Mapping Your Hero’s Adventure: A Mythogenesis PlayShop

Joseph Campbell used to celebrate his birthday at Esalen. Asked why, he’d recount how Carl Jung—wondering “What myth am I living by?” and realizing he didn’t know — wrote, “I took it upon myself to get to know ‘my’ myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks.” 

“That’s what a birthday is for,” Campbell would conclude, “and what Esalen is about.” In 1988, the year after Campbell died, his friends —recalling his dictum: “What you do, you do with play”—gathered at Esalen to inaugurate “Campbell Week,” a tradition that morphed into this PlayShop, which has continued annually ever since..

Who were you? What has inspired your biographical saga? What treasures hide in your basement or attic? Who are you? What’s displayed on your refrigerator? What dangles from your rearview mirror? Who do you aspire to be? What’s on your bucket list? Dare to re-vision yourself and join our springtime rebirth rituals. 

You needn’t be familiar with Campbell to relive dreams, rekindle visions, and experience mythogenesis. Toward that end, we will use myth-making tools—drums & dance, music & song, medicine bags, and masks; we will play D-PiCT™; The Game of Mythogenesis; and we will engage in small- and large group activities that provide reflective and expressive opportunities for revisioning the myths that have shaped your life. 

“Re-vision — the art of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, from a new critical direction — is for us an act of survival. 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.” —Adrienne Rich

Please bring a meaningful but expendable totem, an unsung story, or an evocative song.

Recommended reading: Anything by Campbell. Anything that makes you laugh. Poetry.