The Hero’s Journey: From Pain to Purpose

Embrace Your Journey. Transform Your Pain. Discover Your Purpose.

What if your struggles are not just challenges, but a sacred initiation designed to unlock your deepest potential? Across time and cultures, myth, initiation, and transformation have been central to human development, and now neuroscience and spirituality affirm what ancient wisdom traditions have long known—story has the power to rewire the brain, shape identity, and catalyze personal evolution.

In this Jungian, Soul-Centered, and Neurospirituality-based webinar, we exploreD how the Hero’s Journey—the timeless narrative structure described by Joseph Campbell and deeply connected to C.G. Jung’s understanding of archetypes and individuation—serves as a powerful map for navigating pain and uncertainty, rewiring the brain for meaning, and unlocking the soul’s deeper purpose.

Why Jung? Why Neurospirituality?

Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung understood that suffering and struggle are not just obstacles but initiatory rites that move us toward individuation—the process of becoming whole. In Jungian psychology, myths and archetypes provide a symbolic language through which the unconscious speaks, guiding us toward transformation.

At the same time, modern neuroscience affirms the power of storytelling on the human brain. According to Neuroscientist, Dr. Christophe Morin, a leader in neurospirituality and narrative psychology, stories release neurochemicals like oxytocin and dopamine, deepening emotional connection, enhancing memory, and shaping behavior. 

When we engage in personal storytelling—such as framing our struggles through the lens of the Hero’s Journey—we literally rewire our brain to move beyond survival responses (fight/flight/freeze) and into higher states of consciousness, resilience, and spiritual awakening.

Furthermore, initiation itself is a neurospiritual process—one that engages deep limbic structures in the brain responsible for memory, transformation, and meaning-making. When we undergo profound life challenges, we enter liminal space—a neurological and spiritual threshold where our old identity dissolves, and a new, more authentic self emerges.

Topics of Interest

• Explore the Hero’s Journey Through a Jungian and Neurospiritual Lens – Learn how archetypes and the collective unconscious shape your transformation at both a psychological and neurological level.
• Understand the Brain’s Response to Story & Initiation – Discover how narrative shapes neural pathways, allowing you to shift from survival to meaning-making.
• Work with Pain as Initiation – Learn how rites of passage and transformation affect the nervous system and spiritual awakening.
• Rewire Your Brain for Growth & Purpose – Gain Soul-Centered Coaching tools to integrate your journey and reframe your experiences for lasting change.

Soul, Cosmos, and Consciousness™ is an illuminating “soul feed” to feed your soul! ENGAGE WITH US in deep reflection and self-discovery at the crossroads of ancient wisdom, cosmic mysteries, evolving consciousness, and the essence of being—via podcast, articles, webinars, online courses, and in-person retreats on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Transcript

 Webinar: The Hero's Journey: From Pain to Purpose 

Led by Dr. Bonnie Bright and Dr. Christophe Morin 

CM: Delighted to join you all for this special presentation on the Hero’s Journey. I'm Dr. Christophe Morin. I will bring, as some of you may be already familiar with our format, my neurospiritual perspective. 

I've been a researcher in neuroscience for over two and a half decades and more recently exploring specifically the nature of our maladaptive behaviors, conditions that I'm sure you've never heard of, like anxiety, stress, depression, trauma, addiction, shall I continue? And what they ultimately mean. And we'll talk quite a bit about that, the meaning of suffering to some extent. 

So with that, I'll let Bonnie introduce herself.  

BB: So just a couple of announcements, and then I will introduce myself a little bit better, and then we're going to jump right in. First of all, some of you have been present or have had a chance to watch the recording of the last webinar that we did, our final Friday free webinars, which we're going to do throughout this year. So the last Friday of every month. 

And that's in our Soul Cosmos and Consciousness™ media series, which includes not only these webinars, but also posts, articles, other kinds of events, online courses, and inperson retreats that we are offering on the Big Island of Hawaii.  

So if you are interested in the Enneagram, and I know many of you got a lot out of that webinar, I have personally used the Enneagram for over two decades, and it's just such a powerful thing. We are offering an online course. It meets four times over four weeks, two hours each time. If you register today, we are going to give you half off for the next 10 people who register for that course.  

And that course is regularly $199. So if you're interested, please go to the Institutewebsite and check that out. You can find all of the information about Soul Cosmos and 

Consciousness in the link called Soul Feedat the Institute for SoulCentered.com.  So with that, I'd like to just say a few words about myself. 

02:10 

My name is Bonnie Bright. I am a depth psychologist and also a soul-centered coach. And my work is primarily in soul-centered psychologies, as I have chosen to call them. And that includes depth psychology, which of course is primarily Jungian psychology, although the way that I learned it, I did my graduate work at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and that is expanded into a lot of different kinds of topics and different kinds of contexts. 

[Carl] Jung was quite a polymath, and he was very interested in making psychology an interdisciplinary system. And so he brought in a lot of different things. And of course, we understand that from a depth psychological standpoint, it is all about studying the unconscious, whether it's the personal unconscious or the collective unconscious. And the way that we can understand and start to engage with what is currently unconscious, therefore unknowable for the moment, is through symbols and dreams and mythology and anything that can tell us a story. 

03:12 

So obviously part of our topic today will be stories, and Christophe is going to give us the neurospiritual perspective on stories and how they work for us. But meanwhile, before we jump fully into the lecture part, I'd like to invite you guys if you're willing, and you don't have to be, but if you are willing to just take part with me for a minute or two in an exercise that is going to hopefully prepare you for the story that we are about to engage in. 

