As a basis for your own exploration of personal myth, let me illustrate through personal example. These are the myths and archetypes that have attended me over the last 64 years.

As a child I was disorientated, isolated, and misunderstood. By the time I was seven or eight, I perceived that the world and the family I was in to be somehow incompatible and unsuitable for me. I imagined I would be rescued by my real family, my people, possibly from another dimension or solar system. Sometimes at night I would hear distant rumblings in the sky and say to myself, “This is it. They are coming tonight.” This maintained me in a hopeful state, a condition that enabled me to go on. The archetype at work in me here was the Lost Child illustrated in numerous fairy tales, the Orphan, the Spiritual Child, the precocious child of wisdom, innocence, and the future, and the myth that was moving in and through me was the battle with dark forces and the struggle for survival. Mythological examples include Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, Romulus and Remus, and the story of Moses.

As a teenager, having braved the tribulations of a split family, the rantings of an alcoholic father, and the pleadings of a victim mother, I turned my natural spiritual inclinations toward music. Spirituality had no context in my family and faced with the disappointment of my brief sortie into the Anglican Church, music seemed to embody something of the holy, the sacred, even the numinous quality of presence which I sensed and was familiar with and which I experienced as more real than my worldly existence.

Occupying the Transcendence: The Shaman

Music enabled me to occupy the transcendence I felt inside me; it empowered me to develop my contemplation of the Divine. I studied the drums and was fascinated by the apportioning of time and the mathematical precision of acting in space to divide time in a wondrous ritual that created rhythm, pace, and meter. Wood, metal, and skin were my means to worship secularly and paganly in a timeless ceremony of sincere home-transcending and homecoming. The archetype at work in me here was the healer, the medicine man, and the shaman who rides to other worlds and dimensions on the drum, as intermediary, healer, and visionary, and the myth that was moving in and through me was the healing ceremony of maintaining the connection between the worlds, invisible and visible, beyond appearance and common perception. Mythological examples include the ancient Sumerian goddess Ninkarrak, Bear Medicine Woman in the First Nations tradition, the Greek hero Asklepios, and from Hinduism Garuda, the great man-eagle who mediates between humans and the gods.

Art and Alchemy: The Lone Wolf

In my twenties I not only discovered therapy and meditation, I became a singer-songwriter, baring the plight of the human condition through my song lyrics, singing of the suffering of love and existence, of belonging and abandonment. This was for me always intensely serious and often painful. The price I paid in performance was particularly exacting. I felt that I occupied a deep inner space, an interior solitude and yet simultaneously engaged in revelation and inward confession, publicly. The archetype I was allowing through me at that time in my life was the minstrel, the poet, the conveyor of news, the story-teller, the blues singer who performs the alchemy of singing the world’s ills and converting humanity’s suffering even as he himself suffers from his own and others’ suffering. The myth at work was that of the sacrifice, the ritual offering, the scapegoat sent out to atone. Mythological examples include Orpheus, David the writer of Psalms, and the Omega Wolf who collapses under the weight of collective pain and is pushed out of the tribe to become the Lone Wolf.

Becoming the Lone Wolf was a profound experience for me and one that was to proscribe the entire rest of my life by allowing the deepest archetype in me to possess me; my whole life was to become dedicated to this one pursuit as the other archetypes bowed in gratitude and relinquished their right to live through me.

The Tests and Challenges of the Seeker in Search of Himself

At first this new presiding archetype manifested as the searcher, the student, the seeker in search of himself, as I plunged with great fascination into the activities and events of personal growth, consciousness-raising, therapy, and inner work, as we call it now. My passion for it was great. It so very quickly returned me to myself in a way I never ever hoped would be possible. Here were the aliens, the fourth-dimensional beings who I had waited for and longed to rescue me in my childhood.

My genuine encounter with a new breed of men and women initiated me into the world of feeling and authentic experience. I was to find myself through a long journey through many tests and challenges to emerge transformed. The Orphan or Spiritual Child experience enabled me to develop independence and an inner reality based on direct experience.

Through my personal myth, I developed my childhood wonder at the extraordinary ordinariness in the world, its beauty and numinosity, its glory and mundaneness, its intense sadness and exhilarating joy. This is the myth of the hero’s journey. Describe your own myth. See the prevailing themes in your life. Express them through dance, art, poetry, and story-telling. Enhance your life with the knowledge of your life’s innate purpose and direction. You will find yourself living in a more expansive way, in a more fruitful way. Pass these ideas on to your friends even as you become aware of their mythological dimension. Work with your clients on the archetypal level. This will provide clarity, deepening understanding and give valuable reference points for their life journey.