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THE HERO’S JOURNEY AND THE HEROINE’S JOURNEY By Sheena St. Clair Jonker

“As antagonism increases. We are being trained in the way of answer.”

In the first part of my first degree I studied drama and theatre. There, I got to know something of the significance of story. The practice of law, which I did for the first ten years of my career, is, centrally, about story. My work in mediation, over the next two decades, has been about creating sacred spaces for each party’s story.

Kristin Hanggi has a master’s degree in story-telling and explains the Hero’s and Heroine’s journey:[i]

The hero’s journey is a way of understanding how life teaches us.

As an archetype, the hero’s journey shows up in our work and our life. Less known is the heroine’s journey.

Hero and heroine corresponds to masculine and feminine. We are not talking man and woman here but inner world (heroine’s journey) and outer world (hero’s journey), as metaphors. The feminine is a metaphor for the inner world, and the masculine, a metaphor for the outer world.

We are all going on journeys that are inner and outer at the same time. In stories, the mythic structure expands when we lean into both. These journeys are concurrently happening in our own life and when we realise this, it can inform us how to move, how to heal, how to birth, how to restore and repair.

The journey of the inner world, the heroine’s journey always comes first. We often get it wrong by looking to the outer world (the hero’s journey). We want to fix the outer world, we want to do the journey out there. But what we learn is that the feminine comes first, the inner world always comes first. The masculine is here to serve the feminine. In other words, our outer actions are here to serve our inner actions. And, of course, vice versa. And so, we must go into the depths of our inner world in order for our outer world to get into alignment.

This is happening collectively right now and it is also happening with each individual.

When we are silent, still and listening, something arises, we are invited to act. We act and we return. There is a rhythm to this.

If we sit too long in silence and we don’t act, we may feel or be stunted or stifled. We need to act on the creative impulses bubbling up out of the silence, out of the inner. If we repeatedly act without doing the inner work, we get the world as it is-without listening, without stillness and silence, without asking questions like does this work, is this sustainable, is this supportive of all our wellbeing?

Actions that do not arise from inner work, or the hero’s journey that is not balanced with the heroine’s journey, produce structures that are not sustainable and are not supportive of all life. And so these structures produced from outer action, out of step with inner work, must fall and must crumble and we are seeing this take place all around us. Unless we stop and enter into the rhythm of rest, listen and then act, we will keep producing circumstances and structures that not only do not serve us but may harm or destroy us and other forms of life we share earth with.

We must first honour what is deepest within us.

The Hero’s Journey looks something like this:

ACT I: INVITATION TO ADVENTURE OR CHANGE

The character starts in the ordinary (outer) world.

Call to adventure (the inciting action eg the car crash, the death, the divorce, the lottery ticket creates a question or invitation. We can go in this new direction or we can stay as we are. We get to choose here)

The call/the refusal of the call.

Opposing force shows up. There might be an opposing force within us that does not want us to grow.

Meeting with a mentor or elder. Someone who has been through “it” may show up in our life.

Moment of decision.

Our hero makes a choice. Crossing of the first threshold.

Now this new world has been entered and we do not know what will happen. Now we are in a new world we don’t know.

The tests and trials start to happen.

Allies show up.

We develop new skills. We start to develop mastery.

Midpoint-false high or false low. We may have a really amazing high which we think is it, but it’s not. Or we have this amazing low where we think all has been lost, but it hasn’t. This is where we are getting trained.

ACT II: OPPOSITION AND ANTAGONISM

Stuff starts going wrong. The “bad guys” are closing in. Difficulty increases. We are approaching the inmost cave. We are going deeper within. Stuff is coming up from our psyche and consciousness. But because we are in the hero’s journey, it feels like it is in the outer world.

Antagonism increases. We are being trained in the way of answer. There has been a deep truth that we have been ignorant of from the beginning.

Through these ordeals, the hero (we) come to the realisation of the truth. The hero can’t know this truth until it is experienced.

Everything becomes more and more difficult until the “all is lost” moment. This is the death and rebirth moment. Or the dark night of the soul. In a play or a movie, this may be the point where someone dies. This “whiff of death” is symbolic of our “old self” dying.

At this point the mentor or elder may die. This death allows the rebirth of the hero.

“Aha moment”. The hero (we) understands what they didn’t get the entire time. Revelation of the theme. Understanding this, our actions change because our beliefs have changed.

Now we can head into the third act or the climax. We can go head-to-head with the antagonist, we can defeat the antagonist because of our embodiment of the truth.

So what has happened is that we have said yes to the invitation, we have left the old thing, we step into the new thing, the new thing appears to crush us. Now we are at home in neither place. So it feels like double loss. This is ego death.

There is always that moment in the dark night of the soul where the hero feels they were better off with the old thing.

In story, we take the character into the dark night of the soul, and leave them there, until they learn the truth.

The antagonist is just the crystallization or the dramatization of the limited beliefs personified. Our deepest fears, our shame, has taken on an outer structure or manifestation so we can see it. We hide these things from ourselves. This is why our consciousness projects upon others. A shadow is always cast elsewhere. We create the enemy from our own hidden shame and fears.

