The Hero's Journey E-Book

Stephen Gilligan

• Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Seitenzahl: 489

Beschreibung

Stephen Gilligan and Robert Dilts truly take you on a voyage of self-discovery. The Hero's Journey examines the questions: How can you live a meaningful life? What is the deepest life you are called to, and how can you respond to that call? It is about how to discover your calling and how to embark on the path of learning and transformation that will reconnect you with your spirit,change negative beliefs and habits, heal emotional wounds and physical symptoms, deepen intimacy, and improve self-image and self-love. Along this path we inevitably meet challenges and confronting these challenges forces us to develop and think in new ways and push us outside our comfort zone. The book takes the form of a transcript of a four day workshop conducted by Stephen and Robert. It is a powerful way of learning as you are so absorbed by the experiences of the participants that you feel you are actually there. A wonderful voyage of discovery for everyone who thinks that, "there must be more to life than this".

Leseprobe

The Hero’s Journey

The Hero’s Journey

A voyage of self-discovery

Stephen Gilligan and Robert Dilts

Crown Housing Publishing Limited

www.crownhouse.co.ukwww.crownhousepublishing.com

First published by Crown House Publishing Ltd Crown Buildings, Bancyfelin, Carmarthen, Wales, SA33 5ND, UKwww.crownhouse.co.uk

and

Crown House Publishing Company LLC 6 Trowbridge Drive, Suite 5, Bethel, CT 06801-2858, USAwww.crownhousepublishing.com

© Stephen Gilligan and Robert Dilts 2009

The right of Stephen Gilligan and Robert Dilts to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2009. Reprinted 2010, 2011

Page 5, “Love after Love” from Collected Poems 1948–1984 by Derek Walcott. Copyright © 1986 Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, LLC and Faber and Faber Limited.

Page 89, “Our Deepest Fear” from A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson. Copyright © 1996 Maianne Williamson. reprinted by kind permission of HarperCollins.

Page 154, “Sweet Darkness” from House of Belonging by David Whyte Copyright © 1999, Many Rivers Press, PO Box 868, Langley, Washington printed with permission from Many Rivers Press www.davidwhyte.com

Page 159, “Lost” from Travelling Light by David Wagoner. Copyright © David Wagoner, 1999. Used with permission of University of Illinois Press.

Page 161, somewhere i have travelled, glady beyond is reprinted from Complete Poems 1904–1962, by E. E. Cummings edited by George J. Firmage, by permission of W.W. Norton & Company © 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust and George James Firmage.

Page 223, “Wild Geese” from Dream Work, copyright © 1986 Mary Oliver. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Page 249, “East Coker” from The Four Quartets by TS Eliot © 2001 TS Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber.

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owners. Enquiries should be addressed to Crown House Publishing Limited.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-184590286-5 LCCN 2009936660

Printed and bound in the UK by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow

Contents

Day 1

Introduction and Overview

The Beginning of the Journey

First Premise: Spirit is Waking Up

Second Premise: Spirit is Awakening through a Human Nervous System

Third Premise: Each Life is a Hero’s Journey

The Hero’s Journey Framework

Steps in the Hero’s Journey

1. The Calling

2. The Refusal of the Call

3. Crossing the Threshold

4. Finding Guardians

5. Facing Your Demons and Shadows

6. Developing an Inner Self

7. The Transformation

8. The Return Home

The Generative Self

The Three Minds: Somatic, Cognitive, and Field

Three Levels of Consciousness: Primitive, Ego, and Generative

The Principles for Creating a Generative Self

Developing a Generative Somatic Consciousness

Exercise: Connecting with Your Center

Exercise: Speaking and Listening from Your Center

Bringing the Three Minds Together in Support of the Calling

Exercise: Aligning the Three Minds to Realize Your Calling

Demonstration with Marcos

The Challenge of Sustaining Your Connection to Your Center

Exercise: Active Centering

Demonstration with Carmen

The Generative Somatic State

Learning to Be with What is Moving through You

Conclusion: Keeping Your Channel Open

Day 2

Generative Cognitive Consciousness

Sponsorship

Practicing Sponsorship

Exercise: Questions for Your Hero’s Journey

Demonstration with Stephen

Skills of Sponsorship

Dealing with Resistance and Refusal

Exercise: Beginning the Hero’s Journey

Demonstration with Vincent

Summary: Transforming Inner Resistance through Self-Sponsorship

Integrating the “Shadow”

Transforming “Good Self” and “Bad Self” into Positive Complementarities

Exercise: “Good Self/Bad Self” Identity

Demonstration with Stephen and Robert

Sponsoring Archetypal Patterns of Transformation

Exercise: Moving through Archetypes of Transition

Closing: Sweet Darkness

Day 3

The Generative Field

Practices for Connecting to the Field

Creating an Energy Ball

Accessing the Field Mind through Presence

Your “Second Skin”

Exercise: Developing a “Second Skin”

Demonstration with Eva

Archetypal Energies: Tenderness, Fierceness, and Playfulness

Exercise: Energy Spheres and Archetypal Energies – Creating Transformational Futures

Demonstration with Rosa

Mindfulness and “Opening Beyond”

Exercise: Seeing the Field

Demonstration with Eric

Skills for Opening to the Field

Closing: The Pattern that Connects

Day 4

Navigating the Journey

The Importance of Practice

Self-Sponsorship through Expanding Awareness

Exercise: Self-Sponsorship for Health and Healing – Utilizing Ongoing Awareness

The 5Rhythms® of the Journey: Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, and Stillness

Exercise: Exploring the 5Rhythms®

Finding Guardians

Exercise: Gathering Your Guardians

Demonstration with Alice

Conclusion: The Return

Bibliography

Day 1

Introduction and Overview

We (authors Stephen Gilligan and Robert Dilts) have been on a journey together for more than 30 years that started back in the early 1970s when we were students at the University of California at Santa Cruz. It was there that we met and worked extensively with Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the founders of NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP). We also had the tremendous opportunity to study with Gregory Bateson, who many consider one of the greatest minds of the last century, and Milton Erickson, who is arguably the most brilliant psychiatrist, hypnotherapist, and healer who has ever lived.

