"When you try
to understand
everything, you
will understand
nothing. It is best
to understand
y ourself, and
then you will
u nderstand
everything." 

Shunryu Suzuki

---

 

The Hero's Journey
Article and Essay Workshop

The Hero's Journey and its Elements

• The Hero's Journey Archetype: The Hero's Journey archetype is the pattern of human experience. This article outlines the key stages of the journey pattern.
• Threshold Guardians: Myth and legend are replete with fearsome "guardians of the gate," but we see them in other literature, films and in our own lives.
• Illustrating the Hero's Journey pattern: An ever-expanding outward spiral is perhaps the best way to illustrate the pattern of the Hero's Journey.
• Gestalt Paradoxical Theory of Change: An essay on the Gestalt view that to change we must first become what we are; change will be the natural result of authenticity.

Hero's Journey: Classroom applications and student work

• The Journey pattern and the essay: The relationship between the Journey pattern and fiction (literature and film) is clear, but there is also a basic relationship between the Journey and the essay.
• Brain-based teaching and the Hero's Journey: The Hero's Journey approach to teaching literature conforms to the most current research in how the brain learns.
• Student writings: Two student writings, done by ninth graders under the time pressure of a test, show interesting insights into characters and relationships in the films Hook and Field of Dreams.

Hero's Journey in Literature and Film

• Themes in Jurassic Park: Mathematician Ian Malcolm's insights suggest dangers and paths to our individual hero's journey. Here are ideas for teachers on using his  insights for discussion and research.
• Themes in Fahrenheit 451: Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is known primarily for its anticensorship theme, but there are other themes which, given the direction of our current culture, are equally important to students, if they are to follow the Journeys of their lives.
• The "Bart Simpson" challenge: A standing challenge to my classes is to produce a story without elements of the Hero's Journey. Last year one student answered that challenge with the Simpsons. Here's what happened.
• Using film: Legend: Legend is an older film, but in for teaching archetypes, symbols and the Hero's Journey, it is hard to beat.
• The film Fly Away Home in the classroom: For younger students, the film Fly Away Home can be an engaging, enlightening example of the Hero's Journey pattern. 

Myth, Symbol and Metaphor

The Yin-Yang Symbol: This ancient Chinese symbol of duality and harmony intrigues students and provides an interesting approach to finding insights in literature and film.

Book and Film Reviews

Finding Flow: In our desire and hurry to prepare our students to handle the experiences they will face in life, perhaps we have forgotten a more important point: it is not the experiences we have which give quality and meaning to our lives, but how we relate to those experiences.

Will I Be the Hero of My Own Life? Will I Be the Hero of My Own Life? provides an alternative mode of seeing life and work, and gives us a refreshing, and organic, understanding of what it means to be a hero in our own lives

Callings: Greg Levoy explores how we can be called to our "true" vocations by learning to listen to our inner voice, which speaks to us through intuitions and longings, and to life's recurring and significant details, giving us clues to our authentic journey.

Everyday Zen: Joko Beck writes that life, as it is at this moment � at any moment � is all that it can be and is, therefore, "perfect." We destroy that perfection and create problems for ourselves by filtering experience through our hopes, fears, prejudices and expectations, which prevent us from living in the present moment.

Living without a Goal: Living without a Goal is based on the thesis that our mechanistic, goal-oriented paradigm for life no longer meets our needs in the evolutionary, postmodern world. James Ogilvy does not espouse total goallessness as a rule for living. We do need goals, but not the overriding, great "Goal of Life" that has been the paradigm in the past.

Essays and comments

Comment (Dec 15, 1997): There really is no "meaning" to an experience. Events just "are," and we supply their meaning from within ourselves, based on the interpretations supplied by the "myths" we have chosen to live, by the masks (or personna, as Jung would call them) we have chosen to wear. 

Comment (Jan 5, 1998): ". . . the movement of change is as much the builder as the destroyer," and so is the movement of the Hero's Journey, which is the process of change. To reject the call to growth and change is to reject all that gives life... 

Essay (Feb 23, 1998): The concept of self realization, that is of making the self real (being and acting out of who we really are), is at the core of the Hero's Journey archetype. However, to realize and express the self, one must first discover one's true self. This process is the essence of the quest. 

