain flexible.
As long as our experiences fall within that range of perception
(letter A) -- that is, within the boundaries we have defined as "I"
-- we are relatively comfortable. The experience is familiar to us
and we can handle it. However, when an experience falls outside of
the our range of experience (letter B), it presents us with two
options: to reach out and assimilate it or to put up our defenses
and reject it.
If we ignore or reject the experience, the circle becomes not a
flexible line of definition, but a defensive wall between our self
and the world around us. Unfortunately, when we build a wall to keep
experience out, that same wall keeps us in. 
Our other option is to journey outside our self by keeping the
circle fluid (diagram three). In this way we can expand outward
(painful and frightening though this growth may be at times) until
the circle of self meets that new challenge, knows it, and
assimilates it into the self. If the journey has been complete, the
product of this expansion is not simply the original self enlarged
by the experience. It's an entirely new self, a synthesis of the
former, unfolding self and the rich experience of life.
Stagnation or expanding awareness
When I talk with students about rejecting the call to growth, I
make the circle thick, like a wall. Then I ask them what happens to
the person who hides within this ever-thickening wall. The answers
can be extremely surprising and perceptive. Students seem to
recognize that such a rejection can lead to defensiveness,
stagnation, and bitterness. Such a person becomes a victim of his
own fear, a martyr to an intractable ego.
I also emphasize how much courage it takes to keep the circle fluid,
ready to embrace and assimilate new experience. To do this we must
be willing to say that we are fallible, that we may not know
everything, that we are not perfect. We must be willing to accept
the fact that our model of the world may be flawed or ineffective.
As long as we can do these things, challenges become growth
experiences, enriching our understanding and enhancing our
abilities. The people who represent or contain the challenges become
helpers or mentors on our journey outward. When we can’t remain
fluid, the challenges become threats to the fearful self, objects to
be fought and kept out, and the people who represent those
challenges become tyrants, devils and attackers.
Circles within circles
In
the classroom, as my discussion of this concept continues, I draw
more experiences outside each circle (C and D) and enlarge the
circle to assimilate those experiences. Soon I have a diagram with
circles within circles, illustrating how we grow with experience
(diagram four). It looks very much like the rings on a tree, an
image which suggests some other interesting connotations.
This diagram also evokes the image of the chambered nautilus. The
chambered nautilus lives in a chamber in its shell until it outgrows
that chamber (much as we outgrow the "chambers" of our lives). Then
it builds a new, larger chamber, moves in, and begins to live within
that new home. This process continues throughout the nautilus' life.
What's interesting about this image is that the nautilus keeps the
old chambers. Each old chamber becomes the foundation for the newer
chambers.
In the same way, we can never "discard" our experiences in life.
They will always be with us. However, we do outgrow them and when an
experience no longer serves us, we must reframe it by changing its
meaning. The event is no longer an active agent in our interactions
with life, but becomes part of our past, a "lesson" from which we
grew, but which is still a part of us.
Incorporating the mandala
Incorporating the mandala with this "circles within circles"
image of the journey adds a valuable dimension to this concept. The
mandala is a circle which, in the personal context, represents the
world of the self. Within it are arranged the symbols and images of
the self. Symbolically, then, the journey can be seen as the mandala
growing to absorb new symbols and images. (Note: There is a unit on
creating a personal mandala in The Hero’s Journey: A Guide to
Literature and Life)
This approach also emphasizes that our experiences are always going
to be with us, working for us or against us in our growth and
understanding. What becomes important, then, is not so much the
experience, but how we relate to it, how we see it in the mandala of
self.
Connecting life and literature
I apply this expanding-self model (including the mandala) to
characters from literature and film. I have students do mandalas on
characters, incorporating symbols and images which represent
different aspects of the character’s experience, perception or life.
The mandala helps them understand and analyze the character and his
or her motivations.
Moreover, when the students place the challenges outside of the
character's mandala, they can begin to see how (or if) the character
handles these challenges and grows. They can also see how the
circles of one character interconnect with another character, much
like a Venn diagram.
This way of describing the Hero’s Journey seems to work well on a
number of levels and is a technique worth considering, even if you
don’t teach the Journey pattern as a foundation unit.