Monumental level failures need to be projected elsewhere, so we never stop making new enemies.

ACT 3: CLIMAX

Gift of goddess. Golden elixir. The hero brings this knowledge, this gift back to the community.

The heroine’s journey overview:

ACT 1: SEPARATION OF THE FEMININE

This is symbolic of how we have all left the great Mother. We have all disconnected from her. We go into identification with the masculine. This is a broad generalization across specifically western society. There are still places connected to the Great Mother and that hold the masculine and feminine in balance.

When we over-identify with the masculine it is because we have adopted cultural values that tell us this is what success looks like. This is what happiness looks like.  It is something in the outer world outside of us that will make us happy.

The heroine has a separation from the feminine. We may not understand it and may find ourselves wanting attention from the masculine. “That’s what I need”, the heroine thinks, “the shiny house, the husband, the wife,  the kids, the career and when I have that, I will be fulfilled”.

So, our heroine goes out to get that. Allies are gathered, a road of trials is traversed, we meet the dragons. We go through a process of proving ourselves in the outer world. We are trying to do the hero’s journey when we first need to finish the heroine’s journey. It kind of works. We find this boon of success.

We’ve created what we wanted and there’s this lingering feeling that something is missing. This is going on in all of us. In all genders. In all collectives.

What is this all for?

Feelings of spiritual aridity and emptiness. This was supposed to be a garden. Instead, it is bone dry and desolate. We are overworked, over scheduled, depleted, cut off from myself.

The two journeys relate thus: in our internal desolation and brokenness, we look to fix it in the external. This is always a mistake. We cannot successfully undertake the hero’s journey (the outer work) without first undertaking the heroine’s journey (the inner work). We can never fix an internal absence or brokenness externally.

ACT II: INITIATION AND DESCENT INTO THE ABYSS

We go into the darkness.

This may be due to a catastrophe: death, divorce, unspeakable loss. Something so big, it cannot be solved with the mind. It takes us down. It takes us under.

We have to surrender to it because the power of it is too much. We go deep into the darkness. Into a darker dark than we have ever known. It’s scary and frightening. We don’t know how long we will be here.

Success can also devastate us in this way. The false high or the false low. We may be in the abyss because we won. The ladder was leaning against the wrong wall.

The feelings become our roadmap. Our feelings connect us to our inner truth. Our minds cannot get us here. The mind has to sink into the heart. The body, the soul, the emotion is telling the truth.

Michael Mead says that we must go into the darkness because that is where our soul has hidden its memory-in the unconscious. Our soul has hidden who it really is at the depth of the darkness so we can find it there like a jewel. We have to be willing to sit in our grief, to remain in our discomfort, to feel our pain all the way and breathe through it believing we can survive these emotions.

We meet the goddess in the darkness. She teaches us how to reconnect with our emotion, how to return to the body, how to trust ourselves, how to feel into the next right step, how to listen with our entire beings. She takes us into the heart and repairs our heart.

The heroine finds this urgent yearning to reconnect with the feminine-spending more time in nature, moving our body (space) and expression (telling our stories, drawing, building). This movement of energy is the reconnection with the feminine. At this moment there is the healing of the mother/daughter split. At this point we may forgive our mother for her unconsciousness, whatever her wounds are. But the split we are really healing is between us and the Great Mother.

We are reconnecting with the wisdom and the rhythms of the great mother. She is teaching us to be ourselves. We listen so deeply that we embody the Great Mother. She takes over our life and starts to animate through us-her healing, her abundance, her endless solutions, her heart, her love for all humanity. It takes over our life. This process takes as long as it takes.

At this moment, we heal the wounded masculine within ourselves. The Great Mother energy heals the masculine within and we are filled with the Great Mother’s love. We feel her living through us. She starts to heal the part of us that wants to prove our worth. “We don’t need to do  that, Baby,” She soothes us. We’ve played that game-the part of us that wants to overwork, the part of us striving do find success outside ourselves. We don’t do that anymore. She re-educates the masculine within us and she says “all the work in the outer world (action) comes from a deep knowing of who we are inside: the inner work”. We can think of our masculine as that which takes action, makes the phone call, the hustle, the adventure. But once we’ve done the inner work (the heroines journey), the outer work (hero’s journey) is aligned, in flow, it’s congruent.

The  masculine in us comes to know that the feminine is here to serve. And vice versa. It becomes an honour and a pleasure to serve.

The masculine in us comes to want to serve the feminine in us: it would be our ecstatic pleasure to serve.

We come to see that we, living as our deepest selves, is the biggest gift we can give to all of life.

Then the masculine in us builds structures that are sustainable for all of live. Then there is the sacred marriage, the integration of the masculine and feminine. They work together. They have the same goal. They are balanced and aligned.

ACT 3: NEW CREATION

What happens when the masculine and feminine come together? Birth. New creation. A new idea comes into the world. It’s the new baby. The new world comes through each individual healing the masculine and feminine within themselves.

There is deep pleasure and deep rest.


[i] Kristin Hanggie on The Heroine’s journey, Rob Cast Ep 328, 6 July 2022

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