Here’s another word: toxic.

Every abusive relationship may be a toxic relationship, but is every toxic relationship an abusive one?

An abusive relationship depends upon a pre-existing power imbalance that gives one partner the power to abuse in the first place. In other words, you abuse your partner by abusing the power you have over the partner. You do this systematically. You do this over time. An abusive relationship might or might not be physically violent, but it is always — always — a massive mindf*ck in which the abused partner begins to accept the abuser’s twisted version of reality for reality itself. Anything that contradicts that reality — including the abused partner’s own instincts that something is very and increasingly wrong — gets cut off at the root.

A therapist once said to me that this culture makes it very difficult for a woman to be the more powerful partner in a relationship; if the woman has more money, for example, the man will assume superiority in other areas. As a therapist states to Ada Calhoun in the book WHY WE CAN’T SLEEP:

Women who earn more than their husbands….actually do more housework in an effort to compensate for their higher earnings and the psychological drama involved.

So if a young blonde actress was somehow able to establish and maintain power over a man twice her age — not to mention her body weight — with greater wealth, greater fame, and a considerably greater fanbase, that strikes me as impressive in a demented kind of way.

She must have superpowers.

Yet somehow I doubt it.

Femme fatales and evil goddesses exist in fiction, in movies, in the public imagination; in real life, the women who get designated as either or both turn out to be as human as everybody else.

The post tainted love first appeared on Justine Musk.

The funny thing about being human is our flesh and blood packaging.

You can’t exactly take us out of the box.

We are subject to the quirks, delusions, eccentricities, desires and secret fantasies that make up the undertow of our lives, some of which we are aware of, most of which we are not.

We try to fit concepts like ‘creativity’, ‘passion’ and ‘story’ into such neat little boxes: the five-step formulas, the slots in your calendar.

But they draw from something much deeper within us: that mysterious, symbolic world known as the unconscious.

The preverbal voices of the unconscious were once the voices of your daimon, your genie, your muse. They are not of the everyday world: checkmarks on the daily to-do list.

They need to be invoked and received.

We can’t create them; we create the conditions that invite and attract them.

That requires a routine action of stepping off the beaten path. You need that room of your own, that magic circle, that man cave, or what Joseph Campbell called your bliss station. The din of the world fades away and you drop into the murmurings of your soul. You follow your obsessions and track the truth of your authentic self.

You slow down when the world tells you to go faster; you open up when you’ve been taught to hunker down.

You accept what wants to come through you without the judgment, self-shaming and fear that sent these parts of yourself so deeply underground in the first place.

Can you do that?

Do you want to do that?

The post is the enemy of creativity the culture of daily life? first appeared on Justine Musk.

Power is a neutral value.

Love without power is anemic, as Martin Luther King Jr pointed out (and power without love is tyranny).

You cannot protect what you love if you do not have power.

You sure as hell can’t change the world.

We *cannot* fall into the trap of accepting a very narrow, top-down, command-and-control definition as the essential nature of ‘power’, to the point where we dismiss the subject altogether because it is distasteful to us.

The point is not to play the same old game, whether we’re buying into it or rebelling against it. Either way, you’re still letting the other person define the terms and set the rules

(which will *not* be in your favor).

The point is to keep your eye to the horizon, your ear to the ground, and channel the resources around you and the people on your side to discover a new game that embodies new values.

It is to claim — and to share, to spread, to enable, to inspire — the power to do that.

The post darling, it is time to be powerful. first appeared on Justine Musk.

People can knock on your doors all they want; you are under no obligation to let them in.

Your invitations are sacred.

If you never invite anyone inside your walls, you will die of loneliness. If you invite everyone, you will also die of loneliness – or exhaustion, or disease, or violence.

So there needs to be a velvet rope and a guest list.

The enemy will smash your art and rewrite your manifesto. They will hollow you out into a puppet who might wear cool outfits, but gets no respect.

A soul is not a static thing – it grows if you nurture it, and withers if you don’t. It glows with magic or disappears beneath layers of muck and graffiti and crusted blood. You can save your soul – but you must kick out the enemy. You must mark out a safety zone, so you can tend to the wounded, give your dead a proper burial, and rebirth your sense of self.

The stronger and more powerful your I AM becomes, the lower the walls need to be.

Yes is an invitation to merge. No is a declaration of self.

You are the power you don’t give away.

The post you are the power you don’t give away first appeared on Justine Musk.

Your second life starts when the world cracks you open — usually against your will.

