“What I think is a good life is one hero journey after another.Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are

called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare?And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also,

and the fulfillment or the fiasco.

There’s always the possibility of a fiasco.But there’s also the possibility of bliss.”

- Joseph Campbell

Michael Mervosh is a psychologist in private practice, and also the founder and Executive Director of the Hero’s Journey Foundation. The Hero’s Journey Foundation offers an array of transformational personal development experiences (retreats, web courses, weeklong intensives, weekend immersions), using as its foundation the mythic concept of the “Hero’s Journey” as described by the American thinker and writer Joseph Campbell. This phone interview took place on January 31, 2014. Some portions of this interview have been edited".

Chris: Why did you start the Hero’s Journey Foundation? What work are you doing now and how is that work evolving?

Michael:  The origins of my work with the original version of the Hero’s Journey Foundation began back in the mid-1990s.  I really wanted to create a comprehensive structure to bring together nature-based settings and challenge-based ropes course elements with in-depth personal development work, because much of my work as a psychotherapist up to that point took place inside of four walls. This is an operational presumption that I don’t think we question very much as psychotherapists. I began to find our typical professional office building space limiting for conducting certain kinds of depth work. Sometimes it can be too confining for deeper forms of self-exploration, and especially when it comes to self-expression. 

Psychotherapy is work I deeply believe in; I remain very dedicated to providing this service. It has sound methodologies and a deliverable format that allows people to deepen, heal or grow, but this traditional setting has certain limitations to what it can bring forth for the range of human experiences.

I have always had a love of nature, and when I initially began my career as a family therapist, I worked for a well known inpatient drug and alcohol rehabilitation center, which was situated in a

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rural setting surrounded by nature, and I was struck by that locale.  The rehab center built a ropes course there to further people’s recovery by confronting their fears and self-limitations in concrete, physical ways.  So that’s how I got started working with the physical body in nature-based experiences with groups of people. I began incorporating this nature-based ropes course activity into a particular deepening and awakening process for people.  And it was shortly after that that I was introduced to the work of Joseph Campbell.

Chris: So how did you stumble upon Joseph Campbell and what was that experience like for you? 

Michael: Well I don’t remember how I stumbled upon him…I think I stumbled upon him the way you stumble upon anything, somewhat randomly or blindly as part of more general seeking process.  I have always been an avid reader, and I am always looking to learn by reading new things. About 20 years ago I came across a book about Campbell that was called “A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living” by Diane Osbon.  I was held spellbound by its contents. To me, it wasn’t so much how I came upon this book; the important thing to me was that I had stumbled upon it. Because something happened within me as I began reading it. Something woke up.

When I started to read Campbell’s work, something came together and ignited inside of me.  Now, I would often experience being riveted and inspired by certain writers, but this went way beyond that. You know, it was like what the American writer Annie Dillard once wrote: “I had been my whole life a bell, but never knew it until that moment I was lifted and struck”. There was this feeling of an internal truth telling taking place. I couldn’t say exactly how I knew it to be true, but from the center of my being I could say that it was true, at least for me. Campbell would say that mythology is not fact or lie – it’s truer than a fact. Facts may be true, but a myth is more true than a fact, because it has a resonance inside of someone that is deeper than just historical, factual information or knowledge.  So reading Campbell had something ringing out with such refreshing clarity that I couldn’t just set it aside when I was finished. I had been moved forward somehow.

It’s kind of like the idea of realizing the facts about Santa Claus.  You know that in the myth of Santa Claus there is a real disappointment for the child in finding out that Santa is not an actual person, and his current existence not a literal fact (although it’s origins are rooted in a historical fact). But the myth of Santa Claus is of course far more important than the fact of whether or not he presently exists as an actual person. If you look upon Santa Claus is a real fact of existence, then you inevitably end up quite disappointed when you grow up and come to the realization that there’s no such person.  But then you have the opportunity to become able to experience it as a living myth. Then you realize that there is this spirit of a giveaway inside all of us that is universal, and this is a richer and more mature realization. But you have to go through the pain of disillusionment first to get there.

My family was very involved in religion, and I was immersed in Catholicism theologically, educationally and socially throughout my childhood and adolescence. Campbell spoke about his disillusionment with Catholicism because he said that religion makes the fatal mistake of looking at

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religious events as historical facts, as denotations and not connotations.  He would say that it’s not about something that happened to a particular people in a particular time long ago, somewhere else. You must know religious passages as stories that can come alive and be made relevant in the cultural contexts we have today. So that disillusioning happened when I began to read Campbell. It ironically didn’t ruin my faith, it transformed my understanding of it. It really opened up my consciousness to saying “oh my God, so this is how words become flesh!”

Chris: Does formal religion still have a role in your life?

