Episode 3: Why stories matter: How Myths Guide Us Home

Why have some stories survived for thousands of years while countless others have been forgotten?

Why are we still talking about Adam and Eve, Cinderella, King Arthur, the Buddha, and Jesus?

What if these stories have endured because they are pointing toward something timeless within us?

In this episode of Know Thy Soul, we explore why myths, fairy tales, parables, and sacred stories continue to speak across cultures and generations—not because they are merely entertainment or history, but because they are maps of the human soul. 

Together we'll explore:

•  Why stories often communicate truths that facts alone cannot. 
•  What Jesus meant when he taught in parables. 
•  How wisdom traditions from around the world seem to point toward the same deeper reality. 
•  Why stories reveal new meanings as we ourselves grow. 
•  How symbols such as Bluebeard, Isis and Osiris, and even Dead Poets Society can illuminate our own inner lives. 

If you've ever wondered why certain stories stay with you long after you've forgotten the details, or why the same themes seem to appear again and again throughout history, this episode is an invitation to begin reading stories with new eyes.

Because perhaps the greatest stories were never meant to tell us about someone else.

Perhaps they have been telling us about ourselves all along.

Reflection Questions

• What stories have stayed with you throughout your life?

• Which characters or moments continue to speak to something deep within you?

• What might those stories be revealing about your own journey?

About Know Thy Soul

Know Thy Soul explores myth, fairy tales, scripture, symbolism, psychology, and spiritual traditions as maps of the soul, revealing the timeless patterns that illuminate the journey home to ourselves. 