And so what that looks like for me when I work with clients in my soul-centered coaching practice is it looks like maybe a guided meditation, maybe a relaxation, maybe a centering or a grounding.  

And so if you're willing and you want to, you may close your eyes for this process. If you would prefer to keep them open, that's totally fine. So for those of you who are willing to go along with this, I invite you to take a couple of deep breaths and just begin to allow your attention to turn inward. 

04:10 

Perhaps just noticing how it feels different as you allow your attention to be inward instead of outward so much as we typically do in our daily ordinary reality. And just noticing perhaps what you find within your body, within your being, you might notice some anxiety or stress or tension, or you might notice some spaciousness, really general feelings of well-being. 

And as you are in this space, just noticing what you're noticing in this moment, I invite you to open yourself to contemplating a challenge that you are currently experiencing in your life. And this can be big or small. It can be simply annoying, or it can be something that really has to be transformed, or else you know that your life is just never going to be as fulfilling as you would like it to be. 

And as you think about this challenge, I invite you to feel in your body, where does this challenge seem to live right now? And that might sound like a weird question, but we work somatically and symbolically in this work. And so if you can locate it in your body somewhere, I also invite you to begin to imagine and notice what does it feel like this challenge? You might notice some feelings of being heavy. 

You might notice some feelings of allowing yourself to notice, however, now that this heavy part of you, this challenging part of you, is actually not you. It is a part of you, perhaps, or perhaps is taking up space in your psyche. But it is not actually you. This is a burden that you have been carrying that perhaps is taking your time and energy. 

06:00 

But in this moment, if it feels okay for you to rise up out of the top of your head, whatever that means for you, knowing that you're grounded in your body and that all is well, and be able to just look down on yourself and notice yourself as this human being, or perhaps as a soulful being in a human form, and noticing this challenge that you're facing, and noticing that as you have risen out of your body and you're looking back down at yourself in the room, that perhaps you can see or feel or notice the separation from this heavy burden that you are carrying around right now. 

And so I invite you in this moment to just kind of put a placeholder right here, welcoming whatever this feeling is, allowing it to just coexist with you right now. As we go through this part of our webinar today, we will be talking about what some of these challenges might look like and how we might locate ourselves in the process of trying to deal with these. 

As you find the stopping place here and just put a pause on that place, whenever you're ready, you can allow your eyes to gently open and come back into this place of conversation and learning and connecting here as we move forward. So just to invite you in this moment now as you come back and thank you so much for experiencing this with me. We will come back and pick up this story at the very end and see if it has changed or if something has changed for you or if we can add some resources for you to work with this challenge that you are bringing, that you are carrying today. 

07:40 

And for now, however, we'd like to move into this first phase and that is to talk about the Hero’s Journey. Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist, is the one who really came up with this idea. He died in 1987, I believe. And so I did not have the opportunity myself to ever meet him, but he obviously was an amazing guy and you can watch a lot of videos and just see the wealth of his knowledge is amazing. The Hero’s Journey is what Joseph Campbell called a monomyth. 

And by that he meant that this is an archetypal idea. It's a pattern that we can look at that is playing out in every single individual's life all the time. And for that reason, because it's archetypal, it means that it presents us with patterns or traits or characteristics or ideas that are archetypal. 

And archetypal, as Jung looked at it, and Jung is the one that coined this word really, he looked at it as archetypal as something that is a pattern that can be recognized across era and across cultures. And what he meant by that is, for example, if I say the word teacher to you, everybody on this call and everybody who's listening to this later knows what that word "teacher" means. I don't have to define it for you, and I don't have to describe it to you. 09:07 

It's a concept that you have in your head, in your brain, in your being, in your experience, that you can understand it. So if we start to come back to this idea of the Hero’s Journey, we can begin to see how so many of these aspects of the Hero’s Journey are archetypal. And it's one reason that Campbell suggested that every single one of us is living out an archetypal journey, that we are somewhere on this journey. 

So we're going to move into the idea of these stages of the journey and what happens during each of those stages. And we'll look at this archetypally as well. For those of you who are able to see your screen right now, this may look familiar to you then. This is an image that basically represents the different stages of the Hero’s Journey, according to Joseph Campbell. There are lots of different variations that have been made from his original idea, of course. And so what we are showing you here is one version or one set of ideas or one perspective. 

And of course, there might be dozens, if not more than that. A lot of times when you see these graphs of the Hero’s Journey, and in fact, Campbell himself went counterclockwise instead of clockwise. Here you can see they're actually going clockwise. So it starts at the top at 12 o'clock on this clock and it moves through one, two, three, and four. You can see in a clockwise motion. Often it's counterclockwise because it's meant to represent mythological time. It's not representing our ordinary everyday reality. 

10:37 

It's not our everyday egoic world that we are living in. In fact, we are entering a place of timeless time. We are entering a place that we would call perhaps in soul-centered psychologies kairos, which is this meaning of timeless time, or we might call it mythopoetic, which is the idea of entering a world that is primarily invisible to us. Jung, again, called it the unconscious. We have many other names for it. I like to call it soul or our soul self. 

And when we enter this non-ordinary state or we work with these non-ordinary ideas, it gives us the opportunity to really be able to avail ourselves of something bigger that we often talk about as being the universe or God or our soul. And all of these higher forces, higher powers have the capacity to help us to reconnect with ourselves, to feel grounded and connected, and to be able to start to witness our journey and to understand what is really going on for us. 