Michael: Yes, it does. Like anything that has deep roots in my being, ancient rituals hold a memory and a recognition of something that always rings true (like a good myth does).  But the way certain members of the church hold laws and teachings as rigid doctrines that don’t hold any meaning for me, all the vitality gets sucked out of them, and what is left is compliance with dogmatic principles. Where is the life in that? It is also a way of being exclusive or excluding of other ways and other peoples. Or in the worst examples they do harm to seekers by shutting down and rejecting the importance and the vitality of their own inner experiences, especially when they neatly don’t line up with the given doctrines or rules.  This can unfortunately eradicate complexity for the sake of compliance. And I just can’t find anything worthwhile or meaningful in that sanitizing process.

So I don’t prescribe to a religious order the way I once did, but it’s like anything worthwhile that holds meaning. It’s always being shaped into new understanding, and also what is ancient and true is always nearby.  So a religious faith nearby to me, but it’s not something I actively participate in like I did as a child or even as a young adult. But I can be nourished in some religious services, and I can still find a powerful living myth in within the Catholic faith.

Chris: Having worked with you over the last few years I have noticed you have a great affinity for rituals.  What is it about rituals that attract you?

Michael: To me, a ritual is something that brings presence, awareness and regard to something you are doing. It make a particular time and space become more animated, more sacred. Done well, it imbues an experience with depth and meaning. It is often offered communally as way to bring a group of people together, to take them somewhere inside that is more difficult to access on one’s own.

Lately I have been thinking about rituals as a way to access a sense one’s own living myth. Something wakes up, something begins to happen that you can’t exactly predict in advance, like when you go to sleep and have a dream. In a similar way, the same kind of infused experience can happen to you when you watch a really good movie, or when you’re walking through a particular art exhibit in a gallery, or when the sun is setting a just the right moment. Myth becomes accessible through something like a ritual, an activity that is happening in a certain kind of exterior space that brings something ineffable and essential alive inside the interior of one’s being.  And a good ritual will do just that.  

A good ritual also can wake something up that doesn’t tend to wake up any other way. You can’t

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simply wake up to an inner aliveness through just thinking about it in your head. There’s a big difference between mental thinking and embodied awareness, as Castaneda referred to it, when you suddenly find yourself enlivened and paying rapt attention to what is unfolding before you. So I think a good ritual engages our awareness in an unfolding story that captures our attention, pulls us in and brings us alive.

Chris: Do you have daily rituals, weekly rituals – rituals that are a part of your day-to-day life? How does that play out on a typical day for you?

Michael: Well, yes, and no. I have daily routines, and embedded in those routines are activities that I do on a regular basis for my health and wellbeing on many levels. But I wouldn’t necessarily call these rituals. I think if you do a daily solitary ritual it can become more of a routine than a ritual. For example, I do inspirational reading and physical workouts first thing in the morning, four to five days a week on average, and I have daily mindfulness practices that I do as a part of my psychotherapy practice.

These are small rituals in a way, and they really do matter to me, but they don’t hold the same magnitude of experience and depth of meaning for me as more communal and mythic types of rituals. You need certain types of settings and circumstances that take you outside of ordinary time for these rituals to take place and have their effect. You can’t predict in advance what is going to happen when you enter this type of ritual space. To me, that is what determines whether or not you are participating in a ritual that is sacred and whole.

My professional practice in itself is a certain type of ritual. I sit in front of people throughout my work day, and quite regularly meaningful human encounters take place that I didn’t see coming; so that to me feels like entering a certain ritual space at times. But the types of rituals that hold deep meaning are not so much singular or solitary events. For me, these experiences are more communal, and they happen within the context of an intentional, communal gathering space. In the Roman Catholic faith in which I grew up, the celebration of the Mass is a definite ritualized way of paying attention to things beyond the immediate surface of what is happening. These days, I think the tradition of the Talking Stick Council is a potent and worthwhile communal ritual that I value.

Chris: Do you think you know what your work is in the world? And is that an important thing for people to know?

Michael: That is an interesting question; I actually do think I know what my work is, and even so it is also always evolving. It’s important to me to know what my work is in the world. But I can’t really say for sure if it’s important for other people to know their sense of work in the world. I suppose it depends on the individual and how they make meaning in their world, so I really can’t say for sure if that needs to be an important knowing for others. But I imagine so.

I do believe work is an important thing for us to place value on in a culture. It can give someone a definite sense of purpose, place and worth among other people. These workplace contexts and environments are often quite meaningful in a social way. I do see many people who seem to have a sense of their work and place in the world, and I definitely see a lot of people who just kind of do

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their jobs as a necessary means to an end, just a necessary part of their lives. So work can just be a means to an end, but for the former, it is definitely a means in itself.

David White is a poet who has written about the importance of work in the world. He says that work of any kind is an important function in that it creates meaning, and it is a vehicle that takes someone beyond themself. So I think work can be a way that we have worth, value and a place in the real world, so from that standpoint work is quite important.

We are a privileged generation of people in the Western world, especially over these last few generations. Many of us have had access to higher educations that crafted specialized knowledge and skill sets. This opened us to opportunities where we could choose what our work could be in the world. We have been quite fortunate in that regard, as everyone is not exposed to the same level of educational and employment opportunities.