After we graduated, each of us went our own way, only to reconnect in the mid-1990s. We were both married and with growing children by then, and had both established our own separate and successful professional paths – Stephen in Ericksonian Hypnosis and Psychotherapy and Robert in NeuroLinguistic Programming. We discovered, however, that our different journeys had brought us to many similar experiences and conclusions.

The idea of each life being a potential “hero’s journey” is one of our most passionate shared interests.

The essence of the hero’s journey is: How do you live a meaningful life? What is the deepest life you are called to? How can you respond to that call?

If you don’t find that calling, you’re likely to live in a lot of misery – to be unhappy, feel lost or confused, or perhaps end up with some significant problems. Perhaps a health issue, a career confusion, or a dysfunctional relationship.

To live a hero’s journey will provide the most amazing rewards, but to turn away from it may cause tremendous suffering. So what we hope to do in this book is to help you sense and discover what your journey is, and how you might live it fully and deeply. Our interest is to explore how you can connect and align with the deepest part of your spirit, so that everything that you feel and think and do in the world is aligned with the human spirit.

A hero’s journey is about a type of awakening and a type of opening – an opening to what life is bringing you and calling from you. And this calling is not always easy. Otherwise you wouldn’t need to be a hero to do it.

There’s a great benefit of the hero’s journey, which is a sense of a meaning, a sense of being alive in the world. But with that benefit comes also the challenge, the cost. Wherever there is light, there will always be shadows – and in fact you could say the brighter the light, the darker the shadows. And living a full life is about holding and addressing both, the shadows as well as the light.

Another way of talking about this is that we’re going to be focusing equally on what we call the gift and the wound. We say that deep within each of us is a gift that we’re here to give into the world. But equally deep within each of us is a woundedness. And a woundedness, of course, does not just start with our own personal life – we carry the wounds of our family; we carry the wounds of our culture; we carry the woundedness of our planet. So the hero’s journey is about sensing how to be able to deeply connect in a positive way to both of these energies.

Thus, a hero’s journey is simultaneously about living your gifts and healing your wounds. Your power and your fullness are in both of these energies. And those two things will be there as major influences on your intimate relationships, your professional life, your health, and your development as a person – this simultaneous process of healing and sharing your gifts will always be there.

The Beginning of the Journey

The majority of this book has been drawn from a transcript of a seminar that we did on the topic of the hero’s journey in Barcelona, Spain. We believe that the hero’s journey is a dynamic, alive, and constantly evolving process. Thus, we feel it is appropriate for a book on the hero’s journey to preserve the spontaneity, humor, and feel of a live seminar. We have indicated our names in relationship to our personal contributions in order to maintain the unique flavor of our different perspectives. Enjoy the journey!

Steve Gilligan: Good morning, everybody, and welcome! We’ve got a lot to cover in this program.

Robert Dilts: (In an excited voice) Are you ready for a journey?

SG: (Voice like a preacher) Brothers and sisters, are you ready?

RD: Say amen!

(“Amens” and laughter from the audience.)

SG: Mmmm . . . that’s what we like to hear! So now that you’re a bit out of your rational selves, we want to take advantage of it and deepen it by honoring our daily tradition of reading a poem. Partly this is to honor our Irish roots.

RD: We’re both half Irish. My half is the bad half. (Laughter.)

SG: And even more importantly than our Irish roots, in this search we really want to emphasize language as metaphoric and poetic at its base. We see literal language as a secondary language, and we see metaphor and symbolic language as the primary language.

RD: There’s an interesting book by a linguist named George Lakoff that is called Metaphors We Live By. Lakoff points out that we usually think of metaphor as being a secondary language process to the fundamental, literal language. But he argues, as do we, that it’s actually the other way around – our fundamental language is metaphorical. A child lives in a world of stories and metaphors long before he or she learns literality. So the language of our heart and the language of our soul is metaphorical, not literal.

SG: From a practical level, this means that we’re especially interested in how language enters the body; how it touches the body and awakens experiential–symbolic experience in the body. So when we talk about the hero’s journey, we’re going to be exploring that not in terms of some intellectual concept, but as a distinction that, as you breathe it deeply through your body, begins to awaken all of this experience within your body.

RD: They say in Papua New Guinea culture that “knowledge is only a rumor until it’s in the muscle.” So your hero’s journey and your calling are just rumors, just ideas, until they get in your muscle. Your goals, your resources, your potentials – they’re rumors until they’re brought into the muscle, the breath, the body. Then and only then do they become living ideas that can transform your lives. So we would like for you to leave here more alive. Anybody want to be more alive?

SG: (Enthusiastically and playfully) Say amen!

(Laughter and “amens” from the audience.)

SG: The poem that I want to share with you is by a British poet named Derek Walcott. You’ll hear in this poem Walcott talking about the two selves that are part of the legacy of each of us as human beings. He (along with many others) suggests that we have two different selves – you might call one the experiencing or performance self, and the other the witnessing self. Another set of terms we’ll use is the somatic self and the cognitive self. A big part of what we’re going to be exploring is the connection between these two minds. Is their relationship hostile? Is it dissociated? Is it one of dominance and submission? Or are these two minds within you living in harmony? Because when they’re living in harmony, then your hero’s journey can really open up into the world. So here’s what Derek Walcott has to say about this relationship:

Love After Love

The day will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was yourself.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

SG: So we hope that by the end of our journey together here you can peel your image from the mirror and feast on your own life . . . that the two selves within you can unite into a deeper Generative Self that lives the hero’s journey.

