No matter where you are in the world or what you do, this is true: your life is a heroic journey filled with challenges, barriers, wounds, letdowns, and trauma. And it is within those challenges that there lies great potential for growth and transformation. You might be in pain or feel inadequate at times. You might experience loss or failure alongside some wins. For me, physical pain has been a teacher for many years.
What I know for sure to be true for you, me and everyone is that through it all, is that we have a choice in who we become. Frustrating, annoying or maybe mundane as our challenges might seem, they make up our hero’s journey.
The term ‘hero’s journey’ was coined by Joseph Campbell in his 1949 book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.” The American mythologist, writer, and lecturer identified a common pattern in myths from around the world throughout history, which he called the monomyth or hero’s journey.
Stages of the Hero’s Journey
Campbell describes many stages of what he calls “the hero’s journey,” but they all start with a “Call to Adventure.” This is when an ordinary person living an ordinary life gets invited into another world full of strange new challenges and opportunities. Here are some of them:
Call to Adventure: The hero receives an invitation to leave their ordinary world behind and enter into a new one where they will face unknown challenges as well as benefits.
Refusal of the Call: Initially, heroes may feel inadequate or scared, refusing the adventure due to fear.
Supernatural Aid: On their journey through this unknown land, heroes find mentors who provide wisdom or tools needed during these times—sometimes even magical help!
Crossing the Threshold: Heroes then leave everything familiar behind, entering what seems like total darkness; however, light always follows right after the shadow.
Belly of the Whale: In this stage, heroes usually have their first real challenge, often forcing them underground metaphorically, but in some cases literally, leading to caves where they confront monsters representing fears within themselves, such as anger, loneliness, greed, envy, pride, etc., until those things are defeated by virtues like love, courage, hope, faith, loyalty, honesty, and innocence.
Road of Trials: Heroes are tested many times through different obstacles that test their strength, endurance, and resilience, developing abilities needed for further growth, such as patience, determination, confidence, and self-control.
Meeting with the Goddess: At some point along this journey, heroes come across a female figure who represents divine unconditional love, motherly care, nurturance, wisdom, or knowledge about life’s mysteries that women possess. This is why she is called the “goddess,” because she embodies these qualities.
Temptation: The hero faces temptations that may lead them astray or distract them from their true purpose.
Atonement with the Father: The hero must confront and reconcile with a powerful figure or aspect of themselves, often representing authority, judgment, or fear.
Apotheosis: The hero undergoes a profound transformation, gaining new insights and understanding.
The Ultimate Boon: The hero achieves their goal or receives a great gift, symbolizing their growth and accomplishments.
Return with the Elixir: The hero returns to their ordinary world, bringing back the knowledge, wisdom, or boon they have gained to benefit others.
We don’t need an epic journey to transform ourselves. The truth is that over the course of our lives, we might experience all of these stages or some of them many times. You might be able to recognise them in various challenges you faced in your life. In fact, each challenge can be taken as a call to adventure. Whether we choose a new relationship, job, a new behavior or to heal an old wound, we are embarking on a new adventure. Every day is a new call to adventure.
We might find that similar challenges come our way until we discover how we can navigate them better, resolve inner conflicts, heal old wounds or discover a possibility we never imagined before. What is for sure is that through each one of them we evolve.
The Essence of the Hero’s Journey
It’s enlightening to realize that we humans are designed—neurologically, psychologically, physically, energetically—to evolve. Our lives may seem to be measured mostly by outer-world ‘doings,’ but underneath, like a winding river, we are human ‘Beings’ embodying an inner journey of transformation.
Consider how a human life begins. Like a seed, we get planted into an environment—the particular people and place we are born into. As we start to sprout, we are shaped by what we experience. Good, bad, rich, poor, loving, or harsh, our particular terrain will contain aspects of everything, in varying degrees. Pain, restriction, and discontent are early experiences common to us all, no matter how benevolent our familial garden.
Science has discovered that fetuses surrounded by the ever-changing chemical, hormonal cocktail of their mother’s emotional inner world are positively stimulated by a certain amount of stress. Of course, we cannot order up the perfect environment, including the perfect amount of prenatal stress—but this suggests that even within the womb, challenges are necessary ingredients for our growth.
Living the Hero’s Journey
The hero’s journey is a mythological telling of a story where one begins from a place of ignorance and naiveté, yet embodied with untapped, unrecognized, and unrealized potential. The journey has many hardships and obstacles that will require an often-painful loss of innocence. And yet it is the hardships themselves that cultivate the hidden potentials, as the hero must courageously rise to the challenges and embrace all that their mastery requires. Only then can the hero move into full expression of all they can be.
Inherent within each of us are depths of wisdom, understanding, and greatness. Our lives are journeys in which the difficulties we endure and encompass are the very means of our transformation; where each challenge isn’t to hold us back, but to inspire us further. Regardless of your place or position in the world, you are here to walk a hero’s journey.
Our particular families will provide any number of challenges, experienced when we are small, powerless, and naïve about the greater workings of the world. What we assume from those challenges becomes the lens through which we view life and ourselves—a lens we assume is universally true.
Once grown, we subconsciously still lug many of those assumptions along, where they influence our decisions, actions, and reactions long after our outer environment and the people within it have changed. Despite living in a world filled with infinite variety and possibilities, we will find ourselves repeating certain unsatisfying patterns—familiar situations or relationship dynamics, unproductive behaviors, or emotional states.
This is the place where all of us end up at some time or another—because, like it or not, discomfort is a potent invitation to growth. The good news is that this is exactly the way it’s supposed to be. We can trust our journey, even when it seems to be bringing us everything we absolutely don’t want. Our design lets us know, through our discomfort, where we are ripe for transformation. But it’s up to us whether we reach for it or not.
Part of our job as humans is to move beyond what holds us stagnant in smallness and allow our lives to guide us toward greater fulfillment of purpose and expression. Experiences we were not able to process, absorb, and grow beyond are akin to eating something we can’t digest—let alone absorb nourishment from. The substance of it remains a stagnant toxin in our system until we can finally break it down and render it harmless.
The hero’s journey reminds us that inherent within each of us are depths of wisdom, understanding, and greatness. Our lives, filled with challenges and obstacles, are opportunities for transformation. As we embrace our journey, we move towards our full potential, transforming difficulties into sources of strength and empowerment. Regardless of where we start, our journey can lead us to a more profound understanding and a richer, more fulfilling life.
Over the course of our lives, we might experience all of these stages or some of them many times. You might be able to recognise them in various challenges you faced in your life. In fact, each challenge can be taken as a call to adventure. Whether we choose a new relationship, job, a new behavior or to heal an old wound, we are embarking on a new adventure.
We might find that similar challenges come our way until we discover how we can navigate them better, resolve inner conflicts, heal old wounds or discover a possibility we never imagined before. What is for sure is that through each one of them we evolve.