You learned a certain story about who you think you are and where you think you’re going. Maybe you weren’t fully conscious of what it was – we rarely are – but this story communicated itself to others through not just what you said (and didn’t say) but how you carried yourself and whom you loved (and hated) and what you wore, and what you moved toward (and crossed the street to avoid) and what you did (and didn’t do) when up against a wall.

Others reflected that story back to you, and because they were older and seemed to speak from the bones of authority, you absorbed that story more deeply into yourself, and communicated it more vividly, and others reflected it back to you…

But story truth is trickster truth. It shows itself as one thing and reveals itself as something else.

Something more.

Something that catches you – not to mention everybody else – by surprise.

If the truth of a story could be captured in words, it wouldn’t need to be a story in the first place.

Stories operate on multiple levels of knowing. That is why they engage us in ways that make us feel more alive than the actual lives we are so often living. They reach us through the senses they invoke, the emotions they take us into, the characters they leave in our memory.

Symbolism and metaphor and theme get a bad rap from high school English classes. But they are clues to the deeper life of soul, which is older than language and too complex and slippery for language to contain.

To tell you what it is, a story has to show you. Words turn to images turn to symbols: epic meaning rips through the page like the Hulk through his Bruce Banner t-shirt.

Your first life, my friend, is like a coconut.

Bear with me here.

I was walking to the farmer’s market with my eleven year old son, and for reasons that I shall leave to your imagination my son started marveling over how this thing could just fall from a tree and into the water and buoy itself along until it washes up on a beach, digs in with its slightly pointy end, roots down and grows up and out into a forest of palm trees bearing coconuts of their own.

Or else, enthused my son, some dude comes walking along the beach and says, “Oh, a coconut,” and carries it inland. He (or she) discovers that it’s food and water and dishware, all in one! Also, you can make stuff with it. Like, cool necklaces, or percussion instruments, or toys for your kids. You can use coconut timber to build houses and boats. You can make coconut oil to cook different foods. You can use coconuts to barter and trade, and develop relationships with other tribes on other islands. And no matter how many coconuts you crack open, they just keep falling and falling from the sky, no way you get them all. They keep growing, and falling, and traveling, and growing.

“What a perfect example of the selfish gene theory,” I said, taking on that professorial tone of voice that cues my son to smile and nod and drift out and in and out again.

I explained that the coconut is an excellent survival vehicle that a gene creates in partnership with other genes. These genes do not care about the coconut itself, or the joy and nourishment (not to mention the awesome accessorizing ability), it brings to people across the regions.

All a gene wants to do is replicate itself, to keep winning one of nature’s limited survival slots.

(It’s not unlike novelists competing to get on the list of a traditional publisher, with a process that is almost as brutal.)

The brilliant genes, the mastermind coconut genes, are highly specialized to perform certain functions. They team up with other masterminds that can perform other functions, and together they devise a kick-ass traveling system. The more powerful the system, the better it seeks out — or inspires other traveling systems to carry it into — the conditions needed to achieve world domination.

“Pretend that you are in a BMW,” I said to my son, “and you go up against someone in a Pinto.”

“What’s a Pinto?”

“Exactly,” I said, and felt wise.

So what if a coconut – the high-end vehicle of the plant world – serves you, but only to preserve the spark of genius that pressed pedal to metal in the first place? Is a selfish thing always a bad thing?

Life wants to live. Does it need a deeper reason?

I went to San Francisco to hear Neil Gaiman give a great talk in an overpacked theatre in the Castro. Neil opened with a description of trees that been on this planet for four thousand years. I can’t remember what they’re called, only that coconuts are not involved. He then recounted a dramatic story that has been in existence for as long as those trees.

The moral was this:

If you have information to send out through space and time, you must build it a story that knows how to motor.

You want people to stay away from the edge of town because there’s poison in the soil. You don’t present an academic essay. You tell about demons rising from the dirt to eat your children; and the daughter of a friend of a friend who rode her bike there on a dare and failed to return – alive and in one piece, that is.

The story grows around the unit of info like the shell of a coconut, or the gloss of your persona. We call those units memes.

The best memes win, and by best I don’t mean smartest or most factually accurate. (Some memes aren’t “true” at all: Catherine and the horse, Richard and the gerbil.) They’re in the best cars: whatever compels us to tell and retell them, pass them around, post on Twitter or Facebook or Tumblr or Instagram.

The best of the best create a sense of awe. They convey wisdom that resonates in flesh and bone.