RD: In that same spirit, I have a couple of short readings. The first is a poem about growing older, hearing one’s calling in the body, and of sensing the deeper power of spirit that emerges in aging. It’s an excerpt from “Sailing to Byzantium” by the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats. It evokes for Stephen and me something of what we learned from Milton Erickson, who was a sponsor and teacher to both of us. When we knew him he was old and crippled, struggling with terrible pain, and yet he seemed to find a connection with a source deeper than his infirmities. For me this poem is about how in many ways the hero’s journey never ends. Yeats writes:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress.

RD: So, during our journey together here, may soul come and visit you and clap its hands and sing, and let every mortal tatter of your being come alive with celebration and contribution.

The other quotation I have is from Martha Graham, who is considered to be one of the foremost pioneers of modern dance. She taught, choreographed, and danced well into her nineties, perhaps because of her approach to life which she describes in the following way:

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not yours to determine how good it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep the channel open.

RD: This is the essence of the hero’s journey: keeping your channel open. A key part of this journey is to identify and release what closes your channel down and causes you to lose your vitality and your life force. So we will be seeking to discover and transform the shadowy forces that block you from expressing your unique energy in the world. One of the main goals of this program is to help you develop tools through which you can keep your channel open – whether it’s with your children, your intimate partner, at work, or just going about your daily life – even sitting in a seminar. It’s your business on your hero’s journey to keep your channel open – and let life flow through you.

First Premise: Spirit is Waking Up

SG: The first core premise that we want to offer for navigating the hero’s journey is:

Spirit is awakening into the world.

Everything else we can orient to – thoughts, behavior, experience, relationship dynamics – are all seen as expressions of spirit waking up. And it’s using all these forms – behaviors, thoughts, time, space, identity, and so forth – as the means to do it. By sensing and aligning to spirit at each moment, the hero’s journey activates.

RD: There’s that old question: Are we animals pretending to be gods, or are we gods pretending to be animals?

SG: What are the choices again? (Laughter.)

RD: So we are spirit waking up, both divine and human.

SG: This idea of the primacy of spirit was presented in the book Of Water and the Spirit, an autobiography by Malidoma Somé, a beautiful man who was born and raised in West Africa before coming to the West to teach. He talks about how in his cultural tradition it is assumed that when a baby is born, that baby has just come from another world, the world of spirit. And that furthermore, the spirit has chosen this time, this family, and this culture to be born into because he or she has a gift to give to the world.

We have also suggested that in addition to a gift to give, spirit also has a wound to heal. But in both cases, you can sense underlying any experiential moment, this living, pulsating consciousness that is looking to awaken. And by aligning with that, good things will happen.

The name Malidoma, interestingly, means “one who brings ritual to the enemy.” In his culture, the baby is taken by the elders shortly after birth, and for several days the circle of elders ask the spirit in a ritual language: “Why have you come? What is the gift you have come to bring?” In Malidoma’s case, it was sensed that he had come to bring a healing gift of ritual to the West, which, in the view of Malidoma’s people, had seriously lost its deeper connection to spirit and was wreaking havoc as a result. Malidoma’s grandfather, a chief elder, prophesied that Malidoma would venture to the West to bring this gift. To shorten a very beautiful story of Malidoma’s hero’s journey, this is indeed what happened. There are many ways to sense the primacy of spirit. One common way is to hold a newborn or connect with a young child and feel his or her primacy of spirit.

RD: When you hold a newborn baby, it is easy to experience the sense of awe of being in the presence of spirit. You really feel what Martha Graham was saying about this unique energy that is coming into the world. And to stay attuned to that unique living presence is what guides the hero’s journey.

Second Premise: Spirit is Awakening through a Human Nervous System

SG: To this first core premise, we can add a second:

Spirit is awakening through a human nervous system.

At one level, of course, this seems like a trivial idea, because it’s so obvious. But it’s important to appreciate that the human nervous system is the most advanced, generative musical instrument or computational device that has ever existed. Nothing even comes close to it, in terms of its capacity, its complexity, its power. The Buddhists like to say that when you get a human nervous system, you’ve really hit the jackpot! You’ve won the grand lottery. You might imagine a bunch of spirits lined up, waiting to come into this world, each one waiting to be issued a nervous system for the journey. You watch the spirit in line ahead of you be given a snake nervous system, the next one gets a giraffe, and then when you step up to the desk, they say, “OK, you get a human nervous system.” Perhaps you remember that amazing time . . . you were so extraordinarily excited, so lucky, so happy, because you knew that having a human nervous system gave you the most amazing potential for transformation and self-realization of consciousness. This human nervous system gives you all the possibilities to live the hero’s journey.

But of course, it comes with no operating instructions. And you forget its brilliance once you enter human society, with the televisions turned on, the gossip going on, and the commercials humming. One of the downsides of having such a sensitive biocomputer is that if it’s not tuned properly, some nasty experiences can be created through it.

Third Premise: Each Life is a Hero’s Journey

SG: We mention this at the outset of this work on the hero’s journey, so we can appreciate that to go on the journey, we first need to sense the spirit underlying it all, then tune the nervous system that’s unfolding the journey. This leads us to the third basic premise:

Spirit is unfolding through time / space on a hero’s journey.

