Podcast Transcript | Ep. 19
The Hero's Journey
The Hero's Journey | Ep. 19
[00:00:44] Hello and welcome back. I'm your host, Brandon Ward. Episode 19 today. Approaching. That elusive number 20. I've been doing this for four months now. Wild.
[00:00:59] Got a good show to cover today. We're going to be discussing the hero's journey. And the components of the hero journey. How it reflects in our day-to-day lives, how it reflects in the media and entertainment that we consume. It's really everywhere. And it's a universal concept. It's viewed as a pattern.
[00:01:24] That all of us go through or can go through. Joseph Campbell. Spent. His career. Focusing around this hero's journey. And what it is, how it reflects in society and culture and art, how it reflects in our lives. And there's been variations of it. His work is called the hero with a thousand faces. That's what it's based upon how these, how this hero's journey is throughout history cultures.
[00:01:56] And so it's broken down into three stages that we're going to cover, and then it goes into kind of components within those stages. So the three stages are departure, initiation and return. So starting with the departure. Is the beginning stage. This is where we all start. We all start in our state of ignorance. It's the known world. If you will.
[00:02:22] We are living in that world, somewhat clueless, most likely dissatisfied or yearning for more, but we're living in the known world often. The kind of ordinary or mundane world. So in, in stories, that's just the beginning of the movie or the show or whatever it may be. Describing the central character of the story in their current life.
[00:02:47] Rudimentary going to school, boring, unhappy mundane, for the most part, that's the common components of it.
[00:02:54] But in that there's something happening often. It's The world is decaying. The world that they know is decaying. So it needs to be restored. Or the world that they love, the good world is at threat to be overtaken or destroyed. And that can sometimes push the hero of the story to begin the journey. And so that aspect of it is called the call to adventure. So the call to adventure is where we must choose.
[00:03:25] To participate. In this adventure, the hero's journey. Now we can refuse that call, which many of us do the calls will continue to come because ultimately it's our opportunity as individuals to take the hero's journey, to grow, to expand, to evolve. So that call continues to come for many of us and in movies and stories.
[00:03:48] That call comes until the hero chooses to embark on the adventure to accept. The adventure. Now they may be excited about this because they were bored. Life has been mundane. So this is the call to action. It's the desire for adventure and the unknown venturing out into the world away from what is known.
[00:04:11] They also may be weary, skeptical, frayed, fearful. Hesitant feeling pulled on this journey, but really not feeling like they have much choice. If there's going to be the constant push to do this. And so many of us experience this call to adventure in our own lives. The desire to express the desire to share stories, the desire to create, to build businesses, to provide solutions.
[00:04:34] Whatever it may be. That is our own individual call to adventure. It yearns within us. And when there is that yearning, that feeling of.
[00:04:43] Emptiness or unsettled. There's something in us. That's desiring to get out. That's often our call to adventure. Usually at that point. Supernatural aid may come into play. We realize a strength that we have or some sort of potential power that we may have, or someone around us is helping support us. In this instance, I think showing up, choosing the adventure as a way that.
[00:05:06] Muse the muse can support us and help facilitate us. It's funny how life the universe will provide for us when we choose to embark upon the call of adventure. And how things can be provided for us. So sometimes that comes in the form of supernatural aid or some sort of benefit or discovery of a skill that can be leveraged in the adventure.
[00:05:27] So moving on, is that crossing into the first threshold? The that's where that conscious choice takes place. This is where we're effectively going down the rabbit hole. If you will, we are entering into the unknown. The unconscious is what this is often referred to as, so it's making a conscious choice to go into the unknown unconscious realms.
[00:05:49] This is really where the crazy adventure begins. And as I was mentioning down the rabbit hole, And Alice in Wonderland. That's a component of that. Going with Gandalf in the Hobbit or the Lord of the rings. Following him is a call to adventure and crossing over into the first threshold going to Hogwarts Harry Potter.
[00:06:11] There are these stories that are reflected out. Throughout our movies and culture and entertainment that we watch. Star wars is the same with Luke Skywalker, the call to learn the force, to go out into the world and learn what it means to be a Jedi. Leaving those mundane lives behind. And in that is the land of adventure. This is that strange new world, the unconscious world, the mysterious world.