I pursued my own education and career path consciously and purposefully. Along the way, what helped shape that was doing summer work in a typical steel mill in Pittsburgh - the same mills that the rest of the men in my family had labored in for decades. I was literally working in the mouth of hell: rigorous labor, lots of grit, grime and intense heat. I worked hard, made good money, and maybe could have gotten into the union and had something that would have been a means to a financial end – but then shortly after that, the unions collapsed and the mills as we knew them went down. In a way, I am grateful that I couldn’t enter the union, that would have been a terrible mistake.

Chris: You know one thing I noticed that came up a lot during a recent Hero’s Journey intensive was this concept of SHOULD. The way we use this word SHOULD, on ourselves and on other people. Do you feel that word has a place in our lives? Is it always problematic?

The examples I’m thinking of are “I should do this” or “I should do that” which typically, I believe for myself, is a signal that there’s something deep down that I probably actually don’t want to do. Or I don’t feel like it really aligns with what I am moving towards. So does it ever have a role, a positive role?

Michael: Sure! Is the word should ever useful?. I think you really shouldn’t let your kids play on a high traffic street! (Laughing.) There are certain ‘should’s that really are for our own good. You shouldn’t go inside a lion’s cage, you shouldn’t play with rattlesnakes (unless you are attending a spiritual revival!). You know, I think these kinds of SHOULDS are really common sense table wisdom things that help us to avoid unnecessary dangers in the world.

Chris: But some of those are also “SHOULD NOTS”, right? I assume there are probably some corollaries that are “SHOULDS”. But in talking to ourselves, we mght say things like ”I should love my wife more”.

Michael: Well yes, and your wife would certainly agree with that! (Laughs.) Campbell talked about this very thing. He had a saying, “a dragon has many scales, and written on each one is ‘thou shalt’ ”. I see SHOULDS as a mind game created by the ego as a way to circumvent or over-ride complexity. It does this by directing our energy in a forcing current that is basically willful, wearisome and

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debilitating over time. It places us in a numbing compliance mode, and it also keeps us from diving deeper, beyond simple concepts and rules, areas where we must wrestle with contradicting life currents within us. So we take on the problem of guilt about not following the rules to avoid other inner trouble, that might be more daunting or threatening to explore. Then we are left to “SHOULDER” things, carrying unresolved matters that weigh heavily on us; we often become burdened by a vague and pervasive sense of guilt, of believe that we’ve been bad.

I want to go back to something you just mentioned about yourself. We live by SHOULDS when we don’t know ourselves well enough to know how we actually want to live…and therefore we are reduced to living how we “should” live instead. We follow moral guidelines or commandments not just to be good people or to avoid being bad, but also because of not having a more complex understanding and more authentic knowing of who we are, with all of our complexity and contradictions.

We learn about ourselves, we grow by wrestling in the grey areas between black and white thinking. If we don’t do this inner work, then we don’t develop a clarifying and defining process aimed towards our true self. Then SHOULDS are all we’ve got. It’s like the process of polishing a diamond, in a way. If you don’t do that hard work to get to the inner jewel, it’s nothing but rocks for you!

Chris: You see a lot of people who are undertake personal development work. Some teachings are very specific to an individual’s learning, but some advice or suggestions may apply more broadly to people in general. Is there any advice that you feel you could give, something common that reaches across everyone’s issues, or are certain issues so individualized that there isn’t much you can generalize about them?

Michael: Well I think it is really a contextual matter; it all depends on the individual and the particular circumstance. But I also think what you are raising is a ‘both-and’ kind of thing, as opposed to an ‘either-or’ scenario when it comes to human beings learning more about who they are and what they can do.

Chris: So in your practice, and on the Hero’s Journey wilderness intensives, we encounter all kinds of people…aren’t we all broken in some way? Everybody. Is there a set of generic instructions for putting ourselves back together, or is it really an individualized mapping of things? General things like “saying yes to life” or “living wholeheartedly” or “getting in touch with your animal nature”. What are some of your general suggestions for worthwhile living, if you have any to offer?

Michael: Well you know, there’s all kind of timeless wisdom out there in the world, whether it’s coming from the perennial philosophies, such as Buddhist teachings or religious traditions. There are a lot of worthwhile ‘prescriptions’ to help guide somebody in how to live a good life. There is also underneath all of our conceptual understandings a fundamentally personal way of being awake and alive in the world. It’s not so much which road gets you there as much as that you commit to one that’s going to take you there.

Chris: And what are some of those?

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Michael: I think if you want to have a meaningful life, or a vital life, or an enthusiastic life of any kind (it really depends on your goal), certain wisdom traditions can help you get there. In the Hero’s Journey Foundation, we incorporate Joseph Campbell’s teachings as one of our primary tools, but he is certainly just one of the many teachers from various traditions that provide us with perennial wisdom that is pointing us towards something worthwhile.