So in addition to spirit and nervous system, we emphasize this third component of the journey unfolding across an arc of time. We see a person’s life as this beautiful path that includes past, present, and future – many experiential moments joined together to unfold a beautiful story, sing an amazing song, dance a unique movement. At one level of this journey you are alone. At another, you are being helped by many positive beings, some of whom you are not even aware are there.

RD: In the model of the hero’s journey, we call such beings guardians. In Stephen’s Generative Self work, which we will intertwine with the hero’s journey, they are called sponsors. These positive figures remind you and support your deepest call in many ways.

For example, on the Pacific island of Togo, when a baby is born, the women of the village perform a ritual with the new mother. They take her and the baby into the forest and gather around the newly arrived spirit. They sit with this baby, sensing the unique spirit of this new life, and then at a certain moment, one of them begins to make a musical sound. Another woman adds to it, then another, and in this way the community unfolds the creation of a song for that baby. The song is completely unique and just for that baby.

Throughout his or her life, at birthdays and other ritual times, the women gather and sing the song. And if the child does something bad or becomes sick, instead of punishing or medicating the child, the women gather around and sing the song to remind the child of who he is or she is. So the song becomes a way to support the development of the hero’s journey for that being throughout a lifetime. And when the person dies, the community sings the song one last time and then it’s never sung again.

This is a beautiful example of how we all need guardians to reminds us of our true nature, to support us in opening our channel again and again and again.

SG: The need for such guardians is especially important when we consider all the counter-forces that try to hypnotically persuade us that we have no living spirit to unfold on this journey through life. Consider, for example, the dominant force of contemporary society, namely the trance of consumerism. This hypnotic spell says: “You have no spirit inside of you. You have no hero’s journey. Your main purpose is to buy refrigerators. Your main purpose in this world is to eat cheeseburgers.”

RD: McDonalds and Starbucks.

SG: Robert and I are proud to be Americans – for bringing all these wonderful gifts to the world. (Laughter.)

RD: And as you separate from your spirit, the channel begins to close. As the channel closes, you begin to become lost in your wounds – and there’s an attempt to compensate for the pain by consuming more. “If I just have another color TV, a new car, new shoes, then I’ll be OK. Then I’ll be acceptable as a person. Then I’ll feel more alive.”

SG: Frequently, the symptoms that occur in a person’s life are like the singing of the Togo women. Their purpose is to call you back to your spirit. In other words, you can understand a person’s experience in each moment as, the spirit is trying to wake up into the world. And you can understand the particularly intense experiences that people have, both positive and negative, as what is referred to in the hero’s journey as the call.

RD: A call to action. A call to adventure. A call to be. A call to return to your spirit.

SG: And some people may never hear the call. Others hear it, but refuse it. As a psychologist who does lots of psychotherapy, one of the major diagnoses that I give to clients is: “It appears to me that you are constitutionally incapable of being a couch potato.” A couch potato is someone who sits on the couch watching TV, drinking beer, and eating potato chips for so long that he or she starts to actually look like a potato. (Laughter.) And at the end of this person’s life, the gravestone reads: “He watched a lot of TV, ate a lot of potato chips, and complained all of his life. Next!” (Laughter.)

So we are asking you to deeply consider: At the end of it all, what would you like your gravestone to read?

Some people are contented to just live like couch potatoes, settling into what Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation.” Some can do that; just run out the clock and live in a fog all their lives. But others, what I call the lucky ones, cannot; and their soul creates terrible disturbances and suffering to say, “Wake up! Wake up! Your life is about something more than this low level trance!”

One of the things we will be touching upon in this work is how to recognize your problems as “calls to return” and “calls to awaken” on your hero’s journey, so you can have a positive and helpful relationship to these inevitable problems, utilizing them for your own growth and awakening.

RD: I work a lot in companies and organizations as a coach and a consultant. To me, it is very obvious when an organization has lost its soul – or when people sell their souls or their integrity. The major job of a coach is to help people reawaken their connection to their souls.

At the level of identity, we can say that we have two dynamics – there’s a soul and there’s an ego. The ego is the part of us that is built from the wounds. It is related to what is called in psychology “the idealized self” – who I think I have to be in order to be loved, in order to be acceptable, in order to be OK. This ego becomes a type of trap for the soul – and you see this in companies. And then sometimes a magic happens, and that soul is there again, singing its unique song and unfolding its unique journey.

To give you an interesting organizational example: I have a colleague who was involved in a study conducted by a large telecommunications company as a result of a huge failure they had experienced. They had been in a very competitive situation and needed to develop a product quickly to keep their share of this particular market area. The project was so important that they put 1,000 people to work on it. As it turned out, one of their competitors was able to beat them to market with a product that was of better quality, more economical, and quicker to produce. The reason for the study was that this competitor accomplished this with a team of only 20 people. The big question was: How is it possible for 20 people to so soundly outperform 1,000? In the language of the hero’s journey, we would say that 20 people with their channels open – 20 souls committed to a calling – will always outperform 1,000 egos who are just doing their job and nothing more.

So how does “soul clap its hands and sing” in an organization? What brings and sustains that sense of aliveness, creativity, and vision in the life of a person, a relationship, or a group? This is one of the core questions we want to explore in this work. We hope that the material and the processes that we explore will be relevant to all of you in an important way.

The Hero’s Journey Framework

RD: To begin to develop a general framework for this journey, we start with the work of Joseph Campbell. Campbell was the American mythologist who for many years studied all the different stories, legends, and myths, involving both women and men, from different cultures throughout history. Campbell noticed that across all of these stories and examples there was a certain “deep structure” that he called the “hero’s journey.” His first book was entitled Hero with a Thousand Faces, to emphasize that there are many different ways that this hero’s journey can be expressed, but they all share a common framework. The following steps represent a simple version of that roadmap offered by Campbell, and is the one we will use to help us navigate the course of our own hero’s journeys during this program.