Comment Mar 2, 1998): ...we are indoctrinating our children into the crisis at earlier and earlier ages, and it should be little wonder to us that we see our young people turning to alcohol and drugs for escape or relief. 

Comment (Mar 16, 1998): If learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem, perhaps this is why so many of our students, who have so little self-confidence and self-esteem to begin with, rebel at learning anything. 

Comment (June 1, 1998): Synchronistic events are often a part of the Journey. They take the shape of an unsettling combination of coincidences which generate the Call. They are the helpers who show up at just the right time with just the right aid. They are the ironies in our lives, those strange justapositions which give us sudden, often painful, insight into our condition and ourselves. 

Essay (June 15, 1998): ...when something goes wrong, when the scope of our world view or values is not large enough to incorporate an experience..., we are called to enlarge our world view and re-examine our values. This is the call to the adventure of redefining our self or expanding our understanding to incorporate a new experience. 

Comment (Aug 10, 1998): It is only against the ground (background) of the villian that we can see the qualities of the hero. The figure of Hamlet becomes who he is because he is contrasted with Claudius, Laertes, Gertrude and Horatio. Figure and ground are inseparable. One gives life to and defines the other. 

Comment (Aug 17, 1998): ...our journeys, as individual as they may seem, are really just one activity of the whole system of life. This would also support the concept of synchronistic help coming to those who have accepted the call and stepped over the threshold.

Comment (Sept 28, 1998):This could be one source of the "Call" in the Hero's Journey. Leaving things "unfinished" creates tension, and when the tension becomes strong enough, we are "called" to do something about it... 

Comment (Nov 23, 1998): Our problems in school are not going to be solved with more information. Information is readily available. We need to help students develop the skills to digest the information and turn it into knowledge. Computers will not do this. 

Comments (Dec 7, 1998): The student must get beyond abstracting the material, putting it "out there," and involve himself or herself in the experience of the reading or viewing. Engagement must precede creativity. 

Essay/Comment (Dec 14, 1998): This sounds like a description of much of our school system: so bogged down in ideas and techniques, plans and outcomes, assessment and evaluation that it no longer addresses the reality of experience -- and many of our students know this. 

Essay/Comment (Dec 21, 1998): When we seek to control a system (a process, our environment, and even our lives and future), we fix in our mind a vision of an "end." By fixing on that vision, we upset the natural flow of the journey, and (because of the narrowed focus) we block our awareness of options which might be better suited to our needs and growth. 

Essay/Comment (January 18, 1999): The call to adventure comes when the discrepancy between reality and our perceived reality (colored and distorted by our own projections) becomes intolerable. Jung likens the veil of illusions spun by our projections to a cocoon. 

Comment (April 5, 1999): Mentors must remain detatched in the sense that they must provide support and understanding without attaching themselves to the results. They must remember that the Journey must be taken by the initiate, not the mentor. 

Comment (May 24, 1999): One of the great goals of the Journey is to learn to trust: to trust the universe, to trust the flow of life, to trust in the natural balance and harmony of existence. Ultimately, journeys seem to lead us away from the obsession with planning and control, with a fixation on the future, with desires and preconceptions.

Essay/Comment (June 28, 1999): The Shadow, which is created in our youth, is constituted of those energies, drives, desires and emotions which, when expressed, bring us pain, embarrassment or disapproval. The Shadow often manifests itself in literature and is often the source of "calls" to the journeys of our lives.
Essay/Comment (August 9, 1999): Karmic action is action done with a motive. The motive separates the "dooer" from the "deed" and ties the ego to a desire. One of the most important lessons of the Hero's Journey is that during the journey, in the Abyss, our Ego must die. We must surrender ourselves completely to the journey. We cease to become someone "taking" the journey; we become the journey and the journey becomes us.

Essay/Comment (August 23, 1999): As the windows to the subconsious, symbols, metaphor, and myths are sacred. They connect us to the deeper emotions and meanings in our lives. We repond to them at the deepest level of our awareness. They activate archetypes, emotions, instincts and longings that are the foundation of our being.