Campbell had this expression that has always caused me a kind of ‘aesthetic arrest’, and held me spell-bound. He spoke of “becoming the zeal of eternity for incarnation in time”. His way with words always captures me, and especially when he reflects back to us the zeal for what’s eternal. We know that what is eternal lives in the spirit world and is thus intangible, and beyond this one. But some of that intangible energy is ever available to us, all throughout this world. It certainly is infused through nature. But what spirit needs that it does not have is an embodied form.

What the spirit world needs is flesh, it needs matter, it needs living things that are limited and hollowed out as forms of matter to embody. And human beings seem to be the primary vehicle for that in a way that can be conscious, and can shape how life is lived.

Some might argue that other species also embody the divine, but I think the whole nature of what we do in our work is look to become as human beings the embodiment of eternity’s zeal. You have to really be willing to have an embodied, sensate experience, to be present in your bodily senses, and to also pay attention to bodily sensations as a felt sense. You can feel into the ground underneath you, you can feel into the atmosphere around you, and you feel into the interior space within you.

Then you have to become mindful in your awareness. Eternity’s zeal also needs awakended human conscious for its expressions. To become a ‘presence’, you have to be aware of what it’s like to be in your body and mind, and be in your interior space in the moment, as a lived experience. Then you have to pay attention to what is happening all around you.

These are some fairly general concepts that I am passionate about teaching. I teach them in my psychotherapy practice, I teach them on the journeys, I teach them in our PsychoEnergetics Training programs. These are pretty essential principles for what one could call “wellness” but it’s more about “wholeness”, a sense of being awake and alive, and being present to what’s happening beyond the individual self. And where you feel your own story alive, you will feel the world around you as alive, too, and then you are capable of interacting with life in that mutual exchange. And that’s the essence of a good personal encounter or a good mythic journey.

Chris: I read a lot of spiritual work prior to getting engaged with the Hero’s Journey Foundation, and one thing I’ve noticed is that so much of the work you do is focused on awareness. My problem with just being aware is that if we all just walked around being aware, not much would get done! We would all be just sitting there, aware, and kind of letting things pass through us. I ‘m sure there are some benefits to that, but I believe there also needs to be an impetus for action. Where does that impetus for action come from in the Hero’s Journey framework?

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Michael: Well, it comes out of awareness! There are many people doing many things in the world, and some of them are very worthwhile, and many of them I think aren’t worth a damn. We don’t always do things for a good reason or a worthwhile pursuit. The key to awareness is having a clear sense of how we participate in something larger than ourselves – and why. There is the question of how to know when our efforts are a worthwhile contribution in service of something beyond ourselves, and not simply in service of our own ideas about ourselves.

So I think that’s why awareness is really the key to mindful and worthwhile action. Taking right action, as opposed to action for the sake of just doing something. There’s an expression we have in one of our training programs, which is “don’t just do something, sit there!” (Laughs.)

Chris: Yeah. That can drive me crazy!

Michael: It will drive you crazy only if you are not clear about why you are sitting there in the first place. By becoming still, and taking a non-agenda approach to action, you are doing the work of cultivating awareness towards right action. So if you sit there mindfully enough to be truly present to what is happening in front of you - you develop enough awareness so that when you do spring to action, you are not acting out of a defensive function to ward something else off, or taking an action to prevent other important things from happening. Rather, you are acting in alignment with the universal flow of a larger picture that’s taking place, and you are swimming with the river rather than trying swim against it, overpower it, or control it. Because the river usually has its way!

Chris: We’re all on journeys, but do we ever arrive?

Michael: That’s a good question; do we ever actually arrive? I don’t know if we ever ultimately arrive, yet I think we are arriving all the time. So by arriving you begin again, and you can take your leave again, because a good journey is always cyclical. You don’t stay in one phase for any one length of time. Otherwise you tend to rigidify, stagnate or atrophy. But you have to understand how to arrive as well, and know what it means to arrive.

So I actually think we do arrive at certain end points. You know, it’s a real challenge to not just always be seeking, as arriving also means beginning to find. When we are consciously arriving, we know that we have come to somewhere important and that something essential is now happening as a result of a some hard work and effort. This is the boon that Campbell spoke of. We have to learn to let ourselves find out where we truly are and we have to eventually arrive at who we truly are. Campbell would say that ‘the privilege of the lifetime is being who you are’. I think we arrive at this awareness gradually, and this particular recognition leads us and inspires us ever more towards new journeys throughout the span of our lives.

Chris: Yes. That’s a good way to put it. I notice “fear” comes up a lot in different people as they engage a hero’s adventure on their Journey Intensives. It certainly came up for me. One of the interesting things to me was seeing some ways that fear had manifested itself in my life. What are some of the ways fear manifests more generally in people’s lives? How do we learn to see that? We may not call it fear, but how do you see that there is some trouble and what do we do about that, when having that fear inside of us?

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Michael: Well, I think as human beings we’re all inevitably afraid of various things, and certain matters in particular. For one thing, we can feel threatened or insecure about people, places and things that our outside of our experience or understanding, or are in some fundamental way unknown or unknowable to us. We tend to be afraid of what we don’t already know, or can’t control, or when we see someone or something as essentially ‘not like us’. That is a broad generalization, of course, but it tends to hold true.