Steps in the Hero’s Journey

1. Hearing the call

2. Committing to the call (overcoming the refusal)

3. Crossing the threshold (the initiation)

4. Finding guardians

5. Facing and transforming demons

6. Developing an inner self and new resources

7. The transformation

8. Returning home with the gift.

1. The Calling

RD: The journey begins with a calling. We come into the world, and the world presents circumstances to us that call for or draw out our unique life force or vitality, as Martha Graham would say. Author Eckhart Tolle, who wrote The Power of Now, says that the primary function of the soul is to awaken. We don’t come into this world to sleep. We come to awaken, and awaken again, and to grow and evolve. So the calling is always a call to grow, to contribute, to bring more of that vitality or life energy into the world or back into the world.

SG: Often the call to action comes from a challenge, a crisis, a vision, or somebody in need. Something has been lost and needs to be regained; some power in the world has decayed and needs to be renewed; some core part of life has been wounded and needs to be healed; some great challenge has arisen and needs to be met. But equally the call may come from inspiration and joy: you hear a piece of great music and you awaken to a dimension of beauty that you passionately want to unfold more of in the world; you feel an amazing love for parenting, and it calls you to raise that archetypal power into the world; you fall in love with your work, and it’s all you can think of. As we will see, the call to the hero’s journey can come from both great suffering and great joy, sometimes both at the same time.

RD: We should emphasize that the calling of the hero is very different from a personal goal that comes from the ego. The ego would like another television set and some more beer, or at least to be rich and famous. The soul doesn’t want or need that; it wants to awaken, heal, connect, create; it awakens to the call of deep challenges, not for ego glorification but to serve and honor life. When a fireman or a policeman runs into a burning building to save someone, this is not a desired goal. It’s a challenge and it’s a risk, and there’s no guarantee of success. Otherwise you wouldn’t need to be a hero. So the calling demands courage. It demands that you become more than you have been.

SG: Another thing we’ll be exploring is that you may hear the call in very different ways at different points of your life. In one of our exercises, we will ask you to trace the history of your calling. For example, a simple version of that inquiry is the following: “Take a few moments and sense back through your life, letting yourself become aware of different experiences that really touched you, that awakened a deep sense of aliveness and beauty inside of you.” A similar question is: “What do you do in your life that really brings you beyond your normal self?” Your responses to these questions will bring out some of the ways you have felt the call.

As we will continue to emphasize, your soul swells and your spirit brightens when you hear the call. By noticing when this happens, you can begin to sense, track, and support your hero’s journey. This is what Campbell meant when he said, “Follow your bliss!” Many have misunderstood this as an encouragement to hedonism, rather than sensing that the places when your spirit burns the brightest – when you feel “bliss” – are signs of what you are most here to do in this world.

RD: As Stephen was saying earlier, sometimes the call comes from symptoms or suffering. When my mother was in her early fifties, she had a reoccurrence of breast cancer that had metastasized throughout her body – not only to her other breast, but also to her ovaries, bladder, and the bone marrow of every bone in her body. The doctors gave her at best a few months to live. As you can imagine, it was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. At first she felt very much a victim and not at all a hero.

I helped her to begin to explore questions such as: What is the calling in the cancer? What is the cancer calling me to become? My mother opened to this journey of inquiry deeply, and it completely changed her life. To the great surprise of her doctors, she had a remarkable recovery and lived another 18 years almost completely symptom free. She would later look back at that time and say: “That was the best thing that ever happened to me! I was lucky. I got to live two lives: the one before I got cancer the second time and the one after that. And the second life was so much better than the first.”

The question we will be exploring in this program is: What is life calling from you? This calling is probably not particularly easy – it’s probably not calling you to take a walk in the park. The calling is most likely difficult; a beautiful but challenging path. This path is typically disruptive of the status quo. When I work with people in companies, I point out that a calling is not simply an improvement of the present. A calling and a vision bring the future into the present and can completely disrupt the present, making it impossible to do things the way you used to.

A key part of the hero’s journey is the acceptance of the calling and the commitment to the journey.

2. The Refusal of the Call

RD: Precisely because the call can seem so challenging, it is often accompanied by what Campbell calls “the refusal.” The hero wants to avoid all the hassle it will bring. “No thanks. Let someone else do it. It’s too hard for me. I don’t have time for this. I’m not ready.” These are the sorts of responses that are typically used to refuse the call.

SG: And while some of the negative responses to the call may come from within, some come from outside – from family, friends, critics (what Campbell calls “ogres”), or society. You may be told, “That is unrealistic.” Or perhaps, as many girls and women are hypnotically told, “That would be selfish.” Sometimes this leads you to turn away from your calling, although fortunately not always.

I had a friend named Allan. Allan was one of the great figures in American postmodern art. He had wanted to be an artist as long as he could remember. But his father was a major lawyer in New York and wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. He would repeatedly insist, “You’re not going to be an artist. You’re going to be my junior partner.” He would bring the young Allan to his law offices and show him the office he had already reserved for him. Incredibly, his name was already on the door.

Allan’s unconscious mind was very creative and insistent. He developed severe asthma that forced him to move to the better climate of Tucson, Arizona, far from the hypnotic reaches of his father. Allan developed his art while he grew up in Arizona. This is a beautiful illustration of how his unconscious mind ensured that he could respond to his call. Many people have such stories of how in different ways, small and big, they evaded oppression in order to keep following their spirit.

