Heroic Growth

11/13/2025

In Heroic Growth, we work to understand, tell, and restory our narratives, as we all live a story.

The patterns are out there: floods, tricksters, battles with monsters, creation and apocalypse. Could it mean that, beneath the confusion of gods, ghosts, and rituals, there is a primordial mythology, a long-lost ancestor dimly visible in its descendants? There’s “something intoxicating about the quest for a key: the notion that, by sifting through myth, we might retrieve the imaginative worlds of the earliest storytellers,” Manvir Singh writes. “Nor is the quest just a scholarly game; it’s an attempt to prove, against all odds, that our wild, warring species shares something irreducible at its core.”

Nowadays, we can unearth bones, extract DNA, even map ancient migrations, but only in myths can we glimpse the inner lives of our forebears—their fears and longings, their sense of wonder and dread. Linguists have reconstructed dead languages. Why not try to do the same for lost stories? And, if we can, how far back can we go? Singh writes about the hunt for the world’s oldest tales: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/yEwlsV

11/10/2025

"Sometimes it takes another person to hold up a more accurate mirror in which the possibility of our wholeness can be glimpsed." ~ Kalsched, Trauma & the Soul

11/08/2025

May the odds be ever in your favor.

11/06/2025

I trow I hung on that windy Tree
nine whole days and nights,
stabbed with a spear, offered to Odin,
myself to mine own self given
~ Havamal

Image Credit The Roots Of Yggdrasil
Joseph Campbell

11/05/2025

Not all who wander are lost.

11/05/2025

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/14QGK6WpjrU/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Óðinsdagr

“The Eye Beneath the Roots”

When Óðinn gave his eye to Mímir’s Well, he did not lose vision he divided it.
One eye remained in the world of men, to walk among us. The other drowned in the black waters, to see what no living being could endure. Through that sacrifice, his gaze became twofold: one bright and worldly, the other cold and eternal. It sees beneath the bark of things into the dark sap that feeds them.

The wisdom of the Alfóðir is not the comfort of light yet it is the truth that festers in shadow until it is understood. Every rune, every whisper from the Well, is a reflection of that submerged eye staring back at us. To learn, to grow, to awaken and we too must drown a part of ourselves. To see what the gods see, one must look where no light reaches. For in the dark beneath the roots, the eye still watches.

Völuspá 27–28: Yggdrasil’s three roots and their shadowed domains.

Gylfaginning ch. 15: Odin gives his eye for a drink from Mímisbrunnr, beneath the root in Jötunheimr.

Hávamál 138–139: The self-sacrifice and gaining of the runes.

Grímnismál : The name Grímnir (the masked one), connecting to shadow and hidden sight.

“One root in Jötunheimr, one in Helheimr, and one in Niflheimr…” Each reaching into the shadowed realms where knowledge is not spoken but remembered.
~Post inspired by a comment from Derek Svensson~

Wisdom is not found in the light, but in the courage to open your eye in the dark.
~The Roots of Yggdrasil~

11/03/2025

11/02/2025

The Joseph Campbell Foundation shares a clip from Campbell's interviews with Bill Moyers, which are recorded in The Power of Myth.
Here they discuss the qualities of, and the need for each of us to have a sacred place. Sacred, defined as a quality of veneration, of transformation, of the profound, of deep introspection and solitude.
In the Heroic Growth .growth approach to psychotherapy with LEOs, the clinical space of the therapy room is very much a sacred place, where introspection, transformation, and peace occur.
Campbell's Hero's Journey provides the scaffold for treatment within the Hero's Journey approach to growth and change.

Joseph Campbell speaks with Bill Moyers, from interviews included in The Power of Myth. Campbell explains his use of the term “sacred place”, which has a pa...

11/02/2025

https://youtu.be/tD3etRJ05SE?feature=shared

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10/30/2025

“…when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” ~ Jung, Aion

Until you acknowledge and make known your complex, it will control you. Words coming from your own mouth that you wish - perhaps even as you speak them - that you could take back. Actions - sometimes egregious and mortifying - that you instantly regret.

These are the product of our complex - highly-charged, autonomous, energized arrangements of associations and memories which manifest during lowered thresholds of attention, snatching the microphone from your grip or the controls from your hands and letting loose.

Complexes distort consciousness, disrupting control of, and overriding our ability to remain consistent with our forward-facing persona.

In Jungian depth work, the unconscious mind is accessed via the complex. In the Shadow-Work element of Heroic Growth, we identify, acknowledge, and take ownership of and responsibility for our complexes - autonomous, regressive aspects of self operating beyond our conscious awareness and hijacking our control in the moment.
growth

10/20/2025

“Fall into the nothingness that awaits you”

Possibly the best single page in the history of written words