I think a useful way to think about our fear is to look at our way of relationship to it. We can decide what fear itself can be to us. Is fear is our ally and teacher, or is fear our enemy, our thing to overcome and defeat? Working with your fear creates new possibilities for openings that didn’t exist before, and this requires us to have a tolerance for uncertainty and vulnerability, especially upon approaching what we fear.

Working against our fear fuels a tendency to want to exert control over it. We strive to eradicate our fear, or the object of our fear. We want it to go away. Or we seek to manipulate it, get past it – or we try to overcome or overpower something that scares us. When we feel helpless or overwhelmed by fear, we will want to repress or deny it, but in the end if we do this, this path of avoidance ends up creating more anxiety and tension for us that the original source of fear did.

What if embedded this poem here? And/Or shared a personal story about fear.

Suppose That What You Fear Could Be Trapped and Held In Paris.

Chris: What does it looks like when someone is working with their fear? How does that look different from working against it?

Michael: Well the first thing you have to be willing to do is slow down, calm down. This is not easy to do under normal circumstances, and it is especially difficult to do when we are acutely anxious. We have to slow down enough to be able to reflect, to look into our fear and how it manifests itself and overtakes our thinking We have to learn to listen to what our fear has to say, and not just shut it down. This takes a certain grounded-ness and courage to face what threatens us, without judging ourselves, or the object of our fear.

We then need the fortitude to gradually become interested in the fear, and identify exactly what it is that we are afraid of. Then we can begin to head that way, in the direction of what we fear. We have to become curious how fear holds us back, how it impairs the quality of our lived experiences. How it keeps us from going forward in our lives. It is really something to see exactly what holds us back from living the lives we were meant to live. We can be astounded to discover all that we have missed out on, due to a state of mind that is not grounded in a manageable, doable, and vulnerable way of being conscious in our real lives.

One way of working with fear is to first see how our deepest fear diminishes our ability to go forward, towards living in a more exciting and worthwhile manner. We all stop ourselves with our own deeply entrenched fears and beliefs. We have to ask ourselves some important questions: Why

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aren’t we genuinely happy, or why aren’t we content with our place in the world, why aren’t we more enthused or joyful about our living? In order to become larger, more expansive and more conscious, we have to work through our fears of being open to what is new, of opening to what is beyond all of our previously known territories.

And what would happen if you allowed yourself to think about this next question without any self-judgment: What am I actually and truly afraid of? What is my deepest held, ongoing, chronic fear? Is it a fear of loss, of losing something or someone? Am I always afraid of failing - is this my biggest fear? Am I afraid of the vulnerability of exposure, of self-revealing? Or am I most afraid of feeling inadequate or stupid? Now what happens if I slow down and follow this thread of inquiry?

Chris: How does all of the above sound?

Michael: Sounds like becoming more of a human being, right? We just have to explore these fears one at a time!

Chris: Right!

Michael: But to really take the time to explore our fear, be in relationship to it, to understand it and track it back to an origin point, rather than trying to eradicate the fear, or manage the fear – that leads us to mastery of the self. This is what mindfulness awareness is about - looking at what holds power over us. We look closely and intimately, without judging our feelings or ourselves for having them. We also cannot take a truncated, premature action in reaction to our fear. Mindfulness is looking clearly at what scares us in order to simply see what is, and staying with that for a while. Then we can wonder about it some, saying, “wow, look at this, look at what I start to think, look at how impulsively I want to act, to get some relief. That doesn’t work!”

I’ve got this guy I work with who is afraid of airplanes – but only when he is in one up in the air! (Laughs.) So he doesn’t go any where far on vacations, his venturing life is truncated. And how is that a metaphor for his inner world? I say to him, “Isn’t that something, that you can’t let yourself fly?” But he is not yet really in a place where he is curious about that fact. You know he is perfectly “fine”, I guess the word is. He is not about to go on a plane, and he is fine like this, not having to deal with his fear of being up in an airplane. So that limits him, [and] he can’t go very far.

And so, more important than taking it up the fear of flying as a literal event, like it is for some people, we have to see it as metaphorical of how we are afraid to step out into life some essential way. We use it as an opportunity to look at our issues with trust, for instance. Then, when you come to that moment when you realize, “Oh my God, this fear stops me from living how I want to live, this is the thing that is in my way of doing exactly what I know I want to do” - you can have a new and necessary motivation to look deeply at what stops you from working through the fear.

This fear of extending myself, this fear of failing, this fear of feeling that nothing will ever work out for me - it’s just so human, and it is precisely what holds power over me and stops my life. Understand that working through this kind of fear requires an ability to examine that fear closely, and also to be motivated enough by what we see to say “I don’t want that fear to continue holding

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power over me”. Then we can have the courage and the heart we need to take necessary risks that will grow us beyond where we’ve been.

Chris: How do we know it’s time to go on a Hero’s Journey? When it is a good idea to take a week out of my life to go on one of your Wilderness Intensives? If somebody calls you up and says “Michael I don’t know if this thing for me”, how would you respond to that question?