RD: In my mother’s case, when she began to look within and make these changes in herself, her surgeon looked her straight in the eye and told her in no uncertain terms that this kind of exploration was “a bunch of poppycock” and would “drive her crazy.” And the doctor for whom she worked as a nurse said to her, “If you really care about your family, you won’t leave them unprepared” – which is an interesting “hypnotic suggestion.” The suggestion comes in the form of a presupposition: “You’re going to die, and to try to live is selfish. You should prepare yourself and all your loved ones for your death and stop making a fuss.” She decided to stop working for him soon after this.

Interestingly, this doctor got a serious illness about six years later. It wasn’t nearly as advanced as my mother’s, but his response was to take his own life. And it was never clear if she was a willing participant, but his wife died with him. Because, of course, he couldn’t “leave her unprepared.”

So there are messages that can come from inside or outside to block the path of your calling. A key part of our work will be to recognize and move beyond these messages.

3. Crossing the Threshold

RD: Once you respond to the call and really make the commitment to your path and your hero’s journey, it results in what Campbell calls the “crossing of the threshold.” You are now on the journey, you’re in the experience. “Let the games begin.” The word “threshold” has several meanings. One is the implication that beyond the threshold is a new frontier, a new territory, the unknown, the uncertain, the unpredictable, the shadowy promised land.

Another meaning of threshold is that you have reached the outer limits of your comfort zone. Before the threshold, you’re in known territory; you’re in your comfort zone, you know the lay of the land. Once you cross the threshold, you’re beyond your comfort zone. So it becomes difficult, challenging, risky, frequently painful, and perhaps even fatal. To enter this challenging new territory is a crucial challenge of the hero’s journey.

The third implication of a threshold is that it is a point of no return. You can’t go back. It’s like if you have a baby – you can’t easily say: “Oops, I made a mistake. This is too challenging. I don’t want it anymore. Take it back please.” Once across the threshold, there is only one way to go, and that is forward.

So your threshold is the point at which you’re going to go into a new and challenging territory that you’ve never been in before, and there’s no turning back.

SG: And it is precisely at that place that your ordinary mind will fail you. Your ordinary conscious mind only knows how to create different versions of what has already happened (a bit like “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” in order to try to save the ship). It cannot generate new realities. So as you realize that your conscious mind can’t be the lead system in the journey, it is common to experience disconcerting responses – paralysis, confusion, trembling, uncertainty, passing out, and so on. These are the “subtle cues” that you are being called beyond where you’ve ever been before.

This idea that your ordinary conscious mind cannot lead your hero’s journey will be a central one in this work. Therefore, one of our major practical explorations will be how to reorganize your consciousness at those points to what we will be calling a Generative Self – one capable of supplying you with the wisdom and courage to navigate the hero’s journey.

4. Finding Guardians

RD: As you begin to travel along your hero’s journey, Campbell points out that you must find guardians. Who are the ones that are going to sing my song and remind me of who I am? Who are the ones that have the knowledge or the tools that I need and know nothing about? Who can remind me that the journey is possible, and offer support when I most need it? Who are my teachers, my mentors, my sponsors, my awakeners?

This is a significant part of your learning on the journey – a constant search. Of course, it’s your journey and not one that anyone can do for you. You are the one you will most need to listen to, to learn from, and consult with. But at the same time, it’s also not a journey that you can make alone. It’s not an ego trip. It’s something that will challenge you beyond the capabilities that you currently possess.

In this regard, we find it helpful to distinguish between a hero and a champion. A hero is generally a normal human being who is called to an extraordinary circumstance by life. A champion is somebody who is fighting for an ideal that they think is the right way, the right map of the world. This ideal is right and anybody who opposes it is the enemy. So the champion imposes his or her own map of the world upon others.

SG: So the champion will says things like, “You’re either with us or against us,” and other memorable lines that you will hear from many priests and politicians. (Laughter.)

RD: “We fight for truth, justice and the American way . . . all over the world.” (Laughter.) “And we’re going to free your country by occupying it.”

SG: A small point about guardians. They can be actual people – friends, mentors, family members. They may also be historical figures or mythological entities. For example, when I consider my path as a healer and therapist, I sometimes meditate on all those who have gone before me, the great lineages of beings who have given their love and devoted their lives to forging traditions and ways of healing. In the meditation, I sense their support flowing through time, from different cultures and different places, coming to me as support for my humble journey. So another one of the great questions we’ll be exploring is: How do I sense and stay connected with those guardians that can guide and support me on my journey?

5. Facing Your Demons and Shadows

SG: A key difference between the hero and the champion is in the relationship to what Campbell called the “demons.” Demons are the entities that try to block your journey, at times even threatening your very existence and the existence of those with whom you are connected. One of the main challenges in the hero’s journey is how you deal with “negative otherness,” both within you and around you. The champion looks to dominate and destroy everything that’s different from his or her ego ideal. The hero operates at a higher level, one of relational transformation with the demons. The hero is called to do something that not only transforms his or her self, but also transforms the larger relational field in which he or she lives. This is change at a deeper level and, again, one that requires a different sort of consciousness, which is one of the main topics for our journey together.

RD: In many ways the climax of the hero’s journey is the confrontation with what we will call “the demon”; the seemingly malevolent presence that threatens you and is determined to keep you from achieving your calling. Campbell points out that while initially the demon is perceived as outside of you and against you, the hero’s journey brings you to recognize that the problem is not what is outside of you, it is what is within you. And that the demon is ultimately just an energy that is neither good nor bad. It is just an energy; a phenomenon.

What makes something a demon is the fact that I’m afraid of it or intimidated by it. If I wasn’t afraid, it wouldn’t be a demon. What turns something or someone into a demon is my response to it – my anger, my frustration, my grief, my guilt, my shame about it, and so on. That’s what makes the problem seem so difficult. The demon holds a mirror to us. It reveals our inner shadow – the responses, feelings, or parts of ourselves that we don’t know how to be with. I sometimes refer to them as our “internal terrorists.”