So you've probably already looked at these stages now because you can see them, but I'll just touch on them briefly. We may not look at every single one of these individually. And you'll notice here also there are 12 steps. Sometimes Campbell talked about 16 or 17 steps. In fact, sometimes he even broke it down into 32 different steps, depending on what he was talking about and what he was trying to identify with. These steps, 12 is a kind of a common number that a lot of people use. These are the most basic ideas, I guess, that can move the story forward. 

12:17 

And so that might be one reason that they have chosen these out of 17 or 32 or whatever it is. But you can see here that this idea of mythopoetic is introduced immediately right at phase number one. And that is when our hero or we, because we are the hero in our own journey, when we are in our ordinary world, it means status quo. We are basically living our lives the way that we have grown up and intended to live our lives for the most part. 

In our society, Western society, that is, we really mostly are encouraged to grow up, go to school, get an education of some kind, whether it's a trade or mentoring with somebody or just starting a job and working your way up. But the idea is that for this part of our lives, it is get up, go to work, spend time with your family, spend time with your friends. It's all of the structures of our everyday adult life that we know and we talk about. 

But at some point during our lives, and Jung talked a lot about this, and before him, William James, who really was probably the progenitor of psychology back in the late 1800s. He talked a lot about what we now know as the religious function of the psyche. Lionel Corbett, who's a contemporary union, wrote a book called The Religious Function of the Psyche. And if you're interested in that, you really should go look it up. He's a fabulous writer, very knowledgeable. 

13:45 

And what he talks about is how we have within us some kind of an impulse toward the sacred, toward connecting with something that is spiritual, toward developing a relationship with the spiritual or with ourselves, that aspect of ourselves that is spiritual. I like to call that the soul self. And when we are in connection with our soul self, that is what gives us meaning in our lives. 

I believe that if we are consciousness now, and if you believe that we have some consciousness after our physical body dies, that if that consciousness continues, it's easy to also then parlay that into maybe we were consciousness before we actually came here to Earth and were born into these physical bodies. 

And in fact, maybe it was an intentional plan for us as that consciousness to be able to come into these physical bodies, because here in physical bodies, in the world of form, in third and fourth dimensional space, we have the capacity to have trials, to have challenges, to have tests, to have relationships that are challenging us, to have emotions and feelings that can sometimes be very troubling or very torturous for us when we're going through some very big things. 

15:04 

And so what happened is that at some point in our lives, when we're living our ordinary lives, in the ordinary world, we're trying to make ends meet, we're going to work, we're dealing with family stuff, whatever it is, that something happens that Campbell called a call to adventure. And this is truly the beginning of the journey because that call to adventure can be anything. When you get one of these calls to adventures, it may not be what you were expecting or hoping for. 

In fact, that is often the case. So a call to adventure can be a relationship breakup. It can be a disease or illness of some kind. It can be losing a loved one to death or a loved one getting ill. It can be something happening to one of your kids or watching your children struggle. Whatever this is, there's something that interrupts your normal everyday world and something has to change. 

But if you just look at these different labels for the different phases that go through here, you can see this can become an epic adventure, much in the way of some of the great films that you have probably each seen. We know for a fact that Star Wars, for example, was built on this idea of the Hero’s Journey. And in fact, Joseph Campbell collaborated with George Lucas in order to make that film, gave him some consulting on this whole idea of the Hero’s Journey. 

16:27 

So you'll see how Luke Skywalker in that film, for example, was living in this ordinary world as a farmer's son. And he was bored out of his mind. And so what happened? Well, there came this call to adventure. And he decided to actually lean into that call and to leave his ordinary world. And this takes a tremendous amount of courage. And often, you know when something happens to us, when we get sick, or we have a big relationship issue, or something happens, you might think to yourself, you know I did not sign up for this. I am pretty sure I did not sign up for this. But the truth is, is, of course, if we have challenges while we're here in our lives, in the physical world, and we are conscious and we're paying attention, and we want to improve ourselves, and we want to do our inner work to help to heal ourselves, because every one of us has wounding from our childhood, then we have this real opportunity to be able to use this as a model, as a map to see where we are in this process. 

And then from there, we can talk about, discuss, identify some tools and tips to be able to help you either to move forward or to go back to one of the steps that you didn't complete properly. And that is one thing that I will just end on here for the moment. And that is to say that these steps do not always happen in order in your regular life, in ordinary life. Sometimes we are jumping from one to another and not necessarily going in order. 

17:58 

But again, the key is really to be able to understand this whole idea of tapping into the mythopoetic, of tapping into this map, of tapping into these archetypal ideas that can show us, oh, what's happening right now? And then we can begin to understand that these challenges that every single one of us is facing, of course, they are meant to be. They are created by us, for us, in order to learn some very specific lessons that perhaps we chose to learn when we were here in this lifetime. 

Almost like choosing a major if you go to college, where you can pick the kinds of things that you want to work on, and then you enter into this process unknowingly, of course, but something happens that then puts our foot on that journey and we move forward. So I of course have a lot more to say about that, but I want to be conscious of our time. And so Christophe, I'd love to turn the time over to you. Thank you. 

CM: Imagine my shock as a neuroscientist when I was challenged, when we were working on many aspects of this webinar, on the significance of processes that I've always examined as happening in the brain for mostly a biological reason. So for me, the early work on the meaning of a journey of a story was really its direct impact on the brain. 

