In this project, we studied the Hero’s Journey and the things that come with it, like the shadow journey. The Hero’s Journey is a theory that was developed by Joseph Campbell around 1950. The Hero’s Journey, also known as the monomyth, says that all great stories are the same journey with different characters. It says that all great journeys start with a protagonist and along his or her way to greatness, they run into trials and temptations, find allies, have an abyss in which they fight their greatest enemy, and emerge with newfound wisdom that they then carry back to their community. This monomyth also says that all stories are written like this because it is very relatable to the human experience. Joseph Campbell said that we all are going through journeys like the ones depicted through the hero’s journey, whether long-term or only lasting for a few hours, in which we all change.
We looked at classic examples of the hero’s journey through the books The Alchemist and Siddhartha, looked at alternate theories, such as the shadow journey; looked at rites of passage, and how they relate to the hero’s journey, even creating our own rites of passage in the style that depicts both a small hero’s journey and also shows the exit threshold from being a child to being an adult. After building our knowledge on the topic of the hero’s journey, we started investigating what it meant to write and perform a Moth-style story. The Moth storytelling event is where several people prepare five-minute stories and put their names in a hat. If their name is picked, they tell their story about self-change to the audience. We all wrote and rehearsed stories about times when we changed. These were based on the model of the Hero’s Journey and showed how we had grown through a certain experience.
I have never been good at talking about myself. I can talk and talk for hours about a new scientific discovery, but when I need to analyze parts of my life and things that have happened to me, I shut down. Because of this, I rebelled at this project at first. Our teacher, Ally Johnson, was having us doing daily starters, where we analyzed the portion of the book that we had just read and then took one of the lessons that were in that bit of the book and tried to apply that to an event in our own life. I continued to rebel, and my teacher continued to insist that these starters were necessary. Now, I am glad that I did them. If it hadn’t been for my teacher insisting that we write about ourselves, I would never have been able to make a story about myself mean anything. Because of this project, I now have a much firmer grasp of how to talk about and analyze events in my own life, and give them clarity that they never had before in my mind.
In this project, we did a lot of reading and analyzing. There were many common strings between everything we read, but I think that the thing that I will always remember is that the key to learning and living a happy life is to live in the present. This was first mentioned in the Alchemist, then in Siddhartha, and then I found it again in some of the Joseph Campbell passages that we were reading. This outlook really made an impact on me. I realized that I live most of my life in either the past or the future, either worrying about things to come or stressing over things that are due; or reminiscing on time that I wasted and could have done so much with. I think that this lesson should be taken to heart with everyone, especially in this day and age when we are always hooked up to the news, looking at a screen, or worrying about what will happen to us..
We looked at classic examples of the hero’s journey through the books The Alchemist and Siddhartha, looked at alternate theories, such as the shadow journey; looked at rites of passage, and how they relate to the hero’s journey, even creating our own rites of passage in the style that depicts both a small hero’s journey and also shows the exit threshold from being a child to being an adult. After building our knowledge on the topic of the hero’s journey, we started investigating what it meant to write and perform a Moth-style story. The Moth storytelling event is where several people prepare five-minute stories and put their names in a hat. If their name is picked, they tell their story about self-change to the audience. We all wrote and rehearsed stories about times when we changed. These were based on the model of the Hero’s Journey and showed how we had grown through a certain experience.
I have never been good at talking about myself. I can talk and talk for hours about a new scientific discovery, but when I need to analyze parts of my life and things that have happened to me, I shut down. Because of this, I rebelled at this project at first. Our teacher, Ally Johnson, was having us doing daily starters, where we analyzed the portion of the book that we had just read and then took one of the lessons that were in that bit of the book and tried to apply that to an event in our own life. I continued to rebel, and my teacher continued to insist that these starters were necessary. Now, I am glad that I did them. If it hadn’t been for my teacher insisting that we write about ourselves, I would never have been able to make a story about myself mean anything. Because of this project, I now have a much firmer grasp of how to talk about and analyze events in my own life, and give them clarity that they never had before in my mind.
In this project, we did a lot of reading and analyzing. There were many common strings between everything we read, but I think that the thing that I will always remember is that the key to learning and living a happy life is to live in the present. This was first mentioned in the Alchemist, then in Siddhartha, and then I found it again in some of the Joseph Campbell passages that we were reading. This outlook really made an impact on me. I realized that I live most of my life in either the past or the future, either worrying about things to come or stressing over things that are due; or reminiscing on time that I wasted and could have done so much with. I think that this lesson should be taken to heart with everyone, especially in this day and age when we are always hooked up to the news, looking at a screen, or worrying about what will happen to us..