Michael: I would say I don’t know either if it’s for you, but you called, so something has you inquiring! (Laughs.) I don’t know how you know for sure, but I guess the real question is, “How do I know when I am being called towards a new way or a different way of being, or to a new adventure, to a time of change or transition in my life - how does anybody listen to what calls to us from within?

And you would hear that call when it comes to you. The externals are obvious, you [may be] going through a major life transition. Somebody has lost a job, somebody has left a marriage, somebody has a major health issue, somebody’s kids are all out of school or out of the house and now it’s just them (and maybe their husband or wife), and they don’t know where they go next. Those kinds of things are how the adventure of a journey is often brought to us from the outside world. Suffering, crises, endings, they are all likely points to enter a new way or a new possibility for living – because we have evidence that the old ways no longer work.

But there’s also a way to quiet one’s self and learning to listen closely, asking ourselves the fundamental question: “Now what is it the time for? What needs to change? What am I to be used for, that there has not been time or space for yet, before now?” From time to time, if we are really paying attention, we all come across a time and place in our lives that we have not yet come to before. It is a good to take a journey when we find there is a new opportunity for living that is approaching that feels immanent.

These are the questions we usually have to face when we are ready for a good journey: Can I open to a new time or way in my life? Do I need help? From who or what? What is this new time in my life to be used for? What is now worth living for? What do I need to do to be ready for this new life, how do I learn to say ‘yes’ to it? What do I have to face in order to enter more fully into the new way of life? How do I face the problem of the new unknown?

I am reminded of the biblical passages from Ecclesiastes, “There is a time for every purpose under heaven.” Usually, we were are facing a deep sense of being in transition, or needing one to happen, it is time for something like our Hero’s Journey Intensive.

Chris: What do people ultimately say about their experiences living into the Hero’s Journey myth when they have completed their weeklong intensive?

Michael: I think they mostly say is “Wow!” The kind of work we do is best described as an alchemical process. What we know how to do, and what we do very well, is create certain necessary conditions for transformational opportunities to happen in. We make very solid transformational cauldrons, and have good people who can help stir the pot.

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I may have said this to you once during your own adventure, Chris. I think you said to me, “Now what is going to happen to me?” I remember saying, “I have no idea what’s going to happen to you next in this unfolding process that takes place each moment as you journey. I can only say it is inevitable that something essential will happen for you, if you can get out of the way.” And so the trick is learning how to get your own will out of the way of the universal life force’s unfolding process. Why would someone want to go on a kind of adventure where they have no idea what will happen for them? That’s the great question. In fact, a true adventurer seeks out exactly those conditions, where as someone else wants no part of that great unknown.

What we say to someone signing up for a weeklong intensive is this - even though we don’t know what’s going to happen for you, we fully trust that what needs to happen for you will happen, because it seems to happen for all people who enter their journey with a sense of wholehearted involvement. Something ineffable seems to comes forward towards them as they go forward across the threshold of no return.

So the Hero’s Journey facilitation and logistical team creates the necessary conditions for that ‘something’ to happen where you find yourself starting to surrender over to something bigger. That unknown ‘something’ is both enveloping and vast, and you find yourself becoming less solid and more fluid in your own being. You notice yourself somehow beginning to move in and out of one state of consciousness to another. And you start to feel something being indelibly altered inside of you. You feel struck by that increasing awareness, and it’s always a surprise. You can’t see it coming, and that’s the beauty of a good journey, it stays true to the sense of mystery.

It’s like a dream, like having a good and vivid dream. In your dream tonight (if you have a dream), there’s no way you can tell me about what you will dream in advance. In the same way, on the Hero’s Journey Intensive, on one of our elements, there’s no way we can tell you what’s about to happen inside of you, we can only tell you that you are going to have a pretty vivid waking dream! Everyone there has vivid encounters and enlivening experiences, and they are very contagious. In fact, you would have to work pretty hard to make sure you didn’t have one.

Actually, what happens for many people is they have the sense of having come out of a dream-like state, that they have been in a way sleeping through their daily lives. Now, in the immersed in the wilderness and far beyond the dulling of their routines, people have the feeling of waking up into a vivid kind of clarity. Some often say, “Wow, the world that I am in every day feels like it’s just a dream, and the reality I am having during my Journey, it’s like waking up from a dream.” That’s maybe why we call it an ‘intensive’! (Laughs.)

So that is why “wow” is what people often say at the end of their Hero’s Journey Intensive. It is the basic feeling of “I’m waking up to something, and that something is personally very meaningful yet also hard to put into verbal language, in that way that a dream can often be hard to recall or speak into words.