Brief comment (September 27, 1999): And this is the ultimate quest of the Journey, I believe, to widen our circle of awareness and compassion to the point were we are "at-one-ment" with the world, there is no "known" to journey from nor "unknown" to journey into. (full comment)

Comment (October 4, 1999): When we educate our children in using computers, in gathering information, and we do not educate them in a mythos or (perhaps) a common set of values, our children have no basis for evaluating the information they receive. With no basis for evaluation, they have no basis for determining what is substance and what if fluff, what is genuine and what is smoke, what is valuable and what should be discarded.

Comment (October 18, 1999): Individuation might be the ultimate goal of the psychological journey. It is a most difficult journey, full of dangers to our fragile and unprotected egos, but is one that we must undertake if we are to discover and manifest that unique character that is us.

Comment (February 14, 2000): Could chaos be the foundation of the Heroic Journey? It is when we become most settled and our lives are most predictable that the Journey calls. The element of chaos, symbolized by the mythological Trickster, enters our lives to break the bounds of "normalcy" to once again show us that more is possible.

Comments (March 27, 2000): Jean Piaget's concept of cognitive equilibrium closely parallels the fundamental processes in the Heroic Journey pattern. In fact, when I describe the Journey process at seminars for teachers, I often use the words "equilibrium" and "harmony" to describe the Return.

Essay/Comment (September 18, 2000): It seems to me that what Dr. Thom Williams describes in treating PTSD parallels, in many ways, the pattern of the Journey. As he wrote, "the healing process involves thawing [the memories of the trauma] and looking at them realistically." His goal is to look at the original trauma in a different light, which could mean helping the client build a new "myth," a new story about the trauma which allows him or her go to on with life.

Comment (October 2, 2000): In the Hero's Journey, Trickster is the ever-present element of uncertainty and chaos. He is often the initiator of the call to adventure. Sometimes he guards the threshold and sometimes, if our life has stagnated because of micro-management or the entrenchment of security, he may even be our mentor.

Comment (October 16, 2000): To assume that each of our students will assimilate experience and knowledge at the same rate is not only foolish, but disrespectful of the student and their needs. Standards and standardized tests reduce the process of human growth to a series of predictable, controllable "shoulds," which ignores the reality of the human experience and the individual Heroic Journey.

Brief Comment (November 6, 2000): It is one aspect of our life's journey to acknowledge and reassimilate the energies of the dark side into our personality, where they can provide the passion and drive to fuel our creativity and exploration. (full comment)

Comment (November 13, 2000): Viewing our lives as a constant reauthoring of our own personal narrative also fits the hero's journey model for human growth. We live comfortably in our current narrative (known world) until something happens (internally or externally) which tells us that our current narrative no longer fits our lived experience. 

Comment (December 11, 2000): Standardized tests are a means of serveillance, and the more teachers keep them in mind while they are planning and teaching, the more they internalize the power of the system and become their own intellectual "prison guards." 

Essay (January 15, 2001): In our culture, and especially in our schools, we focus too much on the outcome and not enough on the process, the being and becoming. This is backward thinking. It is like focusing on the apples without paying attention to the tree. 

Essay (February 19, 2001): How do you measure insight, growth and understanding objectively? How can one turn the process of living and being into objects which a test can measure? We can't, and if there is one indictment of the high-stakes testing which is sweeping the country in the name of "accountability", it is that they are dangerous. They will shape our teaching. They will shape our children's understanding.

Comment (March 12, 2001): Existentially, there is no universe but the subjective universe, the universe as we experience it in our minds through the vehicle of our senses. To exist as "I", a being separate from other beings, we must exist actively as an object against a ground of everything that is "not I." To lock ourselves in ourselves, in our own subjectivity, is to remove our relationship with the ground of our existence (not-I).

Comment (April 16, 2001): We complain that many students are unmotivated or undisciplined or undirected. Perhaps this is because we impose too much structure and too many rigid standards. Perhaps e need to allow for a bit of chaos, a bit of unstructured time to move our students into creativity rather than compliance.

Comment (April 30, 2001): For a philosophy to be of any real value, especially in terms of taking our journeys in life, it must affect us inside. It must change our way of understanding ourselves and our world at the most fundamental level. 

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