EXPLORING YOUR MYTH
24 MAY 2022 (15 MIN READ)
“The images of myth are reflections of the spiritual potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating these, we evoke their powers in our own lives.” - Joseph Campbell
We often view myth as an escape from ordinary life, becoming absorbed into a new reality with a rich story. However, the opposite is quite true, myths allow us to, unconsciously or consciously, make sense of the happenings of our inner lives. Mythical expert, Joseph Campbell, argues—with Jungian psychology backing up his claim—that myths bridge the gap between the unconscious mind and the ego. Put differently, myths help us make sense of the repressed happenings of our psyche through inviting them into our sense of self. That sentence sounds complicated because it’s that hard to put into words, which is why stories are so powerful at bringing up that repressed side of ourselves—because it bypasses the barrier of language and speaks through something deeper. We have all had that moment when watching a movie or reading a fiction novel that something inside you clicked, where something previously unexplainable about yourself finally made sense inside you. In essence, this is the power of myth and why it’s so important for humans. But how are myths actually able to do this to us?
Behind the objective story unfolding in front of your eyes, another layer exists underneath the surface, full of symbolism and metaphors. These symbols and metaphors represent parts of our inner lives, such as the higher self, the ego, or a specific common trauma that many humans live with, among many others. For instance, consider the common masculine archetypal tale of having to save a woman captured by dark forces. This story represents man having to take a scary, dangerous journey inside his own body to cleanse himself of any shadow or evil stemming from trauma which he may leak onto his woman, which if left undealt with, would control her and hold her captive, away from a life of full feminine expression. Whether we train our psyches to view mythology in this lens or not, our bodies pick it up and can make genuine change without our mind fully comprehending it. However, without the conscious ability to really see what’s happening on all levels, you’re not getting a full taste of the magnitude of what’s really going on. This article will simultaneously serve as a guide on how to pick apart mythology, while also guiding you on the role mythology has played in your own life.
As children, we tended to love one specific tale and wanted to hear it over and over again. What if among the love for the story itself, something in our bodies was unconsciously drawn to this myth for a specific reason? What if something inside us was trying to inform us of the inner work that lies ahead, preparing us for the journey we would be taking on? What if this tale could be used as the breeding ground to create the accessing of our second Eden? And by that I mean, what if this tale held the key to unlocking our own personal heaven in this dimension? These what-ifs are all actualities that one can access.
Here is my myth and how it showed me the answer to these questions:
MY MYTH
A couple of weeks ago, I asked my family what myth I was drawn to the most as a kid, either through a book or movie. To my surprise, they told me I would watch the movie, Drop Dead Fred, over and over again for years. Considering the movie has a whopping 11% on Rotten Tomatoes and the plot seemed dumber than dumb, I felt quite disappointed with my choice. However, upon rewatching the movie, I could not have been more wrong. The answers to the next stage in my life all resided in this story, even though I had been ignoring it ever since I was a kid. The plot follows a young woman who had an incredibly strict, controlling mother, who only accepted and loved her if she was a caricature of her. And within this caricature, no space existed for juvenile actions. In other words, her mother could never accept her being a playful kid. Due to this wounding, she developed an imaginary friend who would tell her to playfully wreak havoc, much to the dismay of her mother. The mother ends up locking the imaginary friend in a box, who magically escapes in her young adult life and begins to cause trouble again, leaving her in a space of hating the new friend as it goes against everything she stands for as an adult. My understanding of the movie is that the imaginary friend serves as a metaphor for her inner child, which she had to neglect as a young kid to appease her mother, meaning that she never got to fully access her childhood and all the joy that could have come with that. And the story of the film follows her coming to terms with that inner child and learning to love it as a piece of her, even though she attempts to fight it off for the majority of the movie.
In terms of my own life, I had to grow up fast as a kid, specifically in the form of feeling the need to be somebody outside of myself to receive love from my parents, throwing out my playful, inner child in the process. This set a pattern of bypassing who I really was inside to play a role of who I thought would earn the most love—the archetypical hyper-masculine persona I created for myself. Although a couple of years ago I realized this persona no longer served me, I still unconsciously looked for something outside of myself to feed my identity. Watching this movie made me finally realize that the person I should strive to be is already inside me—that playful, crazy, goofy little kid who made everyone pee their pants laughing without even trying. And the more I look for something else outside of this, the more I am betraying who I really am, feeding that trauma of feeling the need to be somebody outside of myself to please others. In order to become this kid again, I have to embrace that playful, inner child and allow him to express his joy in whatever way he wants. I now understand that the next stage of my life consists of uncovering this real side of myself by allowing myself to experience the childhood I did not have the chance to as a kid. This does not mean running around breaking shit and acting like a fool, but rather cultivating joy as much as possible and holding on to that goofiness for dear life, refusing to lose it out of shame for someone not liking that side of me.