It is also often the case that during the weeklong journey that something happens to someone that makes no particular sense to their own journey, but it will matter greatly and become a cherished gift to one of their companions. It is uncanny in that way. Someone finds a deer antler in the

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woods, it reminds someone else of rich memories hunting with their grandfather for the first time as a child. Someone else shares a story about learning to play a certain song on the piano as a child, and that awakens a long forgotten and important memory in someone else. That type of synchronicity is what typically happens on our journeys. So we re-create the alchemical process mirrored from the concept of the mythological journey – the Hero’s Journey - to awaken to an adventure that’s there already, waiting for you. We know that it is waiting; but you are the one who discovers it anew. You live into how it has been waiting there for you, like a deer antler in the forest, waiting to be picked up and taken into your hands.

Chris: What are some essential questions worth asking of ourselves as we go on about our lives?

Michael: You were wondering about something recently that grabbed my attention, and that was “How do we become more whole-hearted?”

Chris: Yes, that’s a big one.

Michael: Another question worth wrestling with are these: What is the difference between problems and troubles? What is the difference between unnecessary difficulty and essential trouble?”

Let’s start with the matter of how we become more wholehearted, and why that might be important. Some people are interested in this notion of investing in matters with their whole heart, and for some people this matter may not speak to them. But Rumi would say it like this: “Only wholeheartedness can reach into majesty”. If you want to feel like life is a majestic experience, then you’ll need to either immerse yourself in a life in the midst of a vast mountain region, or else you will have to invest yourself wholeheartedly into something less obvious but just as worthwhile.

You can feel the way everything becomes enlarged when you are wholehearted about your participation in it. If you are half-hearted about something, it doesn’t reach into anything. There’s no sense of expanding or investing, there’s no sense of anything that creates the ‘ahhh’, the awe, that thing evokes wonder. So you become wholehearted by putting your full self into something that matters deeply to you, and you find that you just couldn’t do it half way.

When you put yourself ‘all in’, you say yes to the spirit of adventure, you enter the spirit of play. That’s one of the fundamental things we do on a mythic journey of any kind, whether we are doing this in a big way on a wilderness setting, or working more with what matters in our own daily worlds. When you’re travelling with us, you learn how to say yes. And when you can say yes to something wholeheartedly, you start to feel an adventure unfolding, and a spirit of play comes alive, and you start rolling along. And somewhere along the line, a good adventure eventually leads to some worthwhile trouble.

Chris: Trouble! What’s the difference between troubles and problems?

Michael: Well, everyone’s got problems. If you have an ego, you’ve got problems. Our egos are going to create a lot of the problems along the way, and the world is going to bring to us the other

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half of our problems. So we don’t have to ever worry about having problems, because we all will have them as part of living a worthwhile life. We can’t stay in the Garden of Eden forever. Growing up is a problem.

So really, anything can become a problem to the ego. Driving into traffic is a problem, a broken pipe in my basement was a stressful problem for me this winter. Even what to make for dinner is a kind of problem, sometimes. What happens with the ego is that it becomes a problem creator so that it can be a problem solver, which gives the ego some gratification about having something to do.

And so we go from one problem to the next, and then we become a problem solver, and we gain a sense of worth. Many of us get satisfaction out of being problem solvers. We become fixers of things, like the protagonist in the James Taylor’s song, “Handy Man”. I guess that’s okay, if that’s what you want to do with your life. You get to feel good about yourself as a good problem solver. The crisis comes when you don’t have other people’s problems to fix any more.

On the other hand, what do the mystics have to say about trouble? The notion of troubled-ness is a whole another matter. The goal of life is not to live without any trouble; but if you have no trouble, you have no realness in your life. There is useful and important trouble that wakes us up, and then there is useless and bad trouble - which distracts us from the real trouble. And we better learn to know the difference.

If we enter the living myth of the Hero’s Journey, we place ourselves on track for an authentic spiritual search. Therefore, we will no doubt have some trouble, because we’ll be troubled by things that should actually be troubling to us. When we are coming alive, we often are awakened by worthwhile trouble that activates unrealized potentials within us. It helps us to grow; our soul nature leads us into this kind of trouble. Good trouble disrupts the status quo like nothing else; it conspires with the soul to create the conditions for essential change.

The ability to go with the trouble, to look for good trouble, to get it started and then wholeheartedly enter into it - this gets a meaningful adventure going. If we’re getting into bad trouble, then we start destroying things, and we’re making a mess of your life, creating panic and suffering for other people. Sometimes, we thrive on crisis and create disaster to feel alive. And all of this trouble keeps the important trouble at arm’s length, so we never have to deal with it. We get to make the suffering of our own choosing instead.

So the mystics say that good trouble is the pathway to God, at least for the spiritual seeker. The Upanishads have a different version of the biblical ‘Seek and ye shall find’. It says that what you’ll find by seeking is trouble! And when you know this, then you open the door to some important troubles, so that what you find through the threshold of troubled-ness is pathway to the eternal.

The ordeal leads you to God… Joseph Campbell called this kind of trouble ‘having the ordeal’. If this life, you are inevitably going to have your share of ordeals. If you are going on a hero adventure you are going to have important ordeals, and if you find yourself having the right ordeal, you are going to have a hell of an adventure. The ordeal is what takes you towards the boon.