Now, most of you who know me well, then that I never travel too far from a brain here. And our brain in a physical form has also layers that have evolved over millions of years and our understanding at this point in time, knowing that 90% of what we know about the brain has been discovered in the last 20 years, that we have been supported neurobiologically speaking to engage in various challenges of our journey. 

The first being to survive. And it seems that even today, having the benefit of additional layers, we continue to see many of the directions of those Hero’s Journey story. Simply the rhythm of the episodes is very much front and center about the survival of our existence. So I've looked at how important stories are for our brain. You could say, in fact, and this is what I'm showing you now, that we are indeed biologically wired to engage with stories. 

20:26 

Stories and the notion of having acts are all supported by various biological processes, but a huge amount of our wiring in the brain is dedicated to what's called self-referential thinking. It's another way of saying not only engaging with our own story, but trying to seek meaning to our own story is a huge brain priority. 

It may not be obvious because a lot of that processing, in fact, as Bonnie has insisted, is really done without consciousness. And the lack of consciousness doesn't mean there isn't something happening below that threshold. And what is happening is engaging in the emotional processing, the steps that are involved in any story, bring in different contributors in the way emotions work on our system. 

So the default mode network is a technical word to describe what is, in fact, the most dominant and by far collaboration between millions of neurons to support our traveling in those journeys and our understanding of those journeys. Now, I insist on the idea of understanding our journey. But as you well know, since we all watch movies, we're suckers for others' hero’s' journeys as well. 

21:56 

And we spend an enormous amount of time by the proxy of our mirror neurons. We have these very unique mirror neurons that help us, in fact, transport ourselves in others' stories. And so the teachings of the Hero’s Journeys for me are not the teaching just of my own stories, but my ability given by those mirror neurons to sample and transport myself in other stories. 

And there's enormous, enormous learning through that, particularly because of the emotional cocktails that happen when we engage with our stories. And by that I mean emotions that take us from fear to anticipation to joy. And all our neurobiology is about, in a way, producing and helping us consume and metabolize neurotransmitters that you've all heard of, like dopamine to fuel our motivation, oxytocin to fuel our sentiment of loving ourself, of being loved by others, all the way to adrenaline, which gives us the fire and the energy to fight. 

23:04 

So there is a dance, if you will, more so a symphony of neurotransmitters that are extremely active in this process of either experiencing your own journey or experiencing through the proxy of a movie, the journeys of others. The last point I want to make is my awakening, personally, happened late because I couldn't tell what was going on beyond the neurobiological process until I finally opened up to, you could say, a spiritual awakening. 

And in science, as you know, we're still strugglers in terms of putting, you know, the meaning of our life in a reliable algorithm. But I really began to step up, if you will, once I got into the experiential aspect of living through a Hero’s Journey. Once I started to write about it, my new book is essentially my own Hero’s Journey. 

And that's the work that, of course, soul-centered psychology has been able to bring not to me, but others that are really grasping just pieces of a story, but not essentially tap into the neurospiritual dimension of it. So the neurospiritual dimension of it is also your opportunity to see stories as initiation and to see the contribution of a story to your own ability to change and transform. 

24:28 

And of course, the function that is now well understood within the brain to support that is what's called neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity has long been looked at the great ability that we have to heal a cut or a broken bone. But we've never, until just, you could say a decade ago, we never understood how much our brain was, in fact, ready and willing to rewire stories, to rewire even traits. 

And part of the work that we're doing in teaching the Enneagram and also another model called the Big Five is to really help people understand the absolute gift that we all have received to modify and to some extent heal ourselves out of those toxic stories that end up recycling inside our head and consume an enormous amount of energy. So in this cycle of initiation, we really have the opportunity to leverage that neurobiological force within us into a neurospiritual dimension. 

I think I created one more slide just to insist that when I say rewiring, I'm also talking about those maladaptive behaviors that may, of course, derail your journey. We kind of see stress, anxiety, and depression as problems, as disease that are not what we should be experiencing, when, in fact, all those conditions, certainly neurobiologically speaking, and it's true for stress, our invitation to leverage neuroplasticity, our invitation to enter these luminal states and extract more openly the meaning and the directions of those stories. 

26:19 

So it's really the integration part of the Hero’s Journey that I find the most fascinating. And that's what we're going to be talking about next. Bonnie.  

BB: Great. Thank you so much. I mean, so powerful when you can start to plug in your own life's journey into this kind of an archetypal idea. So I do want to go back and refer to some of those because we're also then going to look at this side-by-side, not literally, because I don't have the visual, but side by side with what we know now as the Heroine’s journey. 

26:51 

Some of you may have heard of that and also be familiar with that. And basically the idea is that the Hero’s Journey, if you look at these 12 different steps, you can see as we go through them, the call to adventure, often what happens is initially when that call to adventure happens, whether it's a challenge, a struggle of some kind, whether it's something extremely difficult we've never faced before. 

Whatever that is, often the first thing that happens is we go into denial or our fear gets the better of us and we just aren't able to break out of that enough to take a step to put our foot on that path. But once we have a few opportunities to put our foot on that path, often there are real-world consequences. If we don't respond to that call, the idea is that eventually we do, mostly because we have to. And once we do accept that call, then we are able to start moving through these steps. 

So you can see here the steps like meeting a mentor in the movie The Hobbit. Of course, Bilbo Baggins met Gandalf and Gandalf was the mentor. The Harry Potter series is also based a lot on this idea of the Hero’s Journey. And so in the Harry Potter series, there were a bunch of different guides or mentors that were available as the kids moved through the different stages of the school of Hogwarts. And you can see that having a mentor can give you some kind of guidance. 