The fact that I was drawn to this movie as a young kid is truly fascinating for one main reason: the time period in which I watched it the most was the time period where I started to cut myself off from my child-self in order to please others. Being obsessed with this movie was something deep inside me—either my unconscious, soul, or inner God, or a combination of all three—trying to communicate to me that I should not go down the path I was entering. In other words, the myth spoke to my body in a way that my intellect could not. The myth was attempting to serve as a bridge between my body and my ego; however, the bridge only finished construction twenty years later.
Although I may have had a happier life if I drew the dots at that young age, no one that young can ever draw philosophical conclusions that deep. And because of this reality, I believe the main story we are drawn to as a child unconsciously prepares us for what lies ahead. Similar to the battle of the protagonist fighting off her inner child and despising her before she could love her, I also silenced that childlike side of myself and hated everything about it before I could fall in love with it again. Once we are about to reach the peak of that personal battle, I believe that the reintegration of the myth can serve us in finishing the fight. Put differently, revisiting our myth can aid us in accessing our own heaven after the arduous years of hell we had to endure. Seeing the myth again at twenty-three—when I was somatically and consciously able to register the meaning of the story due to the related trauma I had been working through—allowed me to recognize the path towards my highest expression. Just like a character in a movie has to go through a ton of adversity before they come out on the other end, or know how to come out on the other end, I had to go through my own personal battle before I could recognize the way out. And man am I grateful that I was able to get to that place. But you can too.
To get there, you must first learn how to explore the myth that dominated your childhood in a meaningful manner.
EXPLORING YOUR MYTH
Your capacity to explore and understand the myth you were most drawn to as a kid is reflective of how deep you have explored and understood yourself. If I had watched that same movie two years ago, when my conscious/spiritual awakening had just begun, then I would have not picked up on the important, life-changing meaning I was able to now. This ignorance is due to the fact that I had not processed enough trauma and pain in myself to fully understand all of me. And since I could not recognize all the parts of myself, I could not see their symbolic representations in the movie. Our ability to recognize these symbols as reflections of ourselves corresponds to the level of our somatic integration of those parts. Yes, you can maybe spend hours dissecting a movie and draw intellectual conclusions that you think may mean something, but the real truth comes from the body, where while you are watching, something in your body whispers to you that this symbol corresponds to this part of yourself. Remember, myth bridges the unconscious and the ego, meaning that it is pretty fucking hard to make conclusions solely based off your ego, which in most cases, is your intellect. You must let your body speak to you as it acts as the vehicle on the bridge delivering you the message. And the strength of the delivery comes down to how in touch you become with your somatic self.
We often think that the mind is everything when it comes to mental health, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle. The deeper I have gone into my healing journey, the more I have realized that the body knows all. The intellectual mind actually causes more hindrances than benefits, as it develops specific thought patterns to block us from feeling what our body needs to process to become unified with the mind. And when we block feelings we need to process for long enough, disease enters our system, either through mental or physical illness. The goal here is to be unified in mind and body, and we get there by honoring our feelings and allowing them to tell us a story that needs to be heard. If we refuse to go into our bodies and stay in our heads forever, then we will hold on to the same protective thoughts that we have been creating since we were a child. These protective intellectual loops are the key mechanisms of the ego. We can only break this stronghold if we go into the body and honor what it needs to release/tell us. But what the fuck does this have to do with mythology? Mythology can aid us in bridging the gap between bodily emotions and the intellectual mind. In other words, it can help explain why our pain is occurring and how we can overcome it. But we can only receive this explanation if we have allowed ourselves to feel the pain. For instance, when I was watching Star Wars a couple of months ago and discovered how Luke saving Leia was a metaphor for a man having to slay his own demons to freely love the feminine, the discovery only came through because I previously allowed myself to feel the pain being conveyed in the movie.
