Are You Ready To Be A Hero For Your Own Life?

_When you find your path, you must not be afraid. You need to have sufficient courage to make mistak (1)

Most of us are in what Joseph Campbell calls “Sleepy Land”. We get so bound up in the day to day details of living that we fall asleep to our purpose. “The hero’s journey always begins with the call. One way or another, a guide must come to say, “Look, you’re in Sleepy Land. Wake. Come on a trip. There is a whole aspect of your consciousness, your being, that’s not been touched. So you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you there, and so it starts.”
 

Then one day it happens. We notice that we are missing something. We want more. We wake up to the fact that “more” is not more money; it is not a better job; or house, or car. It is elusive, and we may not know what “it” is, but we begin to figure out what “it” isn’t. It is our birthright, and it is what takes our life from “normal” to “greatness”. 

We wake up to the fact that we have the potential to do better and be better in how we live our lives, both for ourselves and for others.
 
We wake up to the fact that we have this intense desire to be socially active and impact the lives of others in some monumental way.  Especially in those areas where we have lived through hell and come out the other side of.
 
We wake up to the fact that we are in fact searching.  We are searching for a community of souls that is like us.  We are searching for mentors and leaders to learn how to navigate this new place of being.  That can help us with the tools we need to develop our gifts and skills, and assist us with understanding just how big our purpose is.  
 
We wake up to the fact that we want our life to have meaning, and that this means we want to positively impact the lives of others.
 

Men like Steve Jobs and Richard Branson figured out what that was for them. And while they had all of the things that people think will make them happy, it was the “more” they woke up to, that actually brought them to greatness. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” Martin Buber. They may have started out after all of the material things, but they ended up with the “more”.

Joseph Campbell said , “A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.” This something else is transcendence. Transcendence happens when we “reclaim the visionary, the utopian, the dream of the better or happier world” – when everything that we touch becomes a prayer.

So how do we discover what it is? We have to walk out the door of the safe comfortable space we have created for ourselves, and we have to walk down that path to the unknown. We have to enter the dark forest. You have to embark on the Hero’s journey. It is how you discover the vast resources that reside within you. A hero’s journey – finding the edge of your unknown forest, and entering into the heart of darkness.

What do you find there? You explore the caves of the past and you wake up to the dreams of the future. You let go of the life of existence, of “go to work, come home, eat dinner, watch TV, go to bed and repeat over and over again”.

Traveling down into the depths of the abyss we recover treasures of life. We recover the dreams we let die; we see that the stories that we have told ourselves about past hurts are not entirely true. We become excavator’s and dig up the bones of the past, and let them blow away like dust on the winds of healing. We see that most of the problems in our life have been mirrors being held up to us, but we were too blind or too scared to acknowledge the truth. By exploring the darkness we become enlightened.

We become curious, our mind opens up to new ideas. Changes begin as we see new worlds to explore that have lain beneath the normalcy of our past life. We see possibilities instead of complications. We wonder. We release. We transform. We heal and become whole for the first time.

We realize that although we were damaged, we survived and that makes us dangerous. Because we now know how to not only survive, we know how to become whole again. We become those that Rumi spoke about when he said, “the wound is the place where the light enters you.” We become both a mentor and a teacher for ourselves.

Being a mentor to oneself with love, light, grace and compassion. Being a teacher to yourself with rage, darkness, fear, and judgment. We are both, and both are required for the heroes journey. Speaking love to overcome rage, speaking light to overcome darkness, speaking grace to overcome fear and speaking compassion to overcome judgment.

“I guess that’s the thing about a hero’s journey. You might not start out a hero, and you might not even come back that way. But you change, which is the same as everything changing. The journey changes you, whether or not you know it, and whether or not you want it to.” Kami Garcia

Check out our current event page, to see when our next webinar is scheduled and join us in learning more about not only the Heroes Journey, but about the entire process of transforming our lives.  See Lemonademakers.org/events

Sheryl Silbaugh

I am married with 4 grown children who are all married and currently have 14 grandchildren and two great granddaughters. I work fulltime as a Director at Bank of America and I am the founder of LemonadeMakers.org, which is a website and Facebook page dedicated to personal transformation and growth. We all have life's lemons show up in our life, this website helps us to make them into lemonade.