Facts belong to surface life. The surface shifts and ripples. It goes through periodic upheavals. It reshapes into new landscapes.

We describe myths as “false on the outside, true on the inside”; we describe art as “a lie that tells the truth”; we refer to someone’s misleading statements as “emotionally true” or refer to their “reality distortion field”.

We sense, feel or imagine our way into what they’re trying to tell us, even when the words don’t align with the facts as we know them. If I describe myself as a wounded orphan when you know that I am a) in perfect health and b) so are my parents, you still ‘know’ — through the image I create in your mind — a below-the-surface truth about my childhood, my relationship to family, perhaps even the sacred wound that informs my sense of self.

Then again, I might be messing with you.

It is not ok to tell lies. We relate to each other through art partly so that we don’t have to lie, when what seems true on the surface proves false underneath.

Story truth is trickster truth.

It messes with us, but for all the right reasons.

People don’t pass around urban legends because they feel dishonest. Catherine the Great never had sex with a horse, and Richard Gere never inserted a gerbil through a cardboard tube into a place where the sun don’t shine. Sometimes the truth of the story is about the one telling it, the state of the culture and boundaries transgressed: the powerful woman who wants what she wants, the beautiful man who is wanted.

It seems fitting that the word ‘coconut’ goes back to the 15th century, originating from the word ‘coco’, which is Spanish and Portuguese for ‘grin’ or ‘monkey face’. There was something uncanny about the coconut. It was familiar enough to remind you of a head – if the head was the head of a boogeyman.

Boogeyman: a menacing version of the trickster figure who gets in your face to disrupt time and space.

He shows up to mess you up, to let you know that your coconut isn’t working anymore. Your traveling system is broken, and you must destroy it before it destroys you.

Because the purpose of your first story – the reason you co-create it with your caretakers and your culture – isn’t about truth.

It’s about survival.

It rolled you through dangerous neighborhoods, through icefields and deserts and stretches of wasteland, through mountains and forests and deepest suburbia.

You thought it was an SUV, or a Volvo, or a Mini Cooper, or a sexy Porsche, or a family camper…You see where I’m going with this. If you’re lucky, the story had some alignment with the essence of you known as psyche or soul.

But that wasn’t up to you.

The point in your life when you crack open – the why and where and how – isn’t up to you either. It happens early for some and later for others.

You move from your head to your heart.

Beneath the story you needed to live, is the other, deeper story that needs to live through you. When you’re ready (you won’t feel ready), it steps out of the shadows with love and joy — to make your life hell.

(Change is hard.)

You discover that to save yourself, you must save others.

You discover that to save others, you must save yourself.

You start to remember who you are.

From time to time you wonder at the mystery of it all. Then someone or something comes along to teach you this:

If the truth of your story could be captured in words, it wouldn’t need to be a story in the first place.

Life wants to live. Does it need a deeper reason?

The post your second life starts when the world cracks you open first appeared on Justine Musk.

We forget that.

We try to find “our passion” like it’s some cute and feisty pet.

At some point you learn that your passion is not your bliss. (Or your bitch.) It’s not anything so tame as what you might like or enjoy. It might bring no enjoyment at all — which doesn’t make it less compelling.

Passion is subversive.

It is your willingness to suffer for something (or someone), to risk the sacrifice: stability, peace of mind, happiness itself.

The color of passion is the color of blood. It marks the lovers and the rebels. It steps out of culture, jumps class, overturns tradition. It puts your house at risk.

It might lean in —

— to burn it down.

It strips you in winter. It picks at your scars and leaves you to shiver.

Passion won’t listen to reason. It transforms. It is hellbent.

It alienates you from those who no longer know who you think you are or where the hell you think you’re going.

(Do you know where you’re going?)

It knocks you off the path. (It was the wrong path.)

It makes you start again: the friendless city, the salary cut.

Passion has an edge of war. It points to what we want so much that we’re afraid to want it. The ambiguity of hope. The fear of not getting. The fear of getting.

It requires us to change when we’re so far from ready.

It returns you to your wounded place, the trauma you try to deny. It is the injustice that calls you to crusade. It is the loved one you lost, and now must save through saving others: from cancer or violence or addiction or corruption.

Passion lifts you high and drops you. It strands you on a rocky coastline, in a country whose name you can never pronounce.

It breaks up the stories you pretended weren’t broken.

It doesn’t care that you’re unprepared.

Passion stands behind you with a mirror. It wants to show you who you are.

All you need to do is turn around.