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Visit knowthysoul.com for episode transcripts, reflections, and more.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hi friends, welcome to Know Thy Soul, where we explore the stories, symbols, and truths that lead us back to the wisdom within. Today we're going to talk about archetypes, symbolism, and why stories matter. Why do some stories survive for thousands of years? Why are we still talking about Adam and Eve, Jesus, Cinderella, King Arthur, the Buddha, or the Bhagavad Gita? Why do these stories refuse to die? And what if they've survived because they're trying to tell us something about ourselves? Because stories are everywhere. They're in the movies we watch, the books we read, the songs we sing, the scriptures we study, the myths, legends, and fairy tales that have survived for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. And the fascinating thing is that while cultures change, technology changes, and entire civilizations rise and fall, many of the same stories keep showing up over and over again. A hero leaves home, a kingdom falls into disorder, a king is wounded, a princess is trapped, something precious is lost, and someone must find their way home again. Why? Why do these stories endure? Why have human beings been telling some of the same stories for thousands of years? And what if they're more than just entertainment? What if they're maps? What if they're pointing to something happening inside each of us? Perhaps that's why Jesus repeatedly said, those who have ears, let them hear, or why he taught almost exclusively through stories and parables, not because the stories were the point, but because the stories pointed beyond themselves. That's what we're going to explore today. Over the last decade, I found myself drawn into the stories and scriptures of many different wisdom traditions. I've studied shamanism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Taoism, and Judaism, just to name a few. And what surprised me wasn't how different they were, it was how often they seemed to be pointing toward the very same mystery. But the real shift came when I stopped seeing these stories as being about other people and began asking what they might be revealing about my own life. And once I began seeing that, I couldn't stop seeing it. Every fairy tale, every myth, every scripture, every wisdom tradition became another window into the human experience. The same patterns I encountered in psychology and in my own inner life kept appearing again and again, woven through stories from cultures separated by centuries and continents. And while those traditions spoke different languages and used different symbols, I slowly began to realize they weren't competing with one another. They were weaving the same tapestry. Each seemed to illuminate a different aspect of the human journey. Shamanism helped me reconnect with a living and breathing invisible world. Jesus helped me understand compassion, forgiveness, and the transformative power of love. Buddhism helped me understand suffering and attachment and the role my thoughts play in shaping my experience. The Bhagavad Gita helped me understand the inner battle I would have to endure and the importance of learning to follow a deeper guidance within. The Tao Te Ching helped me stop trying to force life and instead learn to live in harmony with it. The Torah planted questions that would eventually change the way I understood both the divine and our relationship to it. Individually, each piece was powerful. Together, they began revealing a much larger picture, one that this podcast is dedicated to exploring. And though the symbols, stories, and language differed, they all seem to be pointing toward the same mystery. The journey of remembering who we are beneath the conditioning, the armor, and the noise of the world. The journey of remembering what is deepest, truest, and most alive within us. The journey of remembering a connection many traditions suggest has never been lost. And that woven throughout these ancient stories are the blueprints for returning home, not to a place, but to a relationship, a way of living in connection with the divine, the soul, and the deeper wisdom that speaks within us. A path that may have been hidden in plain sight all along, what I now think of as returning the soul to its proper place within our psyche, where it guides the kingdom rather than being buried beneath fear, conditioning, and survival. One of my favorite images of this comes from the ancient Egyptian story of Isis and Osiris. After Osiris's body is chopped into pieces, after he's dismembered, and his pieces are scattered across the land, Isis journeys far and wide, gathering the pieces back together again. She remembers him. Did you catch that play on words? She remembers him physically bringing his scattered body parts together, but she also remembers him. She restores what has been forgotten, that has been scattered all around the world. Piece by piece, she restores and makes whole what has been torn apart. And this is exactly what my spiritual path has looked like: gathering scattered fragments of wisdom from different traditions. A piece from Torah, a piece from Jesus, a piece from Buddha, a piece from the Gita, a piece from the Tao, a piece from indigenous wisdom. Not to create something new, but to remember something ancient that was always there. And in many ways, that is what this journey is about for all of us: gathering back the lost pieces of ourselves, the pieces hidden beneath fear, conditioning, wounds, and survival, and remembering who we truly are. But it begs the question, why stories? Why does this wisdom need to come through myths, fairy tales, parables, and scripture? Why can't we just explain it intellectually? Well, I believe one reason these stories have been misunderstood for so long is because very few people recognize the journey of the soul that they're pointing toward. Do you remember the story I shared in the first episode about our spirituality being hidden within us? It was hidden because most people aren't looking there for it. They're looking outside themselves. We spend so much of our lives searching for the right career, the right relationship, the right teacher, the right set of beliefs, or even the perfect formula that promises to make everything okay. We search for someone to tell us what to do. We search for certainty, we search for rules, and all the while the stories have been quietly inviting us to turn around, to look within, and when we begin doing that work, we start remembering what was never