Hero’s Elixir

Transcript

I want to talk to you today about the hero’s elixir.

A lot of people know about the hero’s journey. A hero’s journey is what they call a mono-myth. It’s this kind of structure of a story which seems to exist among all humans. An archetypal story, the story of all stories.

Carl Jung and later popularized by Joseph Campbell he went into this in detail, I think the book is called a Hero With A Thousand Faces. And the structure that almost every myth or so many myths follow about how a hero begins his regular life, receives a call to adventure, declines and later accepts and meets many allies and friends and faces many tests.

Eventually he must enter the cave and defeat the beast that lies within.

Of course what happens is he doesn’t just beat the beast and go back home, he actually gains something from the journey and finds the elixir in that cave and returns home to find his home is different.

That resolves that conflict as well and they all live happily every after.

What’s not always obvious to us though in the hero’s journey, part of the reason it’s so archetypal, so popular and so repeated in almost every culture all over the world is because it tells our story.

This is the story of being a human more or less. It’s the transformation story and that’s why it always rings true when wes ee something like star wars or this years Homer’s Odyssey because we recognize there’s something of us in the story.

Here’s a key question and it’d be wonderful if people would start to ask.

A lot of the time in our life we have struggles and in one way or another we learn to overcome them.

If we’re present, we even learn to integrate the lessons from the struggle in our life and leads to greater depths of happiness.

The thing about the elixir that the hero finds in the cave, something which wasn’t obvious until my friend Arielle Friedman pointed this out. The elixir has to be not something that’s just valuable to the hero, it’s actually something valuable to the entire society.

When we’re going through a struggle, in a sense we’re going it alone but we’re also going through it with this greater intent because when we emerge from the cave we find we have something valuable to society and part of the reason it’s valuable is because again it’s something universal, the struggle is universal.

The fruit, the elixir is also something universal that can transform our society so this is a question for people to ask and maybe even if you’re going through a struggle right now you might begin to wonder “what will be the fruit of this? What might I learn by the end of this? What hidden piece is going to slide in so I can find this struggle was all worth it?”

It was always meaningful.

I like to say this blessing to people “May all your struggles be meaningful”

Of course its not enough to ask for a life free of struggles. It would probably be quite a boring life but if we can find the meaning, the elixir in our struggles, hidden in the cave behind the beast that will make it all worthwhile.

Thank you so much for listening, thank you for searching for the meaning in your struggles like Victor Frankl did. Thank you for finding the elixir.

Have a great day, be well and most importantly have a good time. I’ll talk to you soon.