[00:06:37] Moving from the mundane to the extraordinary, the. The magical, the mystical, the worlds that we have not yet seen so often. We're in unknown territory. And with that comes fear, excitement, adventure, all of these things. And so it's moving through that point. Learning and understanding and exploring this new world that we've discovered and been pulled into, been called into.
[00:07:03] So that is, is seeing this unknown world. Again this reflects within us, right? As we make the journey into self-mastery. If we, as we make the journey into self-expression to creating order within. We are moving into the unknown. We are moving into the unknown realms of ourselves, the infinite expanse of our consciousness and our spirit. That's the inner aspect of this. We see it externally in the world and our culture, our creations.
[00:07:28] And we see it within us. The next aspect here is the rock bottom or losing our way. On that journey. So once we go into the adventure, we're now beyond the early stages. We're deep within the adventure of the unknown world, this mysterious mystical world. And often what happens is. We lose a friend. We lose a loved one.
[00:07:51] We in movies, right. And movies, the hero will often lose someone close to them, or have a experience, a great defeat or setback. And they're questioning all of these things. They're temporarily defeated. And they're looking for a way forward. They're deciding whether they want to even continue to do this. Like, how did they get here? What do they do from here? They're feeling lost, right? It's like the loss, their way aspect now.
[00:08:17] That can reflect with us too, as we are maybe living in that world, we go into this. New adventurous world. And we. Realize, oh, man, this is hard. This is brutal. This is a dark world I'm in right now. How am I going to overcome this? So there's these internal setbacks that can happen in stories that we watch. There are these often external setbacks that happen, or sometimes they are relative related specifically to the character losing an ability.
[00:08:43] Or having something specifically happened to them, but often it's called it's that temporary defeat or let down that reaches them that push them to it. And ultimately what that does though, is it instills them to press forward. It pushes us to press forward and pull ourselves up. And rise and move forward.
[00:09:04] It teaches us something. There's often a lesson in that point. And then where we realized look, this isn't going to be an easy path, but I can't go back to the old way. And so I have to embrace where I am. I have to pick myself up and I have to carry forward. I have to find the courage in myself.
[00:09:18] To move forward.
[00:09:19] And it's that, that we move into the road of trials. Now, this is that long and painful journey, right? The we've we're in the adventurous stage. We've had these, the setbacks we've lost someone we've cared about, or we've lost something that means something to us or we've, we're struggling with the journey that we are now on. We haven't even really gotten started yet. We're now into that trial component where we're going to go through hell.
[00:09:46] This is really testing our merits. This is where we face the monsters, the temptations, the. Brutal terrain. That can be external and internal, the same thing within us, we may be facing our own demons, our own dark emotions and thoughts, our own challenges and wounds that we must head up and face down.
[00:10:05] So this is both internal and external here, but that's the road of trials is really what tests our merit it builds strength. It pushes us to rise beyond.
[00:10:15] What we know and where we came from, it's how we build our strength. So those road, that road of trials is what builds strength, and character, and pushes us to do more to press through and to do it for the things that matter for us to find meaning in this struggle, in this journey, and this adventure.
[00:10:35] That trial pushes us to grow.
[00:10:37] Now we see this right. And it's in, I love Harry Potter because it does such a great job of telling of depicting these. Components of storytelling and the hero's journey. And I also think that's why it's such a great film and great film series and book because in book series, because it reflects these journeys throughout.
[00:10:57] And so there are lots of trials in that movie, in that book series, throughout the books and the, in the movies themselves. And you see that. And each one, each of those trials, each one of those crazy situations brings about strength and growth and courage each time in those stories. There's confusion, fear loss.
[00:11:18] And then the overcome, the learning, the building, the growing. The road of trials allows us to do that. The next piece here is that what they call the night sea voyage, right? Sneaking into the bad guys realm to gain something. It can be sometimes a rescue mission or a secret piece of the thing that we need, or some sort of as an example, there's the.
[00:11:41] The call for in the deathly Hallows, they're trying to organize these various pieces. So they're searching for. The hor cruxes. That they need to defeat Voldemort. They know, he, Voldemort is aware that they're pursuing these things, but they are out trying to find these things, they're trying to sneak around and find what they need to destroy.
[00:12:03] The bad guy or the great villain or whatever it may be. This the night of the sea's voyage is us seeking that thing. That thing that can help us overcome. And again, It's external and in stories like this, but it's internal within us as well. It's understanding that perhaps it's knowing tools about who we are understanding our consciousness and how our mind works, understanding that the way thoughts can be powerful and they can create ideas for us. And those thoughts can turn into actions and create systems.
