Preparing For Your Hero’s Journey
Summer 2015
“In between living and dreaming there is a third thing: Waking Up.”
By Michael G. Mervosh, M.Ed.
Executive Director
Hero’s Journey Foundation
Becoming More Awake, Aware, Enlivened & Engaged
PREPARING FOR YOUR HERO'S JOURNEY INTENSIVE
“A vital person vitalizes the world.”
- Joseph Campbell
“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly,
but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”
― Maya Angelou
The Hero’s Journey Intensive is inspired by our passion for ancient wisdom traditions as well as the mythic teachings of Joseph Campbell. Our wilderness journey intensives can provide you with a deeply personal and meaningful experience of a passage rite that may not be like anything you have ever encountered. We follow a transformational paradigm that we believe has guided the evolution of consciousness within all human cultures and traditions since the beginning of our awakening as a species on this planet.
Table of Contents
Introduction 2
The Call to Adventure 3
Crossing the Threshold 5
THE SIX QUESTIONS 7
Entering the Forest 8
Allies and Synchronicity 10
The Belly of the Beast 11
Discovery of Your Boon 14
The Return Home 16
BODY & MIND PREPARATIONS 17
PHYSICAL ACTIVITY 17
READING 18
Introduction
You may have already become aware that a journeying process has begun for you. It has started with your heeding of an inner call or pull towards to a greater and more meaningful life. On the deepest level, this is ultimately what has you enrolled for this summer’s journey. It will require you to take leave of your home life, and to wholeheartedly let go of what is familiar and known. You will cross a threshold into mystery, and courageously enter a new terrain - one that carries an unknown potential lying in wait within you.
You will inevitably encounter adventures and ordeals in the days ahead, as you face your inner guardians and your inner daemons. You will have meaningful encounters with allies, and you will discover untapped inner resources precisely when you most need support and encouragement.
You will be surprised by life-renewing adventures that are likely to go beyond your personality’s capacity to imagine right now. If you are courageous enough, you will experience a felt sense of soul coming alive within you, along with an abiding flow of love and power capable of bringing new life and new action into fruition.
Finally, will return home to with the challenge of bringing forth your inner gifts and awakenings to your home life and your people. In this way, your Summer Journey Intensive promises to be a remarkable, inevitable and unforgettable passage.
The Call to Adventure
One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice…
- Mary Oliver
Joseph Campbell said that those of us living in modern times have both the freedom and the obligation of finding out what our destiny is. What do we do if we want to find out what the deeper meaning and purpose for our life is, while we are in the midst of living in our day-to-day worlds? What seems to stop us?
Have we become over-attached to the security of what is familiar, and how we are presently provided for? Have we become afraid to go out beyond what we have already learned or accomplished? Perhaps we are afraid to face what we have failed at over and over again in our past? What is it that keeps us from going into deep into the unknowing-ness of our inner world?
In today’s overwhelming pace of daily life, we may not ever have to really go for the true adventure of our lives. We may have not yet really listened for and answered a deep call to new life that comes from within us.
An authentic inner call is a kind of summoning that takes us out beyond the world we have always known, to begin the search for our own resources with the depths of ourselves. It makes us want to do the inner exploration necessary to find what we have within us, and finally, to want to make use of these resources to be of service to life.
In his book Pathways to Bliss, Campbell poses questions such as this: “What is the great thing for which you would sacrifice your life? What makes you do what you do? What is the call of your life to you – do you know it?”
How can you align more with a conscious beginning of your own authentic journey? What will make you ready to answer your personal call to adventure? How can you learn the difference between your fantasies and childlike wishes, and a voice or a felt sense from within that awakens you to action?
Bill Plotkin has this to say about discerning an authentic inner call to adventure:
1. It is not an avoidance of responsibility, but rather a facing of something difficult, something unknown and frightening that summons you.
Far from feeling to you like an opportunity for escape, a call feels more like a compelling need to face an important challenge, to walk out into the night and toward a storm. You have a profound sense that something essential is waiting for you in the midst of a wilderness and your one true life depends on your being willing and able to find it.
2. It has paradoxical features – like déjà vu, where you know you belong to it, even though you have never before encountered it and can’t really explain it.
Joseph Campbell said the call feels “profoundly familiar to the unconscious – though unknown, surprising, and even frightening to the conscious personality”.
3. You have the feeling that the chapter of your life that you had just been living is suddenly, somehow over, whether you wanted it to be or not, and usually, not. What was formerly meaningful becomes ‘strangely emptied of value’.
4. The call is almost always unexpected, and sometimes even unwanted.
Regardless, you feel summoned by destiny, as if your own future has grabbed you by the collar and is tugging you forward. You feel summoned forth, pulled forward, in ways that feel un-asked for but compelling. It doesn’t make sense to the ego, which may resist mightily, but to the soul there is a strong feeling of ‘yes’!
Crossing the Threshold
Gamble everything for love,
if you’re a true human being.
If not, leave this gathering.
Half-heartedness doesn’t reach into majesty.
-Rumi
Meaningful adventure cannot be taken up and engaged through one’s head. Those who try to approach a journey worthy of the soul with mental reasoning fail miserably, and quickly. The gamble Rumi speaks of is really no gamble at all, but it does involve a sense of risking something worthwhile, and investing wholeheartedly in what matters most.