SG: In practical terms, the demon might be an addiction, a depression, an ex-wife . . . (Laughter.)

RD: In a company it can be a financial crisis, the recession, a new competitor, and so on.

SG: Your demon could be Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, or George Bush. (Laughter.)

RD: The demon could be a health issue, or it could be your boss, your mother, your mother-in-law, or your child. The point is that what we (and Joseph Campbell) are ultimately suggesting is: What makes something a demon is your relationship with it.

6. Developing an Inner Self

RD: So a hero’s journey is always a journey of transformation, especially a transformation of oneself. When I work in companies and organizations, I talk about the difference between the outer game of a business and what author Timothy Gallwey calls “the inner game.” Success in any activity – whether it’s a sport, your work, your intimate relationship, an artistic pursuit – requires a certain degree of mastery of the outer game (e.g. the specific players, the setting, the rules, the physical skills needed, the behavior patterning). Many people can learn the outer game fairly well, but the highest level of performance can only be reached by also mastering the inner game. This is a function of one’s ability to deal with stress, failure, pressure, criticism, slumps, drops in confidence, and so on.

One of the things that a hero must learn is how to play this inner game. It involves much more than our cognitive mind. It is a function of emotional intelligence, somatic intelligence, and spiritual wisdom, which involves the connection to a larger field of consciousness – the deep sensing of an intelligence beyond the ego and intellect. On a hero’s journey, you have to grow. You cannot be a hero and refuse to learn and grow.

SG: The cultivation of the inner game can be described in many ways. We will call it here the development of an inner self, an intuitive intelligence that connects the conscious mind with a larger consciousness that allows greater confidence, deeper understanding, more subtle awareness, and increased capacity at many levels.

7. The Transformation

RD: As you develop new resources within yourself and find your guardians you become ready to face your demons (and ultimately your own inner shadows) and engage in the great transformational challenge of the journey. Campbell refers to these challenges as your “trials.”

SG: This is the time of great struggle, dedication, and battle that leads to the creation of new learnings and resources. It is here that you create within yourself and in the world that which has never existed before. This is what we mean by generative: going beyond what has ever been to create something completely new. This process, of course, can take a long period of time. It could be 20 years of a marriage, a lifetime of work, or years of exploration and innovation. There will be many setbacks and failures; times when all seems lost and the future bleak. These are predictable elements of the hero’s journey. The hero is someone who can respond to these challenges and create new resources in order to successfully meet them. The transformation stage is when you have succeeded in your journey.

8. The Return Home

RD: The final stage of the hero’s journey is the return home. This return has several important purposes with respect to the journey. One of them is to share what you’ve learned on your journey with others. A hero’s journey is not just an individual ego trip; it is a transformational process done for both the person and for the larger community. So when a hero returns, he or she must find a way to share his or her realizations with others. Heroes frequently become teachers. In addition to giving, the hero must receive the recognition of others to complete the journey. Now you are transformed, you are different than you used to be. There needs to be an honoring of the journey.

SG: For example, a good friend of mine is a well known psychologist who has done some very interesting work. He shared with me that as a child, he would love to watch old movies on the lives of great scientists – people like Marie Curie, Louis Pasteur, and Sigmund Freud. Each of these movies follows a general “hero’s journey” pattern: the early calling, the commitment, the great battles, the hard-earned discoveries, and so forth. The typical end of such movies has the scientist standing in front of a large audience – the same people that scorned and attacked him or her earlier in the journey – and being given some great reward or acknowledgment for their life’s work. My friend would always find himself welling up at such movies, feeling within him a calling to contribute something very meaningful in the world. He told me this recently, after being given a lifetime achievement award in front of thousands of people, and sensing that movie ending happening in his own real world, just as he hypnotically attuned to it on the movie screen many years earlier. Those movies reflected his calling, and the award was a recognition that he had succeeded in the great challenge of his journey.

However, as Campbell points out, there can also be a lot of resistance at this stage. Sometimes the hero doesn’t want to come back. He or she is tired, perhaps wary that others won’t understand, or perhaps exalted in the new found state of higher consciousness. So just as there might be a refusal to answer the call, there might be a refusal to return. Sometimes, as Campbell explains, another person or being has to come and get the hero, to call them back home.

Another problem is that the community may not welcome the leader. Moses may come off the mountain to discover his people engaged in partying; warriors may return home from battle and not be welcomed, or their horrors not witnessed and honored; people may not want to listen to a story from a person whose journey reflects the needs for others in the community to do their own healing. So once the great struggle has been achieved within a higher state of consciousness, its integration into the ordinary consciousness of everyday living is a further great challenge.

Still, there are plenty of examples of heroes who have accomplished this final stage. We mentioned that Milton Erickson was a major mentor for both of us. He is a really good example of a complete hero’s journey. One of many interesting details of his life was that he was paralyzed from severe polio at the age of 17, which incidentally is around the (initiation into adulthood) age that a classic “wounded healer” is struck down with a severe illness or wound. So instead of being able to move through the traditional path of the mainstream society, such a person is separated from regular life and must begin his own healing journey. In Erickson’s case, the doctors told him he would never move again. Rather than merely submit to this negative suggestion, Erickson began a long series of mind–body explorations to see just what was possible in terms of healing his condition. Amazingly, he succeeded in regaining his ability to walk, and developed new understandings and resources about mind–body healing in the process. He then used these radical new learnings in his long career as a psychiatrist, helping others to learn about their own unique capacity for healing and transformation.