The post at some point you learn that your passion is not your bliss. or your bitch. first appeared on Justine Musk.

Sometimes the self-loving thing is to do what you fear. It is to make your own soul and pursue your own growth.

Growth is hard.

Growth is anxiety, mess, mistakes, discomfort and an edge. It is pain you must work through instead of shutting down or medicating away.

Self-love is about selfhood: identifying your gifts and cultivating your talents and learning to put them in service to the world, in response to a call of the time, in a way that lights you up instead of grinding you into despair. It’s the courage to show yourself to others, to be vulnerable, to create the authentic relationships so vital to well-being. It’s treating yourself with kindness and compassion while holding to a higher standard: getting to the appointment on time because you respect your time, going on a hike instead of to the movies because you respect your health, and your need to be in nature.

We give ourselves away in all the wrong ways.

We don’t develop a self to sacrifice.

Self-love is to serve yourself through serving others – and to serve others through serving yourself – in a way that sustains you. It is to be compassionate, to make sacrifices for who and what you believe in enough to make sacred. It’s learning to be in the world and not just one room, with candles lit and Bach on the stereo. It’s mastering the art of healthy boundaries. It’s knowing when to throw open your doors, to let in the world, and the people you desire in yours.

Self-love is about love of your self, and that includes all of your self, all of the time, everywhere you go, because there is never a moment when you are not in your self, even when pretending to be someone else.

The post selfhood isn’t selfish first appeared on Justine Musk.

What we don’t know we want: to be whole.

We have turned the pursuit of happiness into big business. The irony is that striving to be happy often makes us unhappy, partly because we don’t know what to want. We miswant, which is the word psychologists use when we want things that we mistakenly think will make us happy (winning the lottery) or know will ultimately make us less happy (feeding an addiction).

The pursuit of happiness also keeps us focused on our own damn selves, which dovetails nicely with a culture fueled by hyperconsumerism and narcissism. It brings us temporary pleasures, but no real joy, and leaves us disconnected and miserable. Even spirituality can turn into “spiritual materialism” when it becomes what Chogyam Trungpa calls “an ego building and confusion creating endeavor” (the main purpose of which is to feel good and escape suffering).

How is this working out for us?

Healthline reports that depression rates rise by 20 percent every year. When you think about the things we do to feel better (eating, shopping, cruising the Internet, sex, gambling) the soaring rates of obesity, addiction and consumer debt underscore the fact that we are not a happy people, no matter how many blog posts we consume or seminars and workshops we attend.

What if we accepted the fact that we are not meant to be happy all the time? Or even that, sometimes, happiness must emerge from periods of unhappiness?

What if we recognized the dark times as a process of initiation into a deeper wisdom, that can serve to heal others as well as ourselves?

The hero and heroine’s journeys are not quests to be happy.

They seek to restore what was lost.

The hero ventures out into the world, and returns with a boon to heal a wounded community. In so doing, he heals himself, through learning how to lose or sacrifice that self for his community.

The heroine ventures deep within herself to confront psychological darkness, heal a split in her psyche, and turn her wounds to light. In so doing, she gains a sense of self independent of community. Her transformation inspires that community to alter the beliefs and values that no longer serve them (or serve to wound them).

Versions of these journeys compel us in story after story after story, whether it’s the hero’s journey made famous in Star Wars or the heroine’s story in films like FROZEN or the upcoming WILD (based on Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling memoir). Since the best stories also serve as emotionally charged delivery systems of timeless wisdom, I can’t help but wonder at our refusal as a culture to apply that wisdom to ourselves, to move through the tough stuff instead of slowly killing ourselves as we seek to deny and avoid it.

I keep coming back to Jung’s observation that the great wound of modern life is the absence of soul.

That’s what the journeys are:

A call to soul.

The post sometimes happiness can only emerge from periods of unhappiness. first appeared on Justine Musk.

I saw part of an interview between Oprah and Elizabeth Gilbert and Gilbert said a thing that still nags me:

“For some reason, and this just boggles my imagination, there are still just huge swaths of women who never got the memo that their lives belong to them.”

I know that feeling, as loathe as I am to admit it. I’m increasingly aware of those places in my life where I “gave away my power” by looking outside myself for validation and authority.

I have played small. I hide out.

As I get older it becomes more important for me to understand why – especially given my ambitious, competitive streak, or what my ex-husband always referred to as the fire in my soul: “You,” he once told me, “are no lamb.”