lost, only forgotten. Even Jesus knew this when his disciples asked why he taught in parables, he replied, Though seeing, they do not see, though hearing, they do not hear or understand. I don't think he was insulting them, I think he was describing something profoundly human. We can hear the same story a hundred times, and then one day, something shifts. Suddenly we see what was there all along. And throughout this podcast, we're going to return to familiar stories, not to learn something entirely new, but to discover what may have been there all along, waiting to be seen. And later, after Jesus explained that it isn't what goes into a person's mouth that defiles them, but what comes out of their heart, Peter asked him to explain the parable, and Jesus responded, Are you still so dull? The disciples thought he was speaking about food, but Jesus was pointing to something much deeper. He was pointing to the emotional and spiritual condition of the human heart, something profoundly internal. In other words, what truly shapes our lives doesn't begin on the outside, it begins within. Our words, our actions, our relationships, they all flow from the condition of our inner world. And even the people who spend every day with him struggle to see beyond the literal meaning of his words. Later, Jesus tells them something else that I find fascinating. He said, I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. Think about that. He's saying there is more to understand, but you aren't ready to see it yet. If Jesus were simply teaching a list of external rules, he could have given us those rules in a single sermon and been done. Instead, he taught almost entirely through stories, stories that invited people to wrestle, question, return, and discover deeper layers of meaning over time. I think that's an important invitation for us as well. We can stop at the literal meaning of these stories, or we can begin asking what they're pointing to beyond themselves. What is so brilliant about the way that Jesus taught is that he expected these stories wouldn't be understood immediately. They weren't meant to be consumed once and discarded. They were invitations, seeds planted in the soul that would continue unfolding as we ourselves grew. When his disciples asked why he spoke in parables, Jesus answered, The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to those on the outside, everything is said in parables, so that they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding. Do you hear that? Ever seeing but never perceiving, ever hearing but never understanding? Jesus isn't describing a lack of intelligence, he's describing a different way of seeing. Perhaps that's the invitation those stories have always held, not simply to read them, but to allow them to change the way we see. Because when we do, we begin to discover that the kingdom of God wasn't something Jesus invented 2,000 years ago. It has been whispering through these stories from the very beginning. And perhaps that's why these stories have survived for thousands of years, not because they're merely entertaining or historically important, but because they continue revealing new layers as we ourselves grow and as we ourselves gain the eyes to see and the ears to hear. Because these stories aren't simply telling us about other people, they're inviting us into our own transformation. And very few people understand the inner work that must be done to become who they were created to be. Yet what fascinates me is that nearly every wisdom tradition seems to recognize this. Jesus says, Enter through the narrow gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says that among thousands of men, one may strive for perfection, and among those who have achieved perfection, hardly one knows me in truth. Buddhism speaks of the rarity of awakening. Lao Tzu says that the great way is easy, yet people continually choose the side paths. Different tradition, different languages, different cultures, yet somehow they all arrive at the same observation. There is a deeper way of living available to us, but few of us learn to recognize it, trust it, and follow it. And that's because it's incredibly difficult to describe with words alone. Even if someone could put it into words, those who were seeing but not perceiving would likely miss it altogether. Imagine if the deepest truths about the human soul had been preserved only in philosophical treatises or mystical writings. They would have been burned, outlawed, forgotten, or dismissed as heresy. And history is filled with libraries that burned, books that were lost, and teachings that vanished. Think of the Library of Alexandria where countless spiritual writings disappeared forever. But stories, stories are almost impossible to erase. Grandmothers tell them, children remember them. Entire cultures carry them forward without ever realizing the wisdom they're preserving. Stories don't require the storyteller to fully understand them in order to carry their wisdom forward. A person can love a story, tell it to their children, and pass it on for generations without ever realizing the deeper truths hidden within it. Those who explored these mysteries were often misunderstood. Some were dismissed, some were condemned, some were silenced, many were killed. But the stories couldn't be silenced. They hid the truth in plain sight. The stories remember even when we forget, because everybody can tell a story. Everybody can recount battles won and lost, heroes rescuing fair maidens, kingdoms falling into chaos, and kings and queens finally being reunited in harmony. Stories stand the test of time, even when their deeper meanings may have been forgotten for thousands of years. Stories give us a way to understand something that is otherwise difficult to see. They allow us to witness the journey from the outside before we learn to recognize it within ourselves. Long before books, podcasts, and social media, stories were how human beings passed wisdom from one generation to the next. They taught us how to survive, how to love, how to lead, and how to make sense of the world around us. Stories were our first teachers, and they still are. At their core, stories help us grow, learn, and understand ourselves. They invite us to see the world through another's eyes and experience lives beyond our own. They introduce us to archetypes like the hero, the maiden, the wise elder, the king, the queen, and the shadowy antagonist. But stories have layers and their magic lies in those layers. On the surface, they entertain. They tell us of dragons and treasure, love lost and found, and kingdoms