28:14 

And so if you are struggling in your life and you've tried everything and you just have no idea what to do next, maybe that is where you use this as a map and you look at it and you say, gosh, I really need a mentor. Who could I engage to be able to help me through this? There's a crossing of the threshold, which always means it's kind of the point of no return. Once you cross a threshold, you can never go back. Often it means something that you have learned or experienced that you now have that understanding of, and there's no way that you cannot know it. 

And so you have to continue to move forward on your journey in order to be able to continue to resolve this, to integrate it as Christophe was talking about. And then, of course, you meet tests along the way. You meet gatekeepers. Eventually, you're going to run into the dragons that are guarding the treasure. This is often referred to as an underworld journey. And some of you might know that as a dark night of the soul also. 

This term a dark night of the soul refers to when we are in a very difficult situation, a very difficult stage in our lives, when we are being asked, perhaps, by our sole self to really allow ourselves to be worked, to allow some of this material that is existing in our unconscious right now, whether it's things that we've repressed because we just didn't have the capacity to deal with them at the time that they happened to us, or things that we have suppressed. 29:34 

This is really an opportunity for us to start to be the witness to our own journey, to our own underworld journey in particular. And so as we cross these thresholds, as we meet these gatekeepers, as we pass through these gates, it is up to us truly to be able to hold that understanding of what's actually happening to us. So coming back to this idea of the Heroine’s journey, well, you can see here that a lot of these things are referring to maybe we could say more of an external or extroverted kind of journey. 

30:07 

As you leave the familiar and you go out into your experience, you might run into a dark forest that is impossible for you to find your way out of. So if you're struggling in your current life, you may be able to locate yourself to the map and say, wow, I'm in the dark forest right now, and I don't know how to get out. When we are talking about the Heroine’s journey, it's actually more of an inward journey or a feminine lunar journey as Jung might have looked at it. 

Jung talked about the difference between masculine, what he called masculine or solar traits and feminine or lunar traits. And the difference is the masculine solar traits, any man or woman can have these, and any man or woman can be on the Heroine’s journey, the same way we can all be on the Hero’s Journey. But the Heroine’s journey is much more about our separation from the feminine. 

And the feminine means receptivity, connectivity, relational, compassion, all of these things that we think of when we consider the softer side of things, softer ways of being in the world, softer ways of communicating, being connected with something deeper. Jung always considered the soul to be feminine, for example. And so what has happened in our culture is we have really not valued those feminine traits as much as we have valued the masculine solar traits. 

31:31 

So again, you know the first half of our lives, as you looked at it, it was our role and our responsibility to develop our ego. Our ego is the thing that drives us in our lives. It gets us to places. It tells us what we need to be doing. It was developed from our childhood conditioning for the most part, and now it tells us what to do and how to get there. Unfortunately, however, the ego doesn't know everything. In fact, it only knows a fraction of things. 

And so what's really important in this journey is to allow the ego to step aside and to be able to go on this journey and be open, as Christophe mentioned, neuroplastic to these experiences that are coming along. In our culture, the feminine has been devalued. And so the first part of this for the Heroine’s journey is to be able to recognize where in our life has the solar masculine overpowered the feminine? 

Where do we need to be softer or more receptive or more relational or more tolerant or more compassionate or more allowing, and especially when it comes to ourselves? Maureen Murdock is the author and the creator, developer of this idea of the Heroine’s journey. Yes, she was doing it as a feminist response to Joseph Campbell's hero's myth. Both of them are extremely valuable. If you are looking for the Heroine’s journey, the book is called literally The Heroine's Journey by Maureen Murdock. 

32:57 

And I'll just tell you the 10 steps that she has put together. She wasn't trying necessarily to do, you know, look at one from Joseph Campbell and do one for hers. She just put these together based on her own experience and her own clients and things that she had going on in her life at the time. So the first one is separation from the feminine, as I mentioned. We put aside the things that are feminine and all of us go after what our culture has developed as the Hero’s Journey, and that is we go out there, we try to get jobs, we try to make a life for ourselves, we develop our ego. 

But the challenge is that often we leave behind the feminine altogether and we become overly identified with the masculine, which is seeking and tracking and setting goals and going after things assertively and being goal-oriented and being rational and linear. Again, nothing wrong with any of these, but the idea is to come into more of a balance. So when you're on the Heroine’s journey, it's going to be about reclaiming the feminine aspects of yourself and bringing that into more balance. 

And if you feel like you're already in touch with that a lot, maybe you need to work more on the Hero’s Journey then to bring that masculine up into more balance with some of those more feminine qualities that you have. But what I really want to say about this is we can look at these journeys as initiations. And we do have resources that can allow us to be able to address the challenges as they arise on our journey. 

34:27 

Again, the overarching theme or idea that we really want to look at here is we are accessing the unconscious. And we might also call the unconscious, again, soul. We might also look at the unconscious as a vast, vast repository of resources that are available to us that can tell us about who we are and how we're functioning and what we need to do in our lives to be able to change. And so that involves working in a very union or transpersonal style. 

That means we can often meditate or sit with our dreams, or we can identify symbols that seem relevant to us. So for example, when we're working with the Hero’s Journey or the Heroine’s journey, and we're working with a particular challenge in our own lives, we might want to sit down, take 15 minutes, 20 minutes, go into a meditative process where you think about your challenge, you look at the Hero’s Journey, and you say, where am I on this circle in the Hero’s Journey or the Heroine’s Journey, and then drop into that place and see if you can engage with the unconscious. 