2

When I was at a dark point in my life – coming to terms with the death of my infant son, undergoing a brutal divorce process – I became fascinated with the Persephone myth. Persephone, a careless and naïve young woman, is dragged down through the earth into the Underworld. Hades, King of the Underworld, forces her to be his bride.

Persephone’s mother, the goddess Demester, searches all over the world for her daughter and raises her own kind of hell. Finally, Zeus himself must intervene…but that wasn’t the part of the myth that intrigued me.

I liked the part where Persephone becomes Queen of the Underworld and a guide to lost souls.

Because she dares to taste the Underworld – she eats half a pomegranate – she is forever tied to it.

(What you learn, you cannot unlearn. Either you master it, or it masters you.)

So every year she spends six months below ground and six months above.

I knew the story as a kid, but when I came across it as an adult – trapped in an underworld of my own – I realized the story was about trauma and recovery. Persephone comes to terms with what happened to her, maturing from silly young thing to mystic Queen. She develops a compassion for troubled souls and the skillset to guide them. She moves between the worlds in an endless cycle of death and rebirth: rising in springtime, descending in winter. She can’t change the past — the events that put her in touch with dark energies. She takes in that energy and transmutes it; she becomes powerful in her own right.

She is initiated.

Pain can remain pain – nothing more or less. Or pain can be ritual pain, if you use it as a call to adventure, a portal to change and transformation. Then, it becomes an initiation into the life of the soul: a deeper sense of you, your connection to a larger story, and perhaps to the mystery itself.

We are stronger for the broken places.

When I researched Persephone, I found an older, pre-patriarchal underground story that stars the goddess Inanna. Unlike Persephone, Inanna is a badass from the beginning: whipsmart, ambitious, sexy as hell. She goes underground because she seeks to become even more powerful. The descent humbles her (as it does us all), strips away her identity layer by layer, and ends in her death. Three days later, she is reborn. She rises from the Underworld with demons nipping at her heels.

She is initiated.

These underground stories introduced me to the term “the heroine’s journey”, the neglected psychological complement to the well-known hero’s journey. If the hero’s journey is about going out into the world and slaying dragons, the heroine’s journey is about pulling inward, traveling down through the layers of yourself until you sound the depths of your soul. Soul is defined here as the essence of what makes you unique, and how that positions you in the world.

To be initiated into the life of your soul means to know who you are and where you belong, expressed in the world through what you do (the work of your soul).

I could identify with both Persephone and (at least on the days when I felt strong and cocky) Inanna. Their underground stories activated something in me – an archetype – that reframed my feelings of grief, anger and hurt, the earth opening up below my feet, as the call to a heroine’s journey. My pain could be a ritual pain, if I chose to move through the process as consciously as I could; if I sought to use everything, everything, to learn and to grow; if I approached my life with curiosity and detachment instead of (or as well as) anxiety and dread.

I could be initiated.

Like the seasons, like creativity itself, personal growth cycles through stages. A journey doesn’t happen once in a life; it happens over and over again, for different reasons and varying lengths of time.

But you never descend into the same place twice; and you always rise a little higher than before.

(We are stronger for the broken places.)

3

A crisis destabilizes us in a way that contentment or happiness does not. Crisis knocks on our life and then knocks it over. It disrupts us, challenges our worldview, forces us to search inside ourselves for an effective response, tapping inner resources we might not even know we possess.

It may leave us standing amid the broken remains of the old life…but that becomes the ground zero on which to build a whole new house.

Sometimes the call to the journey presents as a sense of burnout, or boredom. You feel lost, adrift, confused, depressed, lethargic….and beat yourself up for feeling that way, for not knowing what you want or being motivated enough to go after it, for feeling stuck, for not being productive.

Gertrud Mueller Nelson (in her book HERE ALL DWELL FREE) distinguishes between “a fruitless depression” that renders you “incapable of movement”…and something else.

Instead of hiding from the sharp points of difficult feelings, you can lean into them fully and consciously. Nelson refers to this as

“embracing a conscious choice to withdraw from life where [you] will face [your] woundedness and enter to its very depth…Conscious depression or conscious suffering will finally being about healing.”

However:

“An acknowledged and well-suffered depression rarely receives recognition and validation from the outside world…[which] sees any depression as stagnation – a blockage. But stagnation, when it is freely accepted and suffered through, can be in reality an incubation. The incubation period…is unhurried, an unseen growth prefatory to an initiation…an introduction to a new and conscious way of living life – fully and passionately.”

Chaos will come for us in one way or another. When it does, it opens up new opportunities – if we have the courage to see them.

