Clear and Open

“Did you have a good world when you died? Enough to base a movie on?”

    – Jim Morrison

Does life seem like an adventure filled with decisive challenges that test your resolve, forging you into a better version of yourself?

You’re not alone. 

Did you know there was a model for that? It helps explain yourself to yourself, and frame your path in a way that makes it far more productive and enjoyable.

“The Hero’s Journey” is a template for stories that go back thousands of years, popularized in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).

The book was brilliant and groundbreaking, but it’s also outdated and patriarchal. The female hero or Heroine’s Journey is often different, but hasn’t received its due attention. The result is that many women try to take on male perspectives and either fail, or succeed in betraying their true nature. Also, for the male hero to truly be fulfilled, he must understand the journey of women as well as his own.

We all must understand each other better in an increasingly crowded and diverse world. Each of us is on our own soul’s journey and understanding the building blocks of those journeys helps you see into yourself and others.

The same way a cup, saucer, and plate are different shapes in content, in context they are all made of the same stuff. In this way, while in content our journeys are infinitely varied, in context they are all the same.

This includes elements like the “Call to adventure,” “Challenges and Temptations,” and the auspicious appearances of helpers. 

But even the distinction between the journey of the hero versus the heroine is outdated and unsophisticated. What is truer is there are yin and yang journeys. While men typically follow the yangic Hero’s Journey and women a different yinnic Heroine’s Journey, this is not always the case. A Beautiful Mind is a film, for example, where although the protagonist is male, his journey is decidedly yin as it is more about self-worth and identity than the destination. 

But this course is not about fictional characters. It’s about you!

What is your soul’s journey this life? How can you exactly frame your challenges as helping you to become who you’re destined to be? How can you use this understanding to make better decisions? How do you know what difficulty to embrace and what to avoid?

We’ll use films like Star Wars, The Matrix, Fellowship of the Rings, and more to learn the elements of the hero’s/heroine’s journey, and then I’ll help you find yourself along your version of it.

So yes, assignments will include watching movies. It's psychospiritual infotainment at its finest. Buy plenty of popcorn and I hope to see you there.

The Soul’s Journey in Cinema broadcasts live on Zoom, Thursdays at 11:15 am PT, beginning January 5, 2022 for 11 sessions, ending March 16. When you join the live course you become part of the workshop and get individual attention. All recordings will be posted by the morning following the session, becoming an online course.

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