INSIGHTS: Your Hero’s Toolbox with Bob Walter

One of the bedrocks of my spiritual practice is a multi-dimensional connection with mythology. Myths, closely tied to religion and philosophy by definition, helped form me — my beliefs, fears, and dreams — yet these myths were from many different cultures, like me. 

In the end, one word connects all of them: story. Myths, stories, parables, folk tales, or legends, visions of accounts, events, or the evolution of things make up who we all are. ​​And so do the stories we hold from years of living. 

“We swim in a sea of stories, embodied belief systems, encoded narratives of our own devising or learned from others,” said Bob Walter, President of the Joseph Campbell Foundation and Campbell’s editor for years. “Everyone’s life is guided, whether consciously or unconsciously, by these so-called myths.”

Campbell coined the term, the “monomyth.” Also called “the Hero’s Journey,” it examines the stages of one’s journey: adventure, facing crisis, winning, and returning victorious. To make the myths our own and learn how they’ve shaped us helps us live in our truth, and it’s a journey that lasts a lifetime… if you’re willing.  

In advance of his upcoming workshop, Walter answered a few of my questions about myths, self-identity, and the importance of an adult’s willingness to “play” in these stories.

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Christine Chen: What empowerment comes from identifying the “my” in myth?        

Bob Walter: If one is unable to identify, embrace and/or modify the myths that are shaping and guiding our individual heroic adventure, then we are constantly striving to live into another’s truth, rather than our own. Campbell reminds us that in the Arthurian Romances it is written that “each knight enters the forest where it is darkest and there is no path.”

CC: Why is “Who Are You?” such a hard question?

BW: “Who are you?” is an extremely difficult question for many of us to answer, because our lives have been shaped from birth and are continuously being modified and moderated — not by our individual perceptions, lived experiences, and unique understandings — but rather, by the instructions of others, encoded, as it were, in the stories about who we are that have dogged us from birth.

CC: Are myths bad? Also good?                  

BW: Whoever said that they were bad? A myth can be either “good,” which is to say, a life-affirming and sustaining guide that helps you live a rich and fulfilling life. Or, a myth can be “bad,” that is, a debilitating narrative that circumscribes or otherwise inhibits your ability to realize your full potential and/or engage meaningfully with others.

CC: As an adult, do we return to play in these myths — and why?

BW: Myth emerges from the liminal zone between quotidian reality and the realm of the imagination. We mostly live routinely, enduring day-to-day tedium without complaint; but, few of us are fortunate enough to have retained the ability to inhabit the imaginative realms we “once-upon-a-time” experienced as children. For as Campbell reminds us, “When what you are doing stops being fun, it becomes ‘work, and is no longer ‘play.’”  Rediscovering the ability to play is essential. It gives meaning to what we are doing and can be the gateway to reentering the revelatory kingdom of the imagination.               

CC: How can play allow ourselves to see our true self and perhaps envision a new self?

BW: We were all arguably most innately ourselves when we were playful children, before the world in the person of well-meaning and/or unscrupulous others began to imprint us with their realities. In play, we can recover, re-vision, and transform those childhood retrievals, which is to say, we can reimagine the myths by which we live.                   

CC: When we get rid of the myth, what awaits?

BW: First, we can never get rid of the myths that have made us who we are. What we can do, however, is re-vision them and imagine new possibilities. And, I would suggest that doing so is, nowadays, essential. To quote Adrienne Rich: “Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves ... We need to know the ... past differently than we have ever known it, not to pass on a tradition, but to break its hold over us.”