4

As our heroine descends, the old story of who she is supposed to be falls away from her. She must let go of what is no longer working, and step into the bigger story that is waiting.

There is power in knowing who you are.

In her new book SACRED SUCCESS, Barbara Stanny quotes Erich Fromm: “The main task in life is to give birth to our self to become what we actually are.”

Stanny adds:

“That task is the essence of power…the essential challenge facing women today. It’s each woman becoming who she is meant to be, the ultimate authority in her life….”

I’m going to repeat that: the ultimate authority in her life.

This is when you own your life. When you know beyond a doubt that your life is yours to create however you please.

You are your own damn permission slip.

The culture does not teach girls to own it. From early on, a girl receives messages that her body, her sexuality, her dreams and ambitions, her opinions must be shaped to please other people. If her inner voice threatens to speak out too loudly, or passionately, or take up too much airtime; if it threatens to rock the boat in any way, she learns to switch it off.

If she feels a rise of anger, she learns to disconnect it – good girls don’t get angry – even if it signals that her boundaries have been violated.

Over and over again, she learns to look outside of herself for approval and validation, for the magical authority figure who will give her the A, the prize, the promotion, the compliment, the diamond ring.

In her new book PLAYING BIG, Tara Mohr notes that it

“…is a sad state of affairs when women find it a surprising, moving idea that they can turn inward to access their own wisdom… Though dressed in the guise of women’s empowerment, all the encouragement for women to find the right mentors and right advice is often, underneath, the same old message telling them to turn away from their own intuitions and wisdom and to privilege the guidance coming from others instead.”

If many women haven’t yet “gotten the memo that their lives belong to them”, it could be due to the system we’ve inherited. It is, now, a system in transition, but for thousands of years it had a special interest in girls remaining girls. The maiden was desirable, the mother was useful —

— but the crone, with her wisdom and spirituality and hardwon inner authority, was not.

The system praised and paid attention to girls, and encouraged their mothers to remain as girlish as possible, and moved the juicy crone to somewhere way, way back in the picture.

5

Imagine if we all got the memo.

Imagine a culture of confident, initiated women who regard themselves as the ultimate authority of themselves and their lives; who stop investing so much energy into being pretty and pleasing and ‘young’, and use that energy to seize the queendom of their realms.

Imagine if we stopped being good girls and such good students and (as Tara Mohr points out), instead of adapting ourselves to external sources of authority, used our passion, intelligence and creativity to transform them.

Imagine what that would do to the status quo.

Because that would change the world.

Feed your head!!
How thrilled am I to be doing the Open Books Event with Danielle LaPorte + Linda Sivertsen? They’re better than chocolate!
Come for the wisdom, the creative mentorship, the community.
Come be inspired…+ go inspire others.
Invest in yourself + your wildest dreams.
Your soul will thank you.
…+ your heart will bust out with some sacred rock’n’roll.
Open Books Event Yeah baby.

The post you are your own damn permission slip first appeared on Justine Musk.

When I was in my early twenties, I had a moment where I thought I was going to die, and the thoughts that would have been my final thoughts surprised me.

I was teaching ESL in Japan and I was on a date. It was a first date, which was traumatic enough. We were sitting in the back of a mostly-empty Korean restaurant in the middle of nowhere, when a piece of meat lodged in my throat and shut off my breathing. I jumped from the bench and started flapping my hands at my throat, like I was doing some weird variation on the chicken dance, and waited for my date to manfully rescue me with the kind of expert maneuver you see in the movies. Instead, he sat there and looked at me and said, in a you are so embarrassing me right now kind of voice, “What are you doing?”

You hear a lot about bad first dates, but dying seemed excessive.

And what came to mind was this: the books I had not written, and the regret I felt at losing my chance to write them. How can I die, I thought, with my books still inside me?

Then, like a miracle, I felt the meat fall down my throat. And I could breathe.

My friend Todd Henry is an entrepreneur and author and creativity guru and he urges people to Die Empty. That’s the title of his book: DIE EMPTY. It did not thrill his publisher. But what he means is, don’t risk dying with your songs trapped inside you, whatever they might be or form they might take. Get them out into the world. It’s not enough to ‘find’ your voice – you must give it shape and substance in the world. The world requires it. Your soul requires it, and it will push you and nag at you and at the end of your life, it will hold you accountable.