I had felt the pain of seeing how my shadows from childhood trauma had the desire and capacity to control and cause harm to the woman I love. In other words, I faced the demons sitting at bay and went through the battle of attempting to chop their heads off. I also had felt the pain of coming to terms with these demons as a part of me. Just like a hero earns his scars from fighting monsters, one earns emotional scars from battling the demons inside. Because my mind and body had gone through the metaphorical journey conveyed in the movie, I was able to understand its symbolic nature quite quickly. Additionally, the myth allowed me to deepen the connection between body and mind surrounding this specific topic. It reminded me at a deep level that more work needed to be done around a specific area, specifically in integrating that my woman does not need saving from her own pain, but rather, I had to save her and I from myself. This is the magic of mythology if you have created the room to receive it: it shows you the blind spots in your own healing journey and what needs to be done to address them. But, again, honing this point in deeper, you can only receive the blueprint if you have allowed yourself to feel and recognize the pain inside being metaphorically portrayed in the myth. So, by getting to know and feeling all the pain inside yourself, you can allow yourself to find a powerful lesson in every story.
LIVING THE MYTH
Once you have recognized a blueprint or a direction you must follow after being activated from a myth, this is when the journey begins. In terms of my myth, once I discovered the message Drop Dead Fred was speaking to me, I had to take action to make something out of it. Again, the message was that I had forgotten about my inner child since a young age and actively pushed it away, because that’s how I thought I would receive love. Put differently, I thought I had to be someone outside of my true, playful nature to be admired and respected. So, the blueprint the film gave me was that, in order to find freedom, I had to honor that goofy inner child as much as I possibly could. This is where something I like to call “The Curriculum” comes in. What can you do on a daily/weekly basis to honor the lesson you have received? For me, it was finding activities and meditations that brought out my playful, inner child and practicing them consistently. And what’s cool about some of these myths is that they can actually reveal the curriculum metaphorically. In Drop Dead Fred, the protagonist finally decides to enjoy the juvenile escapades of her imaginary friend, rather than shut him up or hate whenever he does something immature. The metaphor here was showing me to enjoy the imaginative desires of my inner child and honor them, rather than suppressing them and acting opposite to them when a juvenile opportunity arises. If you look carefully enough, your specific myth can show you the curriculum you need to follow to find freedom, but you must take relentless action to taste the nectar.
The way to take aggressive action is by implementing daily habits. I believe that if we fundamentally change the way we feel and think, we shift our identity, which completely changes our perception of reality. Think about a time where a devastating piece of news hit you. This piece of news filled you with grief, which triggered negative, heavy thoughts, creating a hellish reality. This was all due to a deep shift in a baseline feeling and way of thinking. So, to get the opposite effect, and fill our bodies with the feelings we desire and our minds with the thoughts that make us happy, we have to create new daily habits that put us in this headspace. In terms of the myth, if the story is guiding you towards a new expression of self where you are more free, happy, etc., then you must create daily habits that get you to that place. For my myth, which instructed me to become more like my funny, playful, childlike self to become free, I had to implement habits that got me to that place. Thus, I started to watch more comedy, play more sports, collect more cards, dance more often, read more comics, and play dumb video games. Although I do still accomplish serious work, I make sure to cut out time to engage in these playful habits which bring out my childlike self.
In sequence, to get the most out of your myth, create a curriculum that allows you to act on the lesson you received from the story, which both draws from the myth itself, but also your own creativity as to what habits will help you become the person the myth is guiding you towards.
RECREATING THE MYTH
This is the fun part. Once you have created your curriculum and followed it rigorously, witnessing the changes you wanted to occur dramatically alter your quality of life, the time comes to use that higher expression of self to create. In other words, how can you use the change of self that the myth inspired to fuel your creative output? This process is essentially your subjective sequel of your favorite myth. In terms of my own journey with Drop Dead Fred, once I integrated the inner child, although still an everyday process, I brought that goofy self to the work I created and my relationships. Furthermore, I learned about how to escape the pain that comes with having no sense of inner youth, fueling my ability to heal and help those who are suffering with the same wound. In combination, my sequel of the myth involved attacking life with more of a playful lens, especially my creative life, and being able to be of service to those struggling with childhood trauma.
Author Steven Pressfield talks about a transition from the hero’s journey to the artist’s journey, where one goes from saving themselves from the darkness within and using that newfound light to create. I couldn’t agree more with this way of thinking, but in terms of how it pertains to this article, allow your favorite childhood myth to instruct you on the hero’s journey that is required of you. And once that journey has been completed, use that heroic light to fuel your artistic output. However, in my opinion, the cycle does not stop here. Many different parts of ourselves are still in deep pain, which require our continuous heroic journey inside to heal. And once you have healed a certain side of yourself, you can always use that new knowledge to create a higher quality of art that rings truer to your heart. This cycle will keep on going forever and that’s the beauty of life.
Always allow mythology to open you up to what parts of yourself remain in darkness and require a journey inside to bring light to. It’s then up to you to figure out how to create the sequel to the story.