[00:12:32] And goals that we can build from that's how we take those things. And we leverage them in our journey to overcome the villain, if you will. And now in the stories, it's external lot, but I like to think about a lot of these things as internal villains. So it's. It's the. It's the things that we're trying to gather so that we can overcome our internal villains.
[00:12:54] And it's also a brief pause before the big battle, right? Like you have a run in with the bad guy, but then you. You escape and you take what you need, or you rescue your person, or you find that peace within yourself, you recover. That lost part of yourself that you've been seeking and yearning for, for years or decades. For me personally, it was my masculinity reactivating my masculinity and.
[00:13:17] And reconnecting with that side of myself, it really changed my experience. As a human and how I feel as a man and it's made a big difference. And so it's sometimes recovering parts of ourselves that have been lost. Throughout our journey on earth and time.
[00:13:31] The next aspect here is you have the, the sense of. The synthesizing. And the fight with the bad guy. So it's. There's some sort of insight or revelation that comes at this point. It's like the clicking point where you realize, oh wait, that's the thing that we need to do. And, I go, I keep going back to Harry Potter, right? In those last movies you're thinking about it was them realizing that the snake was that final horcrux that they needed to destroy so that they could then actually go about, well, wait, it was that. And then also Harry understanding that he was a horcrux as well.
[00:14:08] And then, so it was knowing these pieces and understanding what they needed to do to defeat. Voldemort. So it's like taking those final insights and revelations that create that clarity that we need to push through and reach that conclusion to defeat our enemy, whatever it may be, right internally it's understanding this new information, synthesizing it, and then leveraging that information to confront our inner demons and in movies or in stories it's to confront the external bad guy.
[00:14:38] And so the epic thing about stories is that they reflect our own journeys. That's why we resonate with them. We see ourselves in these heroes, we see ourselves in these villains and we see ourselves in these adventures and stories. And so it's the external villains. The friends, the people that are supporting us along the way, are a reflection of our own lives. It's the dramatization
[00:15:01] of human existence. And that's why we love stories because ultimately it reflects who we are. And how we live.
[00:15:09] So we have this battle with the bad guy, right? There's. There's often, sometimes one final temptation or sacrifice that has to happen that allows us to overcome the enemy. And we have this epic battle of fighting and pushing and all of these things to defeat the enemy and we learn and we take from the battle there.
[00:15:28] What we needed. And then we overcome that final Tempe temptation. And then from there. It's the next phase is about returning. But sometimes we refuse the return because the new world is so compelling. How can I go back to the old way? How can I go back to the way things were before? How can I go back to the world of humans instead of the world of magic muggles? How can I do that? How can I go back to what life was.
[00:15:57] But often we're forced out of that. We're forced back into that the old world or the original state, because we have something to give, to bring with us. It's not just about the adventure and defeating. It's about sharing those insights and bringing with us. What we learned and what we grew about, like what we grew with on that journey.
[00:16:18] And so the refusal of the return can be hesitation of the hero to go back to the world that he once knew, or she wants new because we like where we are, but life pushes us. And we're often pushed back into that.
[00:16:29] And. That allows us to carry with us what we learned and share that with others.
[00:16:36] And so there's a piece.
[00:16:38] So in that return. We're bringing back with us, what we have captured, what we've learned, what we've taken, what we've defeated and gathered, and we're bringing it back to the world. Now, sometimes that the enemy that we've defeated tries to derail us tries to stop that process. So it's that final push to say, no, we've got this.
[00:16:59] There may be one, many kind of climactic fight to push through, but then we overcome it. And that's that. That's that. That's pushing into the return. So we have the refusal of their turn. We then have the process of returning back to the world, which sometimes has one final battle or one final pull from the.
[00:17:19] The epic journey to stop us from sharing. What we have, and then it's moving into that. Crossing over that return threshold. So we're on the return. And then we're finally crossing back into the old world and sometimes there's an. Resistance right at that final point. Right at that final point. So we're fleeing with what we have. We've now returned back to the old world, but there's a final bit of resistance that we have to overcome.
[00:17:46] Maybe it's the bad guy is showing one little plop up, but then he's defeated again. Or maybe it's the old world that we've returned to initially trying to push us back, but then we show them what we have done. What's happened, how we've changed, what we have and they surrender and open up. So there's that final returning back to the old way that we have to push through. Once you go through the adventure.