I’m a writer and a woman, and writers and women are always being urged to find our voice. I’m lucky, because I started writing when I was too young to know that I was supposed to have a Voice, so I never worried about losing it. Growing up, I lost other things instead, like passports, and car keys, and cars. You should never let me borrow your car.

To me, voice is another way of referring to your particular and highly personal stamp of creative intelligence. Your soul’s intelligence. Your soulprint. We define creativity as a special kind of problem-solving, and we live in a culture that judges how creative we are by how productive we are. We forget that creativity is not just doing, but being. It’s a state of mind that takes in the world and transforms it, makes meaning out of it.

Because creative intelligence is especially concerned with solving problems of meaning.

Human beings have a deep need for meaning. It is right up there with water and oxygen and milk chocolate and Keanu Reeves. It is our quest for meaning that compelled our ancestors to clamber down from the trees. It gave rise to symbolic intelligence and the evolution of language. It stimulated the growth of the human brain. There’s that famous line from a movie, What’s it all about, Alfie? What does it all mean? I never saw the movie, but I know that line.

When that need for meaning goes unmet, we are highly dissatisfied individuals. Our lives seem shallow and empty and – meaningless. That’s when we turn to bad choices, addictive behaviors. I myself would go shopping. I would look for meaning in all the wrong places, like Neiman Marcus, and expensive footwear.

But here’s the thing. As creative people, it’s our job to create meaning, not just for ourselves, but others. People want it, and need it, and look for it. People are willing to pay for context and meaning.

I have A.D.D., so I am sensitive to the fact that I shape my life according to what manages to hold my attention. And nothing holds attention like a good story. If you want me to spend my attention to something, tell me a story about it and show me how I can be a part of that story, or fold it into mine.

Story sets us up for meaning.

Maybe you’ve heard of the Significant Objects experiment. These people bought junk items from flea markets and garage sales and put them up for sale on Ebay. But they also got some talented fiction writers to write a story about each item. Each story was posted on Ebay alongside the item it featured, and a copy of the story came with the item. It was made extremely clear that these stories were fiction – there was no wish to deceive Ebay customers. And the organizers of this experiment still made thousands of dollars off of junk. (They donated the money to charity.)

People were not buying the item, they were buying the meaning invested within it. Story provides this.

The story is the country you visit, and if you love it, you purchase the souvenir, so you can take some of it home with you.

I was an obsessive reader when I was a kid – I still am. I was the kind of kid who would hide in the library stacks during lunch hour and recess so I could read. I remember my eighth grade teacher pounding on the library window, ordering me to get outside so I could be socialized like a normal person. More than one adult told me, growing up, that fiction was an escape from reality.

In junior high, I was obsessed with the soap opera SANTA BARBARA. Talk about an escape from reality. So I was interested to read a story in the New York Times from 2010 about the educational value of soap operas. Countries all over the world have discovered the power of using soap operas to educate populations about everything from domestic abuse to HIV/AIDS to countries in conflict to the status of women. In Colorado, state official developed a telenovela intended to convey health messages to the population. After it aired, there was a substantial increase in the number of children applying for health insurance. Many of us kind of look down at soap operas, but these stories connected people to a message deeply enough for them to be transformed by it.

I have learned that attention is connection; when you put your attention on something, you are getting out of your own head and touching the world outside of yourself. When we compel someone’s attention, we are co-creating their relationship with the world.

Stories are not an escape from reality.

Stories are how we shape and understand our reality.

We create the world we live in by the stories we choose to tell about it.

There’s a Hopi saying: Whoever tells the stories, rules the world.

Or, to quote the title of a popular business book: The best story wins.

As someone who spends time on social media, I am fascinated by online word-of-mouth; by what makes people want to share things other than cat videos. (Although I’ve seen – and been disturbed by — some oddly compelling cat videos.) So I was riveted by a study involving, again, the New York Times. This study looked at the articles people emailed the most, and studied them for what they might have in common. The upshot was this:

People share the stories that above all give them an experience of awe. People share stories that enlarge their frame of reference, shift their personal paradigm. Despite – or maybe because of – the fact that we live in what many writers describe as a narcissistic culture, it turns out we want to connect to something much larger than ourselves. As Martin Seligman put it, the self is a very poor site for meaning. True happiness comes from thinking less of ourselves, and finding a way to connect our daily actions to something so big that it reminds us of how small we actually are.

The best stories, the ones that last, contain nutritional value that teaches us how to do this; how to grow into heroes willing to sacrifice themselves for the people they love and the ideals they believe in.

