I recently saw a documentary of Joseph Campbell’s work called Finding Joe which inspired me to pass my learning along!

Joseph Campbell was a writer, teacher, mythology scholar, and story teller. His favorite mythology was Native American, which he fell in love with as a kid. It became his passion. He was also a philosopher who studied the human experience. He coined the phrase “Follow your bliss.”

He studied and analyzed all the stories, movies, myths, literature, religion, novels and romances of our time. When he dissected them all, he discovered how these stories were a reflection of human experience. He began to realize that of all the stories, there was one that all humans can relate to no matter where they came from. He called it “The Hero’s Journey”.

The whole idea of a hero’s journey is that it is a metaphor for life experience. Life is a hero’s journey. There are clear patterns in life to guide us such as birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood and death. As an adult, we go through adventures. We struggle with inner conflicts, and finally we become a hero when we succeed in uncovering all the demons. Then we step over thresholds. We finally arrive.

If we look at the greatest pieces of literature, we see how they all have the hero’s journey. For example, Star Wars, The Matrix, Harry Potter, The Wizard of Oz.

Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz starts in her natural environment. Like in all of our regular lives, she was living in a house in her hometown. Then something happens to shake her world up (a tornado) and she goes on a journey in which she has to face certain tests and challenges.

Dorothy had to confront her inner barriers. It was not just with the wicked witch. She had to learn how to deal with her own inner resources. She clicked her heels together, which was her ability to get back home, which she didn’t realize until after she went through all of her challenges. The journey was a test to discovering her self.

Story telling is typically about people learning something. You go to an unknown place, which is dark and mysterious. You are faced with challenges and are tested. Through the completion of the test, you uncover a quality, a hidden strength, and a resource. You move to a different unknown place that feels like a crisis point where afterwards you become restored or redeemed, made better through that trial. Campbell calls these stories “heroic”.

As Campbell said, mythology and stories are a metaphor for life’s experience. He thought of myths as a narrative of the psyche, what Jung called the Self. Metaphor is used to create a transformative experiential process.

The Journey of Now

If this path of the Hero’s journey is simple in design why is it that people aren’t living it?

Society guides us towards a weird sense of what’s real in our lives. What we should and should not do. It usually starts out with you shouldn’t talk to this person from a different tribe. You shouldn’t marry that person. You should go to this school, buy a car, house, have kids. Should, should, should.

The reason we listen so much to society, our parents, our friends or our boss is that we have lost contact with our own embodied experience which includes the mythical domain. It’s in everyone, their experience of passion, unique skills, unique ways of expressing themselves.

“For me, mythology is a function of biology…a product of the soma’s imagination. What do our bodies say? And what are our bodies telling us? The human imagination is grounded in the energies of the body. And the organs of the body are the determinants of these energies and the conflicts between the impulse systems of the organs and the harmonization of them. These are the matters of myth.”
Joseph Campbell

Stanley Keleman, a pioneer in psychology is someone who worked closely with Joseph Campbell. In his book Myth as Body he says:

“The source of myth and body knowledge is in ourselves. It is intensified by somatic (body) interactions and conversations. If somatic experience and language are separate, we try to make sense out of our life experience by means of symbols. But when we reflect on our experience, we find that the symbols don’t quite make sense. We have to re-experience the somatic aspects of our own body’s symbol making.

When I turned 21 years old, I realized I was bored in my life. I felt stuck, depressed. I felt the need to take an adventure and travel to the Middle East. I was fascinated with the place. It felt like a dream come true. I went there and eventually found myself in a critical moment. I almost drowned when snorkeling in the Red Sea. Afterwards, when I was lying there on the beach, I made a vow to change my life. I wanted to live my life more fully and consciously. When I arrived back home, I immediately enrolled in college full time and started a new career for myself.

Then it happened again at 28 years old. I found myself in a relationship I didn’t want to be in, a job I hated while living in a boring suburb of Philadelphia. I felt stuck again, depressed. Given my past experience, I knew I had to take a risk. I had to move into the unknown, the forest as Campbell would say.

I eventually found the energy to break up with my boyfriend, quit my job and move into the city. Soon thereafter, a door opened for me to start a new career in management consulting. I felt like this was the beginning of a more meaningful career.

After another seven years or so, I felt depressed again. I wasn’t fully happy with my job. My feeling of being stuck and depressed was calling me again to take the biggest risk in my life so far. I felt I needed to quit my comfortable, high paying consulting job and start a whole new career as a psychotherapist. As much as my husband was encouraging me, I still felt scared! My life was secure. Wasn’t leaving that security against everything I was taught growing up?

Now I feel like I’m living a life that feels like my bliss, my purpose, my passion! I developed the courage to take the leap. Going into the unknown, the unfamiliar, leaving what felt comfortable. After a while I began to recognize that if I wasn’t challenging or growing myself in some way, I would eventually feel stuck and depressed.

