The Hero’s Journey
A Seven-Day Residential Workshop
Do you have a sense that there could be more to life than you are living? Do you have an inner yearning for deeper experience?
Paul Rebillot’s Hero’s Journey workshop gives us an opportunity to come into contact with our own longing for transformation, an opportunity to listen to that call to adventure which comes from our deepest self, or which may also present itself in the form of life challenges and transitions. In this exciting group structure, we hear the call, and we also discover the steps we need to take in order to accomplish the transformation we desire.
The workshop is based on the universal mythic pattern first described by the mythologist Joseph Campbell in his ground-breaking book ‘The Hero With A Thousand Faces’:
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder. Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won. The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons upon his fellow men.”
Of this, his best-known workshop, Rebillot wrote “My purpose is to give people a chance to experience a rite of passage so that they can go into the changes in their lives with a sense of joy and greater context. My hope is that through this process, people will awaken to their creative genius and enter into the drama of their lives with imagination and delight.”
The Hero that we discover in this process is the aspect of the personality that says “Yes” to life and adventure, the part of us that sets or perceives a goal, and goes about trying to accomplish it. However, there is also a part of us that fights against the Hero, that keeps us stuck and resists change – what Rebillot calls the Demon of Resistance. “Every time you make a change, whether of worldview or career, love relationship or stage in life, you polarize yourself into Hero and Demon.”
Combining Gestalt Practice with elements of myth, theatre, ritual, music, art and movement, this is a process of great depth and power which “addresses the innermost dynamics of the human psyche”. (Stanislav Grof)
Entering the Hero’s Journey process we come to discover the Hero within us and – having heard the Call to Adventure – we set off with her or him on a journey of personal exploration. Leaving the Home Ground of our every-day life, our Heroic self encounters his or her opposite, our inner Demon of Resistance. We experience a confrontation between these two aspects of ourselves, a resolution, and an integration. We move into a deeper level of awareness and experience and then return to our life situation illuminated by a new sense of self.