I love the idea of oral storytelling, of stories as a breathing, living thing that are constantly evolving. As people told and retold them, they stripped away the boring parts, and reinvented the details. But the bones of these stories stayed the same: the archetypal truths, situations and characters that remained relevant no matter what time or culture you lived in; that made you want to tell the story in the first place, or see the latest Hollywood version of it.

And all these stories turn out to be pieces of the same big, overarching story, the monomyth that Joseph Campbell described and made famous as the hero’s journey. Perhaps you are familiar with it. The hero is forced to separate from his familiar world, go through a series of trials, slay a dragon and then return to his community with a boon that will transform that community and restore health and wellness.

It’s about separation, initiation, return.

The hero’s journey is really a metaphor for psychological development. This idea of of fulfilling your destiny by following a unique path of development, resonates across the cultures. The Navajo call it the Pollen Path, the Sioux call it the Good Red Road, the Chinese call it the Tao. Jung referred to it as individuation, and Maslow called it self-actualization.

The goal of this journey is to come home to your true self through transforming your view of the world– which ends up transforming the world. In other words, you let go of your old story, so you can step into a bigger, better one – and this ripples out to impact the stories of the people around you.

What is not as well-known as the hero’s journey, but is emerging strongly into the culture in stories such as FROZEN or Cheryl Strayed’s WILD, is the heroine’s journey. (In this case hero and heroine do not refer to gender; either gender can take either journey.) The journeys complement each other. While the hero’s journey takes him (or her) out into the world to slay a dragon, the heroine’s journey takes her (or him) deep into the psyche, where she must wrestle with her personal demons and recover previously exiled or abandoned aspects of her identity.

It’s about enclosure – transformation – re-emergence. It is the butterfly emerging from the cocoon.

The enclosure is the heroine’s secret world, where she withdraws from the demands of her community and the voices that would have her be what they want her to be. It is ‘a room of her own’, where she is free to discover and rehearse a new version of herself. This is a place of creative incubation.

But before she can reach for the new, she must let go of the old. She must dwell in the uneasy place in-between. She must tolerate ambiguity and not-knowing and the feeling of being adrift. She must stay in the dark long enough to nurture visions and dreams, and to follow the clues to the new thing as it presents itself. She must have faith that the new thing will appear.

Anyone who engages in creative work will recognize this process. It’s one that our culture does not make so easy to honor. These episodes of time-out — of feeling personally disrupted and lost – are looked at with suspicion and regarded as a waste of time. You are not being productive. But if we don’t make it a habit to seek out inspiration and integrate new experiences, to engage with them deeply, we won’t get those flashes of breakthrough synthesis that allow for game-changing insights.

Joseph Campbell writes about the need to have a sacred space, what he calls a ‘bliss station’, in order to explore our fascinations and incubate new ideas. Creativity happens when we combine familiar things in new ways, and if we don’t take the time to refill the mental well, we find ourselves with a dwindling number of things to smash together.

As we let of the old beliefs, we create space for new things to enter. As we discover what we are truly drawn to, we invite creative inspiration into our consciousness. We can recognize that the journey of life isn’t simply linear, but also moves in spirals. We descend into ourselves, but then rise into the world again, higher than before. At some point we descend again, but it never to the same sacred space. (As the saying goes, you can’t step into the same river twice.)

We don’t go through this process alone. Every hero has a mentor, someone ahead of us on her own journey who can reach back and help us with ours. The mentor gives the hero a gift to aid in the quest for self-actualization. This gift can be an insight, a tool, or a strategy. It can be a product of some kind, invested with the meaning of the story you tell around it, a story that encourages the hero toward a higher version of self.

When I read about people who succeed at building online communities, they sound, to me, like mentors. In a community, members collaborate toward a shared purpose of self-actualization. The mentor keeps this larger purpose front and center, stretching people with a higher vision. The mentor delivers an inspirational message alongside a focus on tactics and performance, and creates ways for members to make personal gains along the way. The mentor also recognizes the truth of his or her role, which is to enable the community members to be the true heroes.

David Whyte has a poem:

This is not
the age of information.
This is not
the age of information.
Forget the news,
and the radio,
and the blurred screen.
This is the time
of loaves
and fishes.
People are hungry
and one good word is bread
for a thousand.

To find those good words — words with meaning — each of us must sound the depths of our true selves, and bring up the music we find there. When you liberate the songs of your soul, you grant others the freedom to liberate theirs.

The post how to be a hero/heroine: the power of story + the quest for true self first appeared on Justine Musk.