Where Are You in the Hero’s Journey and Who are Your Wisdom Teachers?

For the past several years, I’ve used the phrase “wisdom teachers.”

In general, my working definition has been someone who has:

• experienced harm and joy and love and suffering,
• developed the capacity to be present, even in the midst of the muck,
• learned to embody kindness and compassion, and
• shared the wisdom of their experience with others.

It describes elders and poets and folks who have learned to live deeply in the real world – and share the learnings of their embodiment with others through their actions and energies.

This might be the Language Arts teacher in me – but I realized the other day this is basically the Hero’s Journey. (I’m consolidating some of the steps.)

1. Leaving the Status Quo

Having grown up and created one’s basis of identity, this person entered the world past the protections of their family, parents, or initial in-groups.

2. Support

Despite possible hesitance and fear, they connected with someone (alive or not-so-much) who served as a Wisdom Teacher for them – they experienced resonance with another on a deep soul level.

3. Entering The Unknown

Whether by choice or not, they entered into The Unknown of life. And in facing its challenges, this person gained new tools and friends – but also experienced their sense of self shifting and changing.

(This may have felt like a period of disillusionment as they began to see themselves and the world differently from before.)

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4. The Inmost Cave + Great Challenge

In the midst of the hardships of life, they came face to face with their fears and negative inner narratives and shadows.

As they raised children, negotiated relationships, shifted career paths, and experienced the death of loved ones, they found themselves in their own depths – the depths of struggle and sorrow and sadness, but also in the depths of presence and experience.

If they weren’t before, it’s here they came alive to their own life. And in doing so, they found something more true than the identity they had initially claimed and the needs for certainty they had learned to cling to.

Whether a specific moment of Great Suffering, as Richard Rohr calls it, or an elongated process of continual and turbulent change, it is here they felt their old sense of self fully giving way to a new and yet familiar sense of self emerging up from within them: their true self, the sound of the genuine, the “me” they didn’t recognize.

5. The Return

With the newfound wisdom of this re-discovery, the roots of which were firmly in the messiness of an embodied life, this person began to walk in our world in a new way. (Still filled with imperfection, but now with a gentle curiosity and sense of okayness.)

This is the Hero’s Journey.

And I know, for me at least, I can name several people who fit into this imperfect model. Both those who are alive (Molly and Richard and James and Jim) and deceased (T. James and Teresa and Howard).

Their wisdom is made clear by their kindness, their generosity, and their ability to hold tension and paradox without a need to “win.” Their spirit and animating energy invites me into my own journey.

How does this resonate? Who are your wisdom teachers?

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