Revisioning Your Hero's Journey® Adventure: A Mythological Toolbox® Playshop

In his later years, Joseph Campbell celebrated his birthday at Esalen. Explaining 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.” 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 30 years ago and still continues today.

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 embrace myth-making tools like drums and dance, music and song, or masks, medicine bags, and altars. Individual small- and large-group activities will provide reflective and expressive opportunities to retool the myths shaping your life. Bring a meaningful but expendable totem, unsung story, or evocative song.

“Re-vision — the art of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering … from a new critical direction — is … 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, and know it differently than we have ever known it, not to pass on a tradition, but to break its hold over us.” —Adrienne Rich

“What you do, you do with play.” —Joseph Campbell 

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