In the end, seeking security becomes the final danger that lulls us back to the familiar things that don’t really work.
Security seeking is on the low end of the evolutionary scale; it is often the contrary counter-force to a heroic endeavor. It goes without saying that there are definite places to play it safe in life, and there are times for being perfectly reasonable. But this will not be a high commodity in the mythic realm of a re-vitalizing adventure.
The toll to be paid to the soul’s gatekeeper as you cross the threshold towards a meaningful adventure is a wholehearted, fiercely loving presence. Those without it tend to turn back in the face of a threat that risks security, or in the heat of intensity, or when it’s time to go into the depths of the deep unknown.
Inner threshold guardians say to us things like – “ if you want to find your inner treasures, get behind your heart, get real, be a vital human being, and do it now. Live from your own direct experience and truth - or go back from where you came, go back home to the safe and familiar ways of being and thinking”.
When you are caught up in mental abstractions, conceptualizations or gymnastics, you can’t pass through to the depth of your own soul. You are simply someone confusing the menu with the meal.
Crossing the First Threshold on the Mountain
In this high place
It is as simple as this,
Leave everything you know behind.
Step toward the cold surface,
Say the old prayer of rough love
And open both arms.
- David Whyte
On your Hero’s Journey Intensive, you will be asked to leave behind the person you already know well. We will ask you to let go of certain details about your personal history that could limit you - what we refer to as "credit card information" - upon your arrival on the mountaintop.
You will be asked to refrain from immediately revealing your age, your occupation, your home place, or other usual identifying information that labels you in any way to yourself or to another. You will be asked to leave your time pieces behind, as they will only distract you from a larger dimension of time and space that your will be entering. You can even let go of your common name, and instead go by whatever name you choose.
Your guides and facilitators will focus on being attentive only to the moment that unfolds before you, and between you and the others. They will do their best to help you leave everything else behind.
What will be required of you in the West Virginia mountain forests will be to enter into the spirit of the unknown - living beyond the usual, to permeate the Great Mystery of life - and surrender to the potent uncertainty that is to be found there.
This will be the first of many symbolic letting go processes required of the hero. You will begin to feel how tight your stranglehold may be on controlling your environment, in order to feel comfortable and "secure".
Yet when you have a clear awareness that you are literally stepping “off the paved road” and going where there is no clear path, a certain sense of "immediacy" begins to enter your present moment existence – and this will bring you very much alive. You may not be comfortable with this depth of aliveness, but you won’t want to live without it, either. Without crossing this threshold into the unknown, without this relaxing of our ego state of mind so the soul’s presence can slip forth, we tend to live "lives of quiet desperation", says Thoreau.
We tend to live our lives in paths that are so well established that our senses are no longer stimulated or awakened. Crossing the threshold from our everyday world into the non-ordinary time and space of the Hero's Journey Intensive is to enter the arena of uncertainty that comes with any true adventure.
On your journey, you will learn to tolerate uncertainty, and see it as a necessary trade off for gaining self-confidence and embodied vitality. By learning to take worthwhile risks, you will find new ways of being that are far more life giving and sustaining than doing what you already know. You will have many opportunities for a direct and authentic connection to both the deep feminine and deep masculine aspects of your nature, as well as experiencing the bliss of these polarities coming together and working together in harmony within the self, all while traveling along an unknown path.
New life is an inevitable outcome from such courageous acts of surrender. Don Juan said it well to Carlos Castaneda: "The path of the heart requires a full gesture, a degree of abandon that can be terrifying. (But) only then is it possible to achieve a sparkling metamorphosis... and there is just one simple thing wrong with you - you think you have plenty of time."
In order to prepare you for your deep immersion into your weeklong wilderness journey, we ask you now to reflect on six questions. A good question is meant to take you on a ‘quest’ into yourself, and so they are not likely to have an immediate or ready answer. Spend some time thinking and wondering about them, let yourself begin with not knowing for certain, listen to your heart and not your head, and then put together at least two type-written pages summarizing your reflections.
Your authentic response to each of the The Six Questions is to be emailed to us within the two-week period prior to your Journey Intensive. The effort you put into each response will help us to connect with you more quickly and more effectively.
Remember to use each question as an arrow that points the way to some of the more obscure truths that lie within the depths of your heart. You may also want to write more about these in the Personal Journal we are asking you to keep, and bring with you to the Journey Intensive. Again, bring your wholeheartedness to these questions by giving them adequate, attention and careful thought.
The Six Questions
What Calls Me To This Particular Journey At This Exact Time In My Life?
What events of significance are presently taking place in your life? What kinds of transitions are you facing right now? What are you hearing within, that tells you that you need to take this type of Journey? What is it that feels right about doing this now?
What Is It Within Me That I am Journeying For?
What are you seeking to discover about yourself or within yourself? Is there a particular issue or challenge that you need to face? Does something specific in you need to heal, change or develop? If so, what is it? What place within you do you want to know better, or need to connect with more fully? Is there a particular kind of passage that you feel you need? How would you name this path you are now stepping on?
What Is the Greatest Obstacle Or Threat That I Am Currently Facing In My Life?