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Chris: I’m sure people come to you all the time and say: “I’m feeling stagnant. Things are stagnant in my life.” In fact, maybe things are going fine, you know, I’ve got a good job a nice family. This is actually how I came to the Hero’s Journey. I’d certainly got everything I thought I wanted, I was just kind of ticking along, and then I woke up and I thought to myself “this can’t be it”. I had the sense I wasn’t the first person who had come to the Hero’s Journey through this means.

Michael: No, you’re not! You come to this kind of adventure threshold one of two ways. I think what we would say is that everyone who is a seeker is going to get to this threshold one way or another. Your highest or soul self is going to see to a worthwhile adventure one way or another. Usually people start to really search when one of two things happen – everything goes right, or everything goes wrong - and both places take you there. And if everything goes wrong it’s because nothing’s working and you’re so troubled by that, that you just know that you have to do something different, because what you’re doing doesn’t work, and you are way off track.

Or you enter the search by what you were describing: you follow all the SHOULDS correctly. And you succeed at all the things you should be successful at, and they feel good because, you do them well. And you abide by all the cultural injunctions and societal expectations, and you play the good role at work, and you be the good man, and then you realize that something in all of that is hollow - because it’s not being generated from an interior space, from a source that’s coming primarily and solely from within you, that’s your vital and guiding force, and without that, you’re in big trouble.

Chris: Great. We talk from time to time about “questing” – following the right questions occasionally, and if I understand questing correctly, it’s really a having a good question for us to reflect on. What’s an example of a good questing?

Michael: This goes back to trouble and problems. You know that a good question is going to cause good trouble. A bad question just creates problems – and a series of problem solving techniques. When you’re asking a good question you are lighting a lantern of inquiry, you are illuminating something that has not had adequate and sustained illumination. A good quest(ion) takes us towards something that has not been in the light of conscious awareness for meaningful exploration. So, the purpose of a good question is to keep something illuminated, is to be working with the question. The Irish poet John Donahue writes about this very thing in a rich and illuminating way.

So a good question takes you on a quest, because it doesn’t have an immediate answer, which would satisfy us enough to bring the need for a quest to a halt. So the function of a good question is to takes us on a worthwhile journey in search of a meaningful response; it takes you further along your path, which gives you adventures and ordeals in order for you to learn more about yourself or have more of yourself. So that’s the function of a good question or a good quest, it makes you actively explore the unknown. It’s going to take you somewhere you haven’t been before, in order to live in ways you have not yet experienced. And through that, you realize more of your potential.

Chris: And so what question might you give someone who is stagnant?

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Michael: A good question might be, “So how has it come to this? How have I ended up here, where I am in my life right now? That’s one way to take up a worthwhile quest.

When you hear me ask questions like that, the key is to notice again what happens in your body, not just your head. If you find a fast answer to the question, you do not have to take up the quest. If you feel into the question and start to you wonder about the question for awhile, then you are on your quest.

“Oh yes, I know how I arrived here, I did this and I did that then that took place, and I learned this and now I’m here”. Well, maybe that’s a good answer, but you were probably asked a bad question. If you have a fast answer, then it is likely that someone asked you a poor question. Or they let you get away with a quick answer that shuts down the search.

Sam Keen is a guy who I met many years ago, and he was an influential thinker in men’s work whom I had a pleasure of meeting and having lunch with. His sister lived here in Pittsburgh, and we met at a workshop that he was running. He would ask two important questions. “Where are you going in your life?”. That is a good question. And the second was, “Who is going with you?” And he said to us, “you had better take up those questions in the right order, or you’re going to be lost”.

So when you think about that, how does that strike you? Where am I going? What that means to me is, “What’s going to become of me? What will the quality my future days be like? What will become of me in the days ahead, and how will I live them?” Those are really good questions.

And then there is this quest: “Who do I want to live my future with? Who can join with me, and who can I walk with alongside their journey? And what will I do if significant people in my life cannot go where it brings me most alive? What then?”

And so a very fundamental question, one that you hear asked to participants on many of the journey intensives, is this question: “Tell me, what matters most to you?” One has to be asked this question many times, and the listener might have to ignore any or all of the immediate responses given to this vital question. You have to walk with this one awhile. It certainly depends on where you are going, what matters most.

This is not like asking, where do you want to go out to eat tonight? But another important question might be: “What are you truly hungry for? What essential things matter most to you right now, what are you really longing for? And that’s a question that we ask: what are you really hungry or thirsty for in your life? The Spanish poet Antonio Machado had a saying, “It is a good thing to know that a glass is to drink from. It is a bad thing not to know what you are truly thirsty for.”

Chris: Great saying.

Michael: So if you have taken up a good question, you will not have immediate answer. You’ll feel yourself being illuminated by the question, and that illumination moves you deeper into yourself, and pulls you further into the world. If you can bear with the question and enter the quest, then it inevitably takes you somewhere you haven’t been before. If you fight with the question, then you just spin around in a circle, or busy yourself with a lot of things that don’t really matter.

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Chris: Alright Michael, I think we are about out of time.

www.herosjourneyfoundation.org

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