How Our Online Journey Works

• Join a three-week journey that balances the inner work of being with the outer work of considered action.  We balance self-reflection with informed action – this creates the conditions for each of us to go where it has not been possible for us to go before.

• For 30 days, we will balance an outward-ness, being ‘active’ in online group gatherings, and also inward-ness, being ‘receptive’ and reflective in individualized, personal practices.

• As a community we will come together in the larger community on Saturday Mornings and Wednesday evenings, Eastern Time; and in smaller ‘meet up’ groups at different times during the week to share how the journey is unfolding for us all.

• The larger community gatherings will be hosted by Michael Mervosh.  These sessions are recorded and available to those unable to attend.

• The smaller, one-hour Journey Groups will be held and facilitated by various Hero’s Journey Foundation facilitators.  (These will not be recorded.)

The Ensemble Hero’s Journey is a distinct and dynamic opportunity to learn about developing a resilient and responsive sense of self during the challenging times playing out in the larger world.

WEEK 1 

Going Beyond The Daily & Known Self:

BUILDING A ‘QUIET COURAGE’

‘Unknowing’ is a very different experience from ‘not knowing’.  To enter into the sense of mystery and wonder that can be experienced in adventures into the unknown, we must transcend the duality of knowing-not knowing.

Sacred contemplation and action
opens one’s whole being to unknowing,
no matter what, even in the worst situations,
when everything seems lost.
It also opens one’s whole being to the
endless, miraculous possibilities of
the “One” itself.

– Andrew Harvey

We look with uncertainty
beyond the old choices for
clear-cut answers
to a softer, more permeable aliveness
which is every moment at the brink of death;
for something new is being born in us
if we but let it.

– Anne Hillman

WEEK 3

The Surrender Into Emergence:

OPENING TO RADICAL, ABIDING HOPE

“To be human is necessarily to be a vulnerable risk-taker; to be a courageous human is to be good at it.”
― Jonathan Lear

In this phase of the journey, re-emergence is about allowing the newly possible to arise from the field of what has troubled us, from the darkness that we have been able to embrace and withstand.  Re-emergence does not take place from our efforts to avoid, manage or eliminate what troubles us.

Re-emergence is something that occurs naturally and inevitably, arising from the ground of our interior lives when we are able to stand with and withstand the trouble in our lives, and also when we are active witnesses to others as they do the same with their own troubles.

It’