The Heroine’s Journey
Myth and Social Control
The roots of our symbols and myths have been perverted by patriarchy. The quest in search of differentiation, or the search for the father, is a masculine construct; one of exile from the female source and femaleness, from the mother and her womb. Those female parts of our humanity are disclaimed, repressed, fought against and distorted. Transcendence/escape from the body is the problem. He fears all that body stuff, the liquids of her blood and emotions (seen as watery). He dreads his vulnerability and his mortality. He actively demeans this in others, and attaches disgusting labels to these aspects of his nature. For 2500 years, men have talking about separation and difference and isolation as the human condition. This is the landscape of the Hero’s Journey.
The Hero’s Journey
“Every successful society must have a means by which it indoctrinates its members into the society's system of values and morals. One of the darker aspects of The Hero is the role he plays in disseminating these values. Our heroes are mostly European warriors, fighting and killing to solve their problems. They reflect the violent history of their respective societies in conquering and colonizing other groups. The hero reflects the appearance and values of the dominant societal group and justifies the society's crimes against others by showcasing the hero's strength and violence. These stories result in the hero's people gaining independence, usurping power, or obtaining any of a number of other results favorable to the dominant group, usually at the expense of marginalized groups. Obviously, this reinforces violence as the only means of gaining power; in fact, for persons living in a nation with violent heroes, it's hard to imagine any other way. And, unfortunately, being militarily dominant has historically been very effective in maintaining dominance for privileged groups.
We can see that other societies are culturally-constructed but we feel that our world is not at all the result of a historical process. As innocent myth-consumers, we read our myths as facts instead of culturally-constructed images.
Joseph Campbell outlines three steps of the hero’s journey — separation-initiation-return. Campbell emphasizes how the hero not only conquers the problem, but returns to society to "bestow boons on his fellow people." In modern American cinema, the fixation on the conquering or initiation aspect of the hero has hidden the full life of the hero — that of maturation into leadership and wisdom — from viewers of modern myth. Ancient-world heroes would often return after their journeys to marry and lead a mature life, imparting their hard-won wisdom to their people.
But popular culture’s lack of portrayal of this part of the hero's life in modern media leads to an "arrested adolescence" that "constantly avoids social responsibility and marital commitment." The result is an incomplete individuation process, with members of a society caught in a dangerous, "self-destructive individualism," unable or unwilling to reconcile the worlds of personal ego and community. It is this holistic vision that Campbell believes the heroes were trying to demonstrate. The necessity of heroes, Campbell felt, was to "pull together all these tendencies to separation, to pull them together into some intention.”
War is regarded as natural and right, and historically brought men together in the shared aim of heroic purpose, whose intensity was such that no tilling of the soil or herding of animals could match it.
The hero’s journey is a pattern, repeated in all the stories. Separation, initiation, return. It’s the call to adventure, and about claiming your own inner resources. It’s movement is from an unsatisfying life to a satisfying one by going through the scariest things you can imagine.
Steps in The Heroine’s Journey
It’s also about expansion, growing larger through answering a call to adventure, but this one is different, and has more steps. We start in the darkness, telling our story to build light to follow.
1. Spirit wants to get our attention. It starts with life-as-it-is, when we’re still a little bit asleep and we’re not asking questions. It’s said that the quality of your life is determined by the questions you ask, and life is committed to you waking up. There’s either some kind of loss, or an uncomfortableness around things not working anymore. We hear the call to take the journey.
2. We deepen our inner conversation to build self awareness: what do I want/ what don’t I want? What is it that we value? To find your values, see what makes you mad. What thrills you? We wonder about the path. We listen inside, journal or do therapy, or go into nature.
3. We meet the threshold guardians. Our culture doesn’t support women being wild, or gathering together for the purpose of waking up. So, we find our tribe and we build it stronger. It’s not an isolated journey. We have others to help us fight against the fear that’s inner and outer, all the what-if’s that make us feel small and contracted. All “the loyal soldiers” are the parts of our personality that keeps us safe and holds us back, addicted, distracted, and not receptive to magic. We need help of others, friends, ancestors, teachers, to get clear on our values, and be in harmony with these.
4. We say yes to adventure, and we find or make the path. Magic appears —the forces that we can’t see, but that have been waiting for us to say YES to a bigger life. We agree to let go of The Knower, which is too protected, and embrace The Learner, which is way more flexible and brave, and can find creative solutions. Allies and mentors will show up now. We leap.
5. Transformation takes us right off the cliff, or into the fire, to become something new that we’ve never seen or been. It’s a very intense stage, about faith and an inner knowing without the parachute of all the answers. We look for the message in the pain, or we agree to let go of the suffering. The key is to love the dragon, your own dragon, and stop fighting yourself. You write your own myth, answering questions like “Where didn’t I fit in as a child?” or “What didn’t I cry about?” We are on a search for the deepest part of our heart. We’re willing to stop playing small.
We disarm “the enemy” with our magnificent gift. The dragon is our greatness. We learn to love it and embrace it and feed it.
6. Claiming the Treasure — Here’s where we learn to live our lives for something new, we find the missing piece, or the next piece. We don’t stop here. We take the journey over and over to fully align with who we are meant to be. We use gratitude, appreciation, and wonder to get there.
7. Celebration and Service — We bring our gifts forward to make a contribution to the world. We create rituals and celebrations to honor our expansion. Every day we can do this. Then we are seen by the world for who we truly are. Non-violently, creatively, we lift the collective through this journey.
Marianne Williamson: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” (Course in Miracles)
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