Keleman says:

“Myth is about the body’s journey, recreating itself endlessly in a particular way, to form an individual personal structure called self.”

When we recognize that we’re on the hero’s journey, we wake up to the fact that we are responsible for our own experience in life. What is it to be response-able? It’s the ability to respond. How do we develop the ability to respond? By experiencing our bodies not just our minds or the symbols that they create. We need to stop listening only to stories, other people’s stories or society’s stories of what we should or should not do. Everything is already there inside our bodily experience. The problem is we’ve learned to separate what we think from how we feel.

“We live in two realms. One of direct experience and the other of representational images. Being able to live in both realms and dialogue between them is the very nature of somatic experience. What has happened is we have mistaken one realm for the other. The image has become our direct experience.”
Stanley Keleman

Following your bliss is listening to your body, experiencing your body which includes image or thought and following what feels passionate, following what feels true to you. It’s not ecstasy or happiness. It’s your authentic journey.

Trusting ourselves is learning to trust and to feel that deep impulse of aliveness that can only be experienced through our bodies. Let’s not mistake image or thought for experience. The reason we keep needing more and more stimulus in our lives is because we’ve cut ourselves off from our bodily experience and mistaken only our thoughts and other people’s thoughts for reality. What makes us feel most alive? That’s the path’s key, the Grail, that’s the essence of the hero’s journey.

When I was 18 years old, I went to my dad because I felt confused about what I wanted to do in my life. My dad said, “You should do business.” So I did just that and soon found that marketing didn’t make me feel most alive! The lesson here is not to ask your father this question. The question needs to be asked of you. Joseph Campbell always gave the same advice to his students graduating Sarah Lawrence. Don’t do what daddy says. He has one thing in mind for you which is your security.

Your body remembers every experience you had from childhood to adulthood. What did you like to do as a child? How did you feel when you were doing those activities? Try activities now that you always wanted to do and reflect on your bodily experience when doing them. What would you do if you had no concern about time or money? Write things down. Maybe words don’t work, so collect some images that you are drawn to, or listen to music that inspires you and see what moves you inside. Just because you don’t know what the call of your life is right now doesn’t mean you won’t find it. The very fact that you’re looking for your bliss means that you’re in the process of discovering it.

Finding Purpose in Life

One of Joseph Campbell’s beloved quotes about bliss: “When you follow your bliss, the universe will open doors where there were only walls.” A lot of people feel an experience like this. It happens when you least expect it. It’s like you’re hitting your head against a wall and then when you shift just a tad, low and behold there’s a passage that opens up. When you truly step forth and take a risk in following your bliss, unseen forces seem to reward you for taking that leap of faith.

For me when I finally decided to quit my high paying job, I went into the unknown. I didn’t know what would happen next. Soon enough an opportunity came my way for me to counsel teenagers. At the same time an office opened up for me to use and soon after I got into graduate school.

Keep doing what you love at least part of the time and eventually a door opens up. It’s not about luck. My friend’s brother, Kevin Smith, went to film school but decided he didn’t want to be in school. He wanted to make movies. So he quit film school and made a move called Clerks. He did it on a very low budget which he used credit cards to fund. When he completed it, he was soon recognized by the New York Film festival and then was invited to bring Clerks to the Sundance Film Festival where it was immediately bought by Miramax. Now he is a famous Director.

We are each our greatest inhibitors. When we pay attention to what is happening internally, we begin to realize that we are actually holding ourselves back by our own fear. Our own demons. Eventually we may end up depressed or stuck. Feeling fear or depressed or stuck is a good thing! Rather than running away from our fear, let it be a guide for us. Fear is natural and rather then wait for it to go away, we need to learn to face it! How do we face it? By learning what the sensations are and how to manage them. This can only happen through trial and error or through the help of someone who has traversed a similar path before you! Rather than treating the symptoms of your depression, notice how you are feeling stuck and try listening to it and hearing what the feeling might be saying! This is key here. We have put so much value on our thoughts but our bodies have wisdom. Listen to the wisdom of your embodied experience no matter how numb or confused you may feel. Let your body guide you into discovering your authentic journey.

Begin it now!

Endings Create New Beginnings, by Kirk Larsen

Somatic Psychotherapy is also referred to as Body Psychotherapy. It is an interdisciplinary field of therapeutic approaches to the body, experience and the embodied self. The word somatic comes from the Greek somat meaning body. The word psychology comes from the Ancient Greek psyche meaning breath, soul, mind. The psyche lives in the whole body, not just our heads.

Somatic Psychotherapy is very different from conventional forms of “body-work” in that it is clearly psychotherapeutically based. It is psychotherapy that involves the potential for working not only verbally but also bodily.

The Somatic Psychotherapeutic approach looks at the role of the body in the development and expression of psyche. In addition to tracking and trying to understand clients’ verbally related stories, histories and difficulties, Somatic psychotherapists are attuned to their bodily enactments of feeling and meaning.