When we knew him, he was an aged man. He was in a lot of pain and quite weak, and couldn’t reliably handle a heavy patient load, so he was mostly seeing students. When I met him, I was a poor college student. I lived on ten dollars a week for food, which even back then wasn’t much. But I knew I had to study with this guy because he awakened something very deep in me. I asked him: “Dr. Erickson, can I come back regularly and be your student?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“How much money do I need to pay you?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure I can get some college loans, so if you tell me how much, I’ll make arrangements.”

He said: “Oh, that’s all right. You don’t have to pay me anything.” Which is what he said to all of us young students. He was retired, his house was paid off, his kids were out of the house, he had no major financial responsibilities. He was just giving back – donating his hard-earned hero’s gifts to the community. I went to see him for almost six years, and I never paid him any money. He would let us stay in his guest room or his office building. What he did say was, “The way that you can repay me is by passing on to others anything that you find here that is helpful to you. That’s how you can repay me!” There are many times I wish I had just paid off the old man with money to satisfy my debt (laughter) . . . but not really. I think you can sense that this is a beautiful story of a hero’s journey. And when I encountered him, he was in the final phase of returning to the community and passing on to others.

RD: By the way, not only did the doctors tell Erickson that he would never move again, when Erickson had just contracted the polio and was laying in bed he overheard them telling his mother that he wouldn’t live till the morning. He thought that was a terrible thing for anybody to say to a mother, so he felt he just had to make sure their judgment was not correct. He went on a journey in his body to try to find what he could move. The only things he could willfully move were his eyes. And so for several hours when his mother would come by, he would try to move his eyes to get her attention. Once he had managed this, for several more hours he struggled to work out a signal system and finally succeeded in communicating to her to turn his bed toward the window, so he could be sure to watch the sun come up the next day. So, “soul claps its hands” again! Something deep within consciousness is awakened, and the journey continues.

SG: These are the basic steps of the hero’s journey. This is the framework we will use through the rest of the program to allow you to discover and deepen your own hero’s journey. We’ll be exploring this mostly experientially. We’ll be doing demonstrations, especially asking you to work with each other to develop your own learnings and understandings. So you will be asked to work with yourself as well as be a good coach for others.

RD: A part of learning to be a good hero is also to be a good guardian. For those of you who are coaches and therapists, it will be important to do this from the awareness that it is your client’s journey, not yours. I see a lot of people, especially in the NLP world, who say, “Oh, my client is facing a demon! I’m the hero. I’m going to kill my client’s demon with my great technique! Swish it. Reframe it. Anchor it.” When you try to “rescue” or “cure” your client, you are sending the message, “Yes, you’re a victim. Stay a victim. I’m the hero.” Or on another level: “I’m a champion. I need a victim in order to have my ego feel good. I’m doing this for me, not you.” So keep this in mind: you are the guardian when you are the coach. You have your own hero’s journey, but so does your partner or client. Your job is not to be the hero on their journey, but rather a good guardian and resource.

So this is our map. The next step is to get it “in the muscle.”

The Generative Self

RD: We have gone over the basic road map of the hero’s journey, and we have suggested that there are certain principles and tools that can help in traveling that path. When you reach a threshold, for instance, when you reach a place where you have to step into unknown territory, you can no longer rely simply on the functioning and resources of your ordinary mind, the conscious cognitive mind. The good news is, you don’t have to. You have more than one mind. And the hero’s journey is an opportunity to get to learn more deeply about your other minds.

SG: So this is the second of the two major frameworks that we’re going to be exploring. The first framework relates to the steps of the hero’s journey. The second has to do with developing the tools and the consciousness necessary to make that journey. A key part of this second framework is called Generative Self. It is primarily based on the work I’ve developed over the past 30 years, starting out as a student of Erickson and then incorporating other work such as martial arts.

Figure 1.1 shows the core premises of the Generative Self. We touched upon the first three earlier, namely: (1) Spirit is waking up (2) through a human nervous system (3) on a hero’s journey. We now will move to (4), that the Generative Self has three minds that can be distinguished – somatic, cognitive, and field – and (5) each of these minds can operate at three different levels of consciousness: primitive (or regressive), basic, and generative. To travel your own hero’s journey, you will need to attune these three minds to their highest level, generative, so that transformation, creativity, and healing are possible. Our focus will be on raising your body, mind, and field consciousness to their highest generative levels, so that you can succeed on your hero’s journey.

1. “SPIRIT IS WAKING UP . . .

• Spirit has gift to give AND wound to heal

• Spirit is deepest identity

• Spirit activates whenever ordinary identity is destabilized (e.g. ecstasy or agony)

2. into HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

• The human nervous system is the most advanced instrument of consciousness ever developed

• If you don’t learn to play the instrument, you’re in trouble

• Your experience is a function of your state

• Attuned human conscious PLUS spirit EQUALS Generative Self

3. on HERO’S JOURNEY

• Each person’s life is an arc unfolding over time into the world

• The journey has many death and rebirth cycles

• At heart of hero’s journey is spirit waking up

• Suffering is a signal of misalignment with the call/journey

4. utilizing THREE MINDS

• Somatic, cognitive, and field

• Integration of three minds awakens the Generative Self

5. operating at THREE LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS”

• Primitive (unconscious wholeness, field without self-awareness)

• Ego (conscious separateness, awareness without field)

• Generative (conscious differentiated wholeness, parts and whole simultaneously)

Source: Stephen Gilligan, The five premises of the Generative Self (2004)

Figure 1.1: Five core ideas of the Generative Self approach.

The Three Minds: Somatic, Cognitive, and Field

SG: The first is the mind within your body. We call this the somatic mind