[00:18:09] The bad guys didn't been defeated externally or internally.
[00:18:12] Before we can finally just then enjoy that. The living piece, what they call freedom to live here. And that's where we bring about what we've achieved. We share it with our people. And we provide those insights, those learnings, those growths with our community, with our friends, our family, the people that we care about most.
[00:18:32] And then there's the celebration. And so it becomes a very beautiful, exciting time to celebrate today. It's to live, to enjoy. to embark upon this new time, this new chapter. Where we overcome. Where we overcame those great darkness or destruction or whatever it was that was, as a part of that story, we overcame that enemy, that problem. And now we have the possibility of a new world to create.
[00:18:59] A new way of living a new path for us to build together. Leveraging what we've learned and what we've brought back from the hero's journey. And so this is such a beautiful thing. Like we go through this process in ourselves, we feel dissatisfied with life. We know something's not right. We are called to adventure. We dive into ourselves, we die into creating, exploring, sharing, working, doing all these things. We struggle. It's hell. While we're doing that we fall, we get beat up. We battle enemies. We have temptations were tripped up along the way.
[00:19:31] There's all these things that can happen. But we continue to press on. And we learn and we grow and we get better. And eventually we face head to head with those that darkness, those demons within us. And we slay them. We defeat them. We slay our dragons. And we are victorious in that battle because with us comes the spoils of that battle.
[00:19:55] And we can bring with us. That great victory and share it with the people that we care about. Share it with our loved ones with our communities. And so our own hero journey allows us to help other people embark upon their own journeys, by sharing what we learn, sharing information about that journey and helping empower others who are hesitant to take the call to action. All of us are being called.
[00:20:18] And that's the aspect of it is all of us have this calling. All of us are being sought. To act upon and to take and dive into this adventure. It's a choice that we have to make it's available to all of us, but not all of us. Choose it. Very few choose it. And that's what makes it so rewarding, but the call is there for all of us. So if we can share what we've learned on these journeys, if we can support and help one another on those journeys.
[00:20:43] Along the way. As we continue to embark upon our own hero journeys, then ultimately what we end up doing is creating a world full of heroes. And that's the end state that we're trying to get to because. This process is cyclical in nature. It's reflected all throughout history and culture and arts and our stories and ourselves.
[00:21:04] We're on an epic cosmic journey that is continuing to unfold. And the cyclical nature of this is there are different stages of that hero journey that expands and evolves as we roll in. And move throughout. Existence. The chapters and phases and different stages of that journey change. As we move throughout existence. This is such a wonderful and beautiful.
[00:21:31] Process such a blessing that we're a part of. And by embracing it. We can. Help one another embark upon our own journeys and bring about the best of who we are and what we're in the world to do. And so the cyclical nature of these things and you can see it in, in trilogies and stories and books and movies. I mentioned Harry Potter multiple times that the hero's journey is cyclical throughout it. There is.
[00:21:59] There are many hero journeys within those stories. There's the large overarching hero journey of the whole story itself. So you see this. Throughout our world reflected. As the cosmic path that we're all on. And so we can learn and embrace this journey. Leverage it and build upon it by understanding what it is and knowing how to use it in our own lives. And so it's all around us and it's ours to embark upon if we choose to heed the call. So the question is.
[00:22:34] Will you answer the call of your own? Adventure. Will you be the hero the world needs you to be. Will you activate your ultimate self to live your destiny? Those are the questions that only you can answer. And I hope to help facilitate on your own hero's journey as a trusted guide, as you become the highest and fullest version of yourself.
[00:23:02] So I'm going to go and wrap the episode today. I really love, this is so much fun. I really hope you guys are enjoying it. I'm noodling a lot on content, how I'm going to be expanding the content offering and continuing to write and sharing stories. So I'm hoping you're finding value in the work here and that you're learning and growing from what we're doing with order within.
[00:23:21] So I would love to hear from you. If you have any thoughts or comments or anything, please let me know I'm available. I'm up on Twitter, you can hit me on sub stack. You can comment here just wherever you want to do it. Just let me know. I'd love to hear from you. If you have some thoughts, feedbacks, questions, anything like that. Otherwise, I do appreciate y'all's time. And until next time.
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