won and lost. But for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, they become something much deeper. Beneath the surface, they contain symbolic truths, spiritual teachings, and profound wisdom. They speak to the soul in a language beyond words. And interestingly, modern neuroscience is beginning to suggest something the ancient story sellers seem to understand intuitively. While both hemispheres of the brain work together constantly, the left hemisphere tends to specialize in language, analysis, categorization, and breaking things into parts. The right hemisphere is more attuned to patterns, metaphor, imagery, relationship, and the larger whole. Stories engage both, but symbols seem to have a unique ability to awaken a kind of perception that explanation alone cannot. And as we continue this journey together, we'll discover that many of the recurring characters in these stories seem to embody these different ways of knowing. But for now, let's simply begin learning to see them. When we engage these deeper layers, we discover that stories are not simply about the characters within them. They are about us. The hero, the villain, the wise guide, and the lost child all live within us. Each story becomes a mirror, reflecting our fears, our strengths, our wounds, and our untapped potential. When I listen to a story, I don't just see the characters. I see people, I see relationships, I see patterns, and perhaps most importantly, I see myself. The king is not just a king. The queen is not just a queen. And the hero is not just a hero. They are parts of us. But they also are the people we encounter in our lives. The wounded king may represent a part of me that has become disconnected from my heart, or he may remind me of a parent, a spouse, a leader, or a friend who has lost his way. The silence maiden may represent my own intuition that I've ignored for years, or she may remind me of a woman whose voice has never been fully heard. The stories work because they operate on many levels at once. They reveal our inner world while also illuminating our outer world. But they also help us to see the larger patterns unfolding all around us. The same stories play out in marriages, families, workplaces, churches, nation, and throughout history itself. Once you begin to recognize those patterns, you start seeing them everywhere. Stories invite us to recognize them not only within ourselves, but within the world around us. And sometimes they help us understand all of these levels at the very same time. They help us recognize healthy relationships, unhealthy relationships, the places where we're blind, the roles we unconsciously play, and the patterns we keep repeating. Let me give you an example. There's an old fairy tale called Bluebird, and I'm just going to tell you the opening. Three sisters are walking through the forest when they meet a man with a blue beard, and immediately all three recoil. Something about him just doesn't feel right. His beard is just too blue. But the youngest sister, she wants to be kind. She doesn't want to judge someone she doesn't know, and she wants to make him feel welcome. So she gets to know him anyway. And eventually he asks her to marry him, and she says yes. When she returns to tell her sisters, they're horrified. What do you mean, they ask? Don't you remember how blue his beard was? And she replies, Well, his beard's not that blue. Now, I could spend an hour talking about attachment dynamics and the tendency many of us, especially women, have to ignore red flags. In fact, I tell this story to almost every woman I know who's been through a difficult relationship, and every single one of them understands that line immediately. Well, his beard's not that blue. Think back over your life. Was there ever a relationship that you entered that looking back now, you knew wasn't right? When was the moment you told yourself his beard's not that blue? Now imagine you're leaving work late one night. It's 10 o'clock, you're alone, the elevator doors open, and the person standing inside immediately makes you feel unsafe. Would you get in? Most of us probably would. We wouldn't want to seem rude or to offend them. We wouldn't want them to think we've judged them unfairly. But let me ask you something. Would a deer do that? How about a horse? Or a wolf? No? Because every other animal trusts its instincts. But somehow we've learned not to trust ours. That's what the opening line of Bluebeard is pointing toward. Not simply an unhealthy husband, but the moment we begin talking ourselves out of what we already know. So sometimes a story helps us understand ourselves, sometimes it helps us understand someone we love, and sometimes it reveals a truth about a relationship that we've been unable to see on our own. If your belief about the world is that you always have to be the nice girl, always have to make everyone feel welcome, you may never realize that your own inner knowing was trying to protect you. And this story reminds us of something we naturally have access to, our intuition. And that's why a story can continue revealing new truths over the course of a lifetime. Because the story doesn't change, we do. At 20, you hear one story. At 40, you hear another. At 60, you may discover a layer that was hidden in plain sight all along. The story hasn't changed, you've changed. And because of that, the story is able to teach you something new. One of my favorite ideas from Jewish Kabbalah is the idea that Torah has 70 faces. This image is a beautiful one. The Torah is so rich and layered that it can be read again and again, each time revealing another facet of truth. But I don't think that's true of Torah alone. I think it's true of all great stories. They aren't puzzles to be solved once and for all. They're living things. A story that speaks deeply to me today may reveal something entirely different to me 10 years from now. And the very same story may speak to you in a completely different way. Someone who was abused by their father may hear the moment the father cuts off his daughter's hands very differently than someone who wasn't. That part of the story may speak directly to their own wounds, while another listener may be drawn to an entirely different part of the journey. Not because one of them is right and the other is wrong, but because we're standing in different places on the journey, and both can be true. Stories meet us where we are. Because while each of us has our own unique story, those stories often follow the very same patterns. Our outer lives may look vastly different from someone who lived 200 years ago or even 2,000 years