For me, as a storyteller, the word, 'hero', is like the word 'home' --we all want to go home. We all want to be at home. We all want to be the hero. We all want the traits that a hero has. To be a hero is to be a believer in our own amazing potential, to be courageous in pursuing our life’s adventure, and to be sacrificial in our relationships with ourselves and others. It's to decrease our emphasis on the fighting and aggressive warrior archetype that we all seem to understand way too well and begin to live in the transformative and  miraculous power of the magician archetype. To be a hero is to be at home in our own lives.
Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey is about finding the hero in the stories that are our lives and giving him expression. It's saying yes to the hero when he shows up. We face down our demons and transform our fears into places of magical and miraculous potential. When we are able to do that we are empowered from the deepest and most authentic place inside of ourselves.
As writers and storytellers, acknowledging the Hero's Journey for ourselves if we're the main character in our story or acknowledging it for our characters if we're writing fiction is to give ourselves permission to break through the conflicts and troubled places in our minds to a place of transcendence and freedom.
Chris Vogler writes in his book, The Writer’s Journey: The Hero’s Journey is not an invention, but an observation. It is a recognition of a beautiful design, a set of principles that govern the conduct of life and the world of storytelling the way physics and chemistry govern the physical world…The Hero’s Journey is a pattern that seems to extend in many dimensions, describing more than one reality. It accurately describes, among other things, the process of making a journey, the necessary working parts of a story, the joys and despairs of being a writer, and the passage of a soul through life.
This course is about identifying the story you want to write about, deciding whether you want to approach your story through fiction or nonfiction, and then having the courage to say yes to the “call to adventure” and move into the “special world” of The Hero’s Journey.