Thinking is not an abstract function. It includes physical expression and action. The brain is continually receiving information throughout all the senses of the body. Emotion, behavior, sensation, impulse, energy, action, gesture, meaning and language all originate in body experience. Therefore, it is necessary to incorporate the body within the psychotherapeutic process. Somatic Psychotherapy pays attention to all of these different levels of human experience as they emerge within the therapeutic relationship.

Understanding “why” we have certain issues or problems is important but that alone is not what creates change. Somatic Psychotherapy focuses on how these issues or problems are occurring within our embodied experience so we can learn “how” to replace the unwanted patterns with empowering embodied experiences that lead to new and more desired actions and behavior.

Somatic Psychotherapy is a good choice for problems that have not responded to talk therapy alone since the root of our experiences is deeply stored in the body.

At any point in time, the mind/body interconnection can create joy through muscle expansion or fear through muscle contraction. If we don’t like the feelings and sensations we create like stress, then we may tend to distract ourselves or protect ourselves from them. This may manifest in the form of tightening our chest, shoulders or holding our breath. It can also lead to negative behaviors like alcohol/substance abuse, anger outbursts, depression, and anxiety.

Over time, working inside the mind/body interconnection can lead to sustainable increases in wellbeing and aliveness. The reason it’s sustainable is because we are actually learning what we are doing in a situation, not just what we are thinking, feeling or experiencing. With that learning we have the opportunity to practice new actions which lead to new and exciting experiences in life.

The Golden Path by *latoday

I worked in management consulting for over 7 years. The firm I worked for was committed to changing how people perform at work. They helped people to think differently, which would lead to new actions. I thought this approach was very useful, and that it was going to change the world. But eventually I felt disappointed. Something seemed to be missing in the methodology. How was the ability to think new possibilities not sustainable over time? How was it easy to revert back to the past way of thinking and behaving? These questions led me to discover a whole new direction in my life.

After one year with the firm, I got married and moved across the country away from my friends and family. I soon realized I needed help. This major transition in my life was causing me to experience depression and anxiety more than any other time in my life. My massage therapist recommended that I work with a body-centered psychotherapist. I didn’t know what that meant exactly, but I trusted her and got myself into therapy over 13 years ago.

One day my therapist asked me to close my eyes and explore how I experienced myself physically as I was sharing my concerns. It was the kind of question I needed to slow down my thoughts enough to answer. I soon discovered that I felt tightness in my chest. I was asked to deepen into that feeling of tightness while also exploring any texture, color, or emotion. Eventually an image of wood appeared. I didn’t expect that image to appear. The wood was thick and it stood directly in front of my heart. My therapist asked me how I felt having the wood there. I replied, “I felt numb. Yes, it felt familiar”. She asked me to stay with the familiar feeling of numbness and then suddenly the image of wood transformed into the memory of my bedroom door when I was a child. I remembered using that door to lock my brother and sister out when we got into fights.

There's a rusty lock that's hidden, In a peeling, old oak door –

I realized how I used this door to protect me. It wasn’t just to lock me into my room where I felt safe. This door lived inside me, allowing me to deaden my sensitivity to feeling, forcing me more into my thoughts. My therapist pointed out how my face looked numb too. I could then see how I showed little affect or expression which allowed me to keep others from being able to see my vulnerability. I hadn’t realized I was doing this on purpose. Between my face and my heart, I felt like a knight covered in protective armor.

Soon I came to feel that I wanted my playfulness and joy back! How do I open this door now? Where is the key? These questions led me to study somatic psychology. I learned how the key was right there inside how I experienced my physical body. I just needed to access the door I formed with my tightened chest muscles. By using voluntary muscular effort (Keleman), I exaggerated the tightness and then I learned to let the tightness go. I learned to release it slowly until my muscles softened and I felt them release. I then was able to feel my pain and grieve my loss without it overwhelming me. I was in control of how I used my self and more able to regulate my emotions. Soon enough, I began feeling joyful again and eventually a deeper longing appeared, a connection to my passion. This experience furthered me on my path.

Somatic Psychology addresses the mind, body and spirit as a whole. No wonder changing only how I think doesn’t last. Lasting change happens at the level of the whole person.

My door is useful sometimes, but most of the time it gets in the way of feeling and sensing into what I need, love, and strongly desire ~ the sense of feeling alive! Aliveness is a whole array of experiences. Feeling the depth and breadth of my experience ~ my aliveness ~ fuels my actions, creating a life that is full of passion – a journey in discovering my whole self.

I want the same for you.

The Legend Lives in Her Heart by Shiloh Sophia McCloud

This video is about how life is a gift. Nature is beautiful. We are alive. We are nature. Life is beautiful. We just need to learn “how” to be more present and embodied so we can experience life fully and appreciate each day we have to live.