ago. We have different technologies, different cultures, different problems, but the human heart hasn't changed. We still wrestle with fear, we still long to belong, we still seek love, we still betray ourselves, we still lose our way, and we still search for something that feels like home. That's why these stories continue speaking to us. Because they aren't describing a particular place or time. They're describing the landscape of the human soul. And because we continue to grow and change, they continue revealing new layers throughout our lives. Think about the fairy tales you loved as a Child. At six years old, we were captivated by the magic, the castles, the dragons, the princes and princesses, the adventure. But when we revisit those same stories as adults, suddenly we see something entirely different. We see courage, sacrifice, loss, trauma, transformation, the search for belonging, the longing to become who we were meant to be. The story hasn't changed. We've changed. And that's part of their magic. And if you haven't revisited a favorite story from your childhood in a while, don't worry, you're in the right place. Because we're going to. As Ellie Weasel wrote, God made man because he loves stories. And Heinrich Zimmer reminds us, symbols hold the mind to truth, but are not themselves truth. Stories are not the truth itself. They point us toward it. They're fingers pointing at the moon, not the moon itself. It reminds me of the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching. The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. Some realities are simply too vast to be captured by language alone. Stories don't define those realities, they help us encounter them. They help us remember them. The stories we'll explore throughout this podcast are no different. They are echoes from the past, yet they pulse with a timeless energy that speaks directly to the human experience. They help us navigate the labyrinth of our own lives. They help us uncover hidden wounds, forgotten gifts, and buried treasures. They remind us that we are not alone. The path we walked has been traveled by countless people before us, each leaving breadcrumbs of wisdom behind. May these stories become breadcrumbs for you as well. So with that, I invite you to listen with more than just your mind. Engage your heart, engage your imagination, engage your soul. Allow these stories to awaken parts of yourself that may have been quietly sleeping. Allow them to illuminate truths you've been yearning to uncover. Allow them to become a compass pointing you home, because that is what the great stories do. They remind us that home has been within us all along. And before we go, I'd like to leave you with a few questions to reflect on this week. What stories have resonated with you most throughout your life? Not the stories you think you should like, the ones that keep finding you, the movie you've watched dozens of times, the fairy tale you loved as a child, the book that changed something in you, the myth, scripture, or story that still lingers in your heart years later. What is it about that story that speaks to you? Which character do you identify the most with? Which struggle feels familiar? And which part of the story feels like your own life? Because I don't believe the stories that stay with us do so by accident. I think they were reflecting something back to us: a longing, a wound, a gift, a truth that we're ready to see. Let me give you an example. One of my favorite movies as a young teenager was the movie Dead Poet Society. And if you've never seen it, it's the story of a teacher, Mr. Keating, who encourages his students to think for themselves, find their own voice, and pursue a life that feels true. Now, if you've been listening to this podcast, you're probably not surprised it's one of my favorite movies. But at the time, I couldn't have told you why I loved it so much. I just knew something about it moved me. And looking back now, I can see that many of the themes that stirred me then are the very themes I explore today. Things like authenticity, courage, meaning, purpose, finding your own voice, and choosing a life that feels true rather than simply following the path laid out before you. The story was speaking to something in me long before I had the words for it. And even today, that final scene still brings me to tears. Not because it's sentimental, but because it asks a question every one of us eventually has to answer. Will I live according to what I know to be true or according to what everyone else expects of me? Long before I understood why that scene affected me so deeply, something in me already knew. Stories allow us to see in a few pages what might otherwise take a lifetime to recognize. They show us the same wound, the same mistake, or the same lesson appearing again and again in different forms. So this week, pay attention to the stories that have shaped you. And next time, we're going to stop looking at a single thread and we're going to begin seeing the tapestry. Because individually, stories are beautiful, but when we begin laying them beside one another, we discover that they aren't isolated stories at all. They're threads woven into something much larger. We'll place the handless maiden besides Percival and begin discovering that the deepest wisdom isn't found in one story. But before we go, I'd like to leave you with one final thought. For thousands of years, these stories were shared orally, passed from one generation to the next, long before they were ever written down. That tradition has always depended on ordinary people sharing what they found meaningful with the people they love. It's how the teachings of Jesus spread, it's how the wisdom of the Buddha endured. It's how so many of the stories that continue to shape our lives found their way to us. And in many ways, that's why this podcast exists. Long before stories were ever shared with the world, they were first shared with a friend. And so if today's conversation spoke to something within you, I invite you to continue the tradition and pass it along. Share it with someone who comes to mind. The best stories have always found their way home from one heart to another. And if you'd like to continue the journey, you can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, or visit KnowThysoul.com to explore the episodes, read the transcripts, and join my mailing list. And I'll meet you here next week as we begin weaving the threads together and discover how these stories start to form a larger tapestry. Until next time, my friends, may you know thy soul. It already knows the way.