And what that looks like is you might have a symbol, for example. Maybe in part of the process when you were fighting one of the dragons in the process when you're dealing with one of these very, very heavy burdens that you are carrying around or challenges that you're carrying around, maybe in that process, somehow you imagine yourself getting a sword. This is a very typical mythological idea, right? 

36:03 

And so if in your imagination, which is based on image, of course, and Jung said image is the language of soul, you have the sword, and maybe there's a way you can now engage with this sword. Either you imagine yourself using the sword and you see what comes out of that as a story, or you engage, for example, in dialogue with one of the characters that you meet, or even with the symbol itself. 

And what that might look like is what Jung called active imagination, which was his idea of engaging with symbols or characters that come from dreams or that we can that come to us for whatever reason. And Jung gave them a lot of autonomy, right? This is soul at work. This is consciousness at work. And so we can work with our dreams. We can engage in active imagination. We can work with symbols. 

There's a lot of different ways to really be able to use this as a map and to move the story either forward or backward or to change the story completely as you wish, as you would like. If you need resources, for example, you can drop into some kind of an imaginative experience where images show up for you, and you might see people that come to help you. It might be ancestors. It might be heroes from movies that you've seen. It might be famous historical characters. 

37:22 

Could be somebody in your ordinary world that you didn't even realize was a possibility to help you. But doing this work with the unconscious is what will actually give us the capacity to access soul, to access the mythopoetic. And the last thing I'll just say here, and I guess we'll have to leave it at that, is it's really, really like magic almost when we're able to engage with the unconscious. 

Because even though we are carrying around all of these habits and patterns and ideas and beliefs that are mostly unconscious to us, we do have that capacity to affect change, particularly and especially and sometimes only if we are able to engage with soul or engage with that collective unconscious, that imaginative, that transpersonal, which means beyond the personal realm, beyond the ego, right? 

I just wanted to leave you with this idea that the Navajo people, the Diné, as they call themselves, have a, well, obviously most indigenous people have rituals and rituals are what connect us to the bigger part of ourselves, the soul or the collective unconscious. Navajo people have a ritual where they do sand paintings and the sand painting is basically the story of a myth. 

38:44 

And in that myth, there's always a hero who is facing some kind of a challenge and having to conquer something. And when there is a patient in the tribe who is ill or is going through something very difficult or really needs some help, then the medicine man will bring and the community will bring this patient into this specially designated area, what Jung called a Temenos, which is a Greek word, which means a safe, contained space. 

And it's really important that we have these kinds of safe, contained spaces in which to do this kind of work. So you always want to make sure that you feel safe, you're not going to be interrupted, that you know you're not going to be judged or have to engage with other people, et cetera. But when the Navajo people do this, when the Diné people bring this patient in and do this mythological ritual with the sand painting, literally the story is re-told and the patient is placed next to or in the center of the sand painting. 

And then as the story is told and the hero, his energy and his power becomes evident, then what happens is they take the sand from the leg, for example, of the hero in the sand painting, and they apply the sand to the leg of the patient. And then they take the sand from, for example, the arm of the hero in the sand painting, and they apply the sand from the arm to the patient's arm, and then to the head, and then to the heart, and et cetera, on down the line. 40:18 

So that what is happening actually is the patient is being emerged in this mythopoetic reality, in this imagery, in this healing energy that can allow them to literally take on then the energy of the hero and to be able to have those resources and to move ahead. So really, really powerful to be able to engage with this kind of energy. And of course, this is what we are all about. 

And particularly, this is why I fell in love with depth psychology and soul-centered psychologies to begin with. So Christophe, back to you.  

CM: Right. In closing, and to amplify this really important point of engaging with rituals, it took me decades to understand the value of rituals. As I said, I was, in a way, lost in my upper rational brain and failed to recognize the meaning of all the struggle, of all the steps in the Hero’s Journey. 

I was feeling somewhat victimized by those steps rather than understand their higher meaning. And once I did, and this is really the purpose of this book, my new book, Open, I realized that obviously gaining consciousness was step one. Gaining consciousness is the work we're doing here with you sharing, which is to understand the patterns that are at play. Many of them don't make a lot of sense intuitively. 

Often you need that experiential dark night of the soul to touch the somatic significance of it. But in my case, what I was able to do is really identify that historically, for thousands of years, humans have in fact engaged into modalities and practices that put the pause on the rumination of our brain. 

That Default Mode Network that I suggested is so important needs to be suspended in order to give us the room to raise the consciousness, to have some opportunity to see ourselves in the story, not simply experience the story. So obviously a lot of contemplative practices have been doing this. We have done some research on the nature of nature in healing and providing the space and the connection and the rapport with something that is bigger than ourselves. 

42:46 

And when I say nature, it can be stargazing, it can be being in the forests. Japanese people consider that a true science. Forest bathing is essential. Doctors actually prescribe in Japan going to the forest if you don't feel too good about yourself. And so our ceremonies or practices like breathwork, we've done quite a bit of work with [Stan] Grof and his approach towards breath with the intensity of it is really in the context of freedom or cartography of your journeys and to have as such more power and more ability to shape the directions of those journeys. 

The collective rituals that we can all engage in, in some way, this is part of that, but there are specific ceremonies, as some of you may have engaged with, particularly in the plant medicine world, where there is really the participation and support of a group in appreciating the story in the telling aspect of those rituals. There's enormous benefit from understanding that you're not alone experiencing that story. 

And you're not also alone being able to see these archetypes as true breadcrumbs for reframing the significance of your story.  

BB: I would like to maybe just take one minute and see if we can revisit what we did at the beginning. So if you weren't here at the beginning for this exercise, don't worry. You can still kind of follow it along. We're just going to take a minute and then maybe you will actually have something to report or to share or questions would also be good and we can do that for the last five minutes. 

44:21 

We are also willing to stay on a few minutes longer if anybody has burning questions that you'd like to ask. And so you're welcome to do that. But we will formally try to close just right after the hour. So for those of you again who are willing and wanting to, let's see if we can apply some of this. So just coming back into that place that we visited in the beginning where you're feeling your sitting bones on the chair, beginning to turn your attention inward. You can either close your eyes or leave them just slightly open and down toward the floor. 

And as you, again, just begin to notice how you're feeling in this moment, bring back to mind that idea or that challenge that you identified, or perhaps another one is coming up for you right now, some kind of a challenge that you're facing in your life right now. And noticing the weight of it, noticing how much space it takes within your being. Notice how much of your energy is going toward dealing with this. 

And then thinking about the Hero’s Journey, what you know of it now, knowing that you have answered some kind of a call. If you're just listening to this right now, you have already answered some kind of a call and that you are in this process. And so understanding that you have left your village, you have left the ordinary, you are seeking something, and a seeker is a real archetype too. 

45:43 

And as you are seeking something, as you begin to feel into this challenge for yourself, notice what shows up for you in the form of either a symbol, an image, or a character. And perhaps this is a mentor. Perhaps it's a gatekeeper. Perhaps it's somebody who has some tools or some magic or some wisdom for you. 

And in this moment, I invite you if you're holding something in your hand in your imagination or looking at something or if you're engaging with someone, I invite you to ask this individual or this energy or this object or this symbol. Ask it, what do you need from me right now? And you might want to follow that up with, what do I need to know about this challenge right now? 

And if you have an answer, if you don't have an answer, no problem. Some characters or symbols are more willing to talk than others. Sometimes it's a felt sense. Sometimes there's a sense of holding or completion or maybe there's a sense of you're doing the best that you can and that's all you can do right now. Sometimes when you're lost in the dark forest, all you can do is wander around. Sometimes you're already in the lair of the dragon, but the treasure is there waiting for you. 

And so it could be a negotiation with your challenge. It could be an asking for it to just lighten up a little bit while you gather some resources. It could be some kind of a making friends with this particular challenge. And at the very end, ask this character or symbol if it has anything for you. That could be wisdom, advice, a message, or it could be an object, something that it's giving to you, that you may or may not know the meaning of it. 

And then as you feel ready, letting yourself come back out of this space, allowing your eyes to open.  

Here's a question: “Do you have any suggestions for people who may have blocks or difficulty with imagining or imagery due to potential neurobiological issues, such as from long-term opioid use, what might be the best route to soul work for someone with that history?” Christophe, do you want to address that at all?  

48:03 

CM: It's a pretty complicated question. 

I would not suggest that I have expertise in the neurobiological consequence or damage that may be potentially created by overuse of opioid. But I do think that in many of the rituals that we suggest, there's always an option that really can be conducted quite passively. Just being in nature, for instance, or working on your breath, might be, in fact, enough as a portal to take you to a different layer of consciousness. 

I would really focus on small goals rather than go for the, you know, firework idea. We see this a lot in the plant medicine world, where people just want the big imagery, when in fact, insights can have many shapes and forms. They could come from smelling the nature around you or just watching very mindfully a tree. So I would just really not have expectations. Expectations, in fact, may sometimes create hurdles, self-limiting beliefs. I'm not suggesting you don't have a real challenge, neurophysiologically speaking, but if you truly believe you don't, it might clear the way for some of those experiences.  

BB: Thank you. And I would just add to that a couple of things. One, and again, I come across this a lot in my work one-on-one with my coaching work. And, you know, our society is super head centered, meaning super rational. Again, solar masculine. We don't really value so much imagination. Like we think it's frivolous or we think it's for kids. 49:42 

But again, Jung said images are the language of the soul. And so we all have access to them, not only that, but actually they are an incredible portal to doing our soul work, to experiencing ourselves as that soul self that we really already are in this process, in our journey. And however, if people are having a hard time with the images, and I do find that a lot because we can be very head-centered or overly our ego is overly cautious. 

Let's just say it doesn't want to tap into some of these things because it doesn't know what it should be valuing here. What you can do is help people to get more into the felt sense of things. Often, if they can't tap into imagination or don't understand the value of it, or are unable to for whatever reason, you can just ask them to notice things. So just put them back into that space of what do you notice? What do you feel? What do you feel in your body? Where do you feel it in your body? 

What does that feel like? Can you give it some kind of a texture? Can you give it some kind of a temperature? Can you give it a color? Does it feel like something that I would recognize if you described it to me? And then we can talk about it from that standpoint. What you're actually doing from that perspective is tapping into an image, but through the power of the somatic, through the body, through noticing, and help people just understand that the noticing is just as important as coming up with images or having an image come to you. 51:13 

It's just noticing whatever is right here, right now in the present moment. That's how we get the ego to suspend itself. And we're able to get to what is beneath the surface of our awareness. It's not easy, but the more you do it, it's just a practice, and the easier it will get, and the better you will become at it.  

