Discovering Your Personal Myth
“I suspected that myth had a meaning which I was sure to miss if I lived outside it in the haze of my own speculations. I was driven to ask myself in all seriousness: “What is the myth you are living?”
I found no answer to this question, and had to admit that I was not living with a myth, or even in a myth, but rather in an uncertain cloud of theoretical possibilities which I was beginning to regard with increasing distrust. I did not know that I was living a myth, and even if I had known it, I would not have known what sort of myth was ordering my life without my knowledge. So, in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know “my” myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks…”
— C.G. Jung
Your personal myth is the story that is continually unfolding beneath the surface events of your life. It’s a deeper story that isn’t about what happened, but why it happened.
Uncovering your personal myth is the way to discovering the deeper meaning and purpose of your one wild and precious life. By giving us the larger, mythic view of our soul’s journey through life, it makes the problems and obstacles we face seem smaller in comparison, and thus, easier to overcome, or as Jung says “outgrow.”
“The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble…. They can never be solved, but only outgrown…. This ‘outgrowing’, as I formerly called it, on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency.”
— C.G. Jung
Carl Jung worked with dreams and active imagination to uncover his personal myth and expand his consciousness, a multi-year process documented in his famous Red Book.
He discovered that dreams and imagination were portals into the depths of the unconscious, hence the term “depth psychology”. In these alternative states of consciousness we encounter the archetypal figures that populate our personal and collective myths.
Although Jung never experimented with psychedelics himself and had little to say about their use, we now know that psychedelic plants and other shamanic methods for altering consciousness are potent and effective ways to meet and engage with archetypal figures.
In Jung’s model, archetypes are primal energetic patterns or imprints that shape the way we experience and act in the world.
All the strong human emotions — love, hate, anger, lust, fear, sadness — have an archetypal pattern at their core. The ancient myths personify these archetypes as gods and goddesses because they act as autonomous forces in the deep psyche and, like gods, hold great creative and destructive power. They are the roots of our ancestral instincts for procreation, nurturing and survival.
The archetypes that appear in our dreams, imagination, fantasies and visions are often coloured by our personal experience, culture and religious beliefs. While our distant ancestors may have experienced the archetypal pattern related to aggression as Mars, the god of war, we might encounter it in the garb of a modern soldier or the comic book character The Hulk.
On the other hand, we can observe that both indigenous animists and modern materialists will often meet archetypes in the form of animals, which is evidence that the deep psyche has ancient roots and maintains a continuity over time. Dreams, imagination and rituals that invoke altered states are a way to stay in touch with what writer and teacher Martín Prechtel refers to as the “indigenous soul.”
“Every individual in the world, regardless of cultural background or race, has an indigenous soul struggling to survive in an increasingly hostile environment created by that individual’s mind. A modern person’s body has become a battleground between the rationalist mind — which subscribes to the values of the machine age — and the native soul. This battle is the cause of a great deal of spiritual and physical illness.”
— Martín Prechtel
The archetypes speak to us in the symbolic and metaphoric language of myth.
It’s a language that our ancestors were fluent in. You could say that it is the universal “mother tongue.” As children we enjoy easy and natural access to the imaginal realm, facilitated by our openness and innate sense of curiosity and wonder. Over time, as our minds become colonized by a modern education system and culture based in a rational materialist worldview, we lose touch with the symbolic language and with it, the connection to the imagination, creativity and freedom that is our birthright.
Jung developed ways of working with dream, imagination and creative play to restore what he called “the symbolic life” and many of his students and followers have incorporated these methods into depth psychotherapy. Unfortunately, Jungian analysis has only been accessible to the privileged few that can afford it, and has largely been an individual practice that lacks the communal ritual aspect that was so integral to our ancestral ways of healing.
Much scholarly writing has been done on the evolution of consciousness and the effects that the modern West’s predominantly rational materialist mindset has had on culture and ecology.
The root of the current crisis of environmental destruction, economic disparity and global war is a spiritual crisis caused in part by the loss of our mythic and spiritual perspective. It has become increasingly apparent that the next stage in the evolution of consciousness has to involve the integration of the modern mind with the indigenous soul.
Inner Journeying is development of Jungian dreamwork and active imagination brought into a communal ritual space that is accessible and allows for a diversity of spiritual orientations. To help us cross the divide from the modern mind to the indigenous soul, we utilize ancestral ways of inducing an open and receptive state using music, chanting, breathwork and drumming.
The Siberian shamans thought of the drum as the horse that carries you to the spirit world. The steady rhythm of the drum induces a mindstate that opens us to the realm of imagination and dreams. There we encounter and engage with archetypal figures who may offer us healing wisdom, guidance or experience.
We then share our visions with a circle of friends and together wonder about the deeper meaning behind the dreamlike images. Practicing inner journeying within a group ritual container fosters a sense of deep community and affirms that we are not alone in our longing for a more meaningful and magical life.
At a time when religious institutions are no longer serving the spiritual needs of so many of us, Inner Journeying Circles offer a non-dogmatic, open and accessible way to reclaim spiritual community, personal and collective healing and respect for the not-merely-human world that is needed for the preservation and flourishing of life.
