My "Hero's Journey" is not Campbell's
There was a panel at Norwescon on the Hero's Journey. Fun panel. One person in the audience asked about the "Heroine's Journey", the book by one of Joseph Campbell's students, Maureen Murdock. She felt that Campbell had ignored women's specific spiritual journey. And the lady (I believe) who ask about it felt I was being dismissive in not speaking about it, or reading the book. My reaction was simple: I'd watched an interview with her, and seen descriptions of the pattern she proposed.
The trick is that I didn't just dive into Campbell's pattern either. It seemed to me that he was accurate in evaluating a vast number of popular myths, and HAD looked at them from around the world (while specializing in European forms) and probably more of them WERE dealing with male protagonists and were told by male bards and griots.
I went in a slightly different direction: I asked myself about the relationship between mythology as Campbell had described it, and the universal experience of human life. This lead to the pattern I've studied, taught, and applied for thirty years:
Character confronted with a challenge
Initially they reject the challenge (fear)
Accept the challenge
Road of Trials
Gaining allies and powers
Confront evil-fail
Dark Night of the Soul
Leap of Faith
Confront evil--win
Student becomes the teacher
I've said countless times that these are like the 88 keys of a piano: you don't play them in order, or at the same intensity, or with the same rhythm, or without combining in different patterns.
That if you tell a story in this order, the human mind will recognize this as "story" but will probably regard it as a TRIVIAL AND CLICHÉD story. In fact, we have heard it so many times that fine storytellers specifically revel in knowing WHAT YOU EXPECT to happen next, and flipping the switch. Experienced audiences enjoy minimalistic stories, stories that have only PART of the pattern, knowing the mind will fill in the gaps. If the full pattern is seen as a 360 circle, a short story might be just a few degrees of arc.
Other stories are like kaleidoscopes, literally deconstructing the classic structure. But if you cannot sense something real behind the apparent chaos, the audience won't buy in.
I would defy anyone to mention a story that has survived at any level, where I can't find elements of this pattern, and see how it works.
So the "Heroine's Journey" is an answer to Campbell's archetype, but mine is simply a way of trying to understand how ALL stories work, not just those classic myths of dragons and descents into abysses. To the degree that this is valid, my conclusion was that story works because it reflects life itself, that you cannot find any task or challenge in life that can't be mapped on this pattern. IF that is true, then story might be seen as the Elders of the village telling the youngsters "this is what life will be."
The entire discipline of Lifewriting, my very first success program, arose from this. Basically, you map your task on that pattern, and simply understand that you have to recognize the need for action, deal with the fear, commit, chop wood carry water, gain new associations, mentors, and talents, deal with inevitable failure, find a way to pick yourself back up, and that if you keep going you have optimized your chances of success. IF you succeed, you then move on to new challenges, and if you are kind, you teach those coming up behind you.
That's it. To the degree that this is valid (and I would welcome any challenge to apply it to a specific issue, or a specific story), then a beautiful aspect is that it allows you to PREDICT what resources you will need BEFORE YOU NEED THEM.
Once I created this, I tested it with thousands of students, and applied it to thousands of films and stories. Not only did it apply to the structure of a story, ANY story (even if they were minimalistic or experimental) but to the process of WRITING a story, and to life itself.
Yes, I have to be a little flexible to fit everything into such a pattern, but that's hardly surprising. The lovely thing is that if you are a writer, applying the same skills to life that you use in writing is a pretty amazing connection. And if you AREN'T a writer, you've still seen and consumed countless stories, so that your unconscious mind already is a GENIUS at this stuff. Just bring it up to consciousness, apply it to about ten movies you love, and then to about ten things you've accomplished (or failed at!) in life, and you've made the connection.
Once this happened, I started looking at the vast number of "success formulas" as different ways of looking at this, or different resources to use along the journey. But the core Hero's Journey was the beginning point.
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FIREDANCE is a physical representation of a journey. KinShan, a dear friend and fellow martial artist I saw at Norwescon, commented that martial arts "kata" are stories. Excellent. The Tai Chi form is definitely that. And your life is a story, so the form is a metaphor for your entire life. ANYTHING can be used as a metaphor for human life: gardening, war, dance, politics, physics…anything. They are all valid, IF THEY WORK FOR YOU.
The 108 movements contain retreat, advance, engagement, disengagement, focus, flow, war and peace. Everything. And while the Hero's Journey (and the Yogic Chakras) are the foundation, FIREDANCE is the flowering, a daily practice ANYONE can use to see, in microcosm, what life is. Show me your daily ritual of writing a page a day, and I can accurately predict it will take you about a year to write that book. And I don't know about you, but I don't want to look up once a year on New Year's Day and realize "hey…I didn't get much done." I want to know TONIGHT if I need to make an adjustment tomorrow.
Everything I teach: MAGIC, the Soulmate Process, the Blessing Dance, FEAR…all of them are perspectives on this process that the Elders of the world have begged us to pay attention to. If you didn't know about the HJ and just did Firedance, you would still make wonderful progress. But I believe that understanding is useful--as long as you remember ACTION is primary.
Whew. I woke up this morning feeling that I wanted to focus on the HJ this week, and this Saturday in FIREDANCE. We'd be happy for you to join us. If you are not yet on my mailing list, join at: www.stevenbarneslist.com
And if you are ready for the actual program, just sign up at www.firedancetaichi.com
Be the Hero…or Heroine…in the adventure of your lifetime.
Namaste
Steve