[Participant question]: So, you know, I was kind of curious with the Hero’s Journey. I've noticed that for myself, it's definitely not a linear journey. Like I will go kind of back and forth. And for example, like meet the mentor one, like as a graduate student, you always think, “Oh, this is the one, right?” And then it's not. So that's always a hard thing. And then I think the other part is, how do you know that that's the ordeal? Like, you know, for me, at first, it was like graduating with like a master's hoping for a PhD, and now it's a job. So like, can you have like multiple Hero’s Journeys going on? Do you just go in like a loop? Can you go back and forth? Like, there's so much with this. 

52:09 

BB I will just say absolutely yes, you know, multi-dimensional, multitasking, which of course we can do as human beings. We're not good at it. But yes, you know, if you look at any one of those challenges that you're at, you might see its own little Hero’s Journey, and you might have several of those going on at the same time. And you might be in different stages on all of those. Again, what is really so helpful here, and I can tell already, that you are a witness of your own journey, because you have a lot of clarity and you're able to articulate what, you know, how you see it and what's going on for you. 

That is absolutely the first step. It's being willing to leave behind the ordinary because you can see something else, and then being willing to have the courage to apply this to it and face it and say, OK, that's where I am. So you can see, of all people, I think Alexandria is such a great example of how this can serve absolutely as a map.  

And if I were any of you, and what I also have done at times is to print out this graphic, you can just Google one and find one, or you can buy Campbell's book, The Hero with a 

Thousand Faces, and just print this out and put it somewhere where you can see it. 

53:14 

And then every single day, when you see that somewhere, you can look at it and say, oh, where am I today? Or where am I on this particular challenge? Or how am I feeling? Or am I getting close to the treasure? Or am I lost in that dark forest or whatever it is?  

[Participant question]: Yeah, quickly. You know I recognize that my life changed when I got a mentor. My son could use a mentor, but he's resistant to outside assistance. I think there's some shame there around sharing his disappointment with where he's at. What's a great way to sort of introduce the idea of mentorship?  

BB: You could tell him about the Hero’s Journey. There is that idea, you know, to actually present this and offer it and just kind of talk about it as a discussion point, especially with your son, because that kind of gives you something both a story to tap into. It puts you guys in the mirror neuron space as well. And maybe not you giving him advice so much as just sharing the model with him and saying, you know, where do you think you are on this process? It could just generate some really interesting discussion. 

CM: Remember that having more consciousness around his own journey can release some of that shame or embarrassment. And therefore, any modalities that can be conducted as a group modality like breath work or some plant medicine work can also be an opportunity to see you're not alone in your struggles. And you're not alone in discovering the power to ask for help. It's a very difficult question. 

It took me years to do that. But of course, you know, having gone through it that it can be a huge game changer.  

Well, thank you guys so much. I know a few of you still had questions. And again, I'm willing to stay on after we formally close, but I just wanted to really thank each of you for being here today. Again, it's just so wonderful to see some of your faces, to see your names, to know that you're here, to know we're like-minded, we're all in this together. 

There are so, so many tools and ideas out there that can really help us to not only be on our own spiritual journey, but to make our lives better because of it, and to make the people's lives around us better because of it. And don't forget, this Hero’s Journey is collective also. So whatever you see going on in the outer world that is challenging for you, put yourself right back in that Hero’s Journey or Heroine’s journey, particularly in this case. 

I think a lot of what we're discovering in our current culture is that we are lacking sacred feminine in our culture. So, yeah, really just keep coming back, you guys, to these. If it speaks to you, we really appreciate the connection here, and we plan to continue it. So thank you all very much.  

CM: Thank you all. And we'll see you in a month if you choose to join us. 

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This webinar is part of Soul, Cosmos, and Consciousness, a “soul feed” to feed your soul, delivering timely and illuminating new articles, podcast episodes, events, online courses and in person retreats at Manta Soul® on the Big Island of Hawaii that explore the profound realms of Consciousness, Emerging Sciences, Mystical Traditions, Neurospirituality, and 

Soul-Centered psychologies, including transformative insights from Jungian, 

Transpersonal, Archetypal, and Depth perspectives. The offerings in this space, invite you to participate in deep reflection and self-discovery at the crossroads of ancient wisdom, cosmic mysteries,  evolving consciousness, and the essence of being as we navigate times of personal and planetary transformation. 

About Dr. Bonnie Bright 

Founder of the Institute for Soul-Centered Psychology and Coaching™, Bonnie is a certified transpersonal coach, archetypal pattern analyst, and scholar in depth psychology. Her approach integrates Somatic, Symbolic, and Shamanic methodologies to help people work with symbolic messages, decode dreams, transform old stories, and manifest a life that they love. With a Ph.D. from Pacifica Graduate Institute, Bonnie has trained extensively in Holotropic Breathwork, the Enneagram, and indigenous wisdom traditions. She also founded Depth Psychology Alliance™, a global online community. She has conducted over 100 interviews with thought leaders in Jungian and depth psychologies. 

About Dr. Christophe Morin 

A neurospirituality researcher, author, and expert in consciousness and neuroplasticity, Christophe explores how the brain, psyche, and soul shape human experience. His latest books, Open: A Neurospiritual Exploration of the Self-Healing Power of Your Brain(2025), and Open Up: The Neurospiritual Guide To Your Enneagram Type(2025), examine the science and spirituality of awakening, healing, and human potential. With a Ph.D. in Media Psychology, Christophe bridges neuroscience, psychology, and spiritual wisdom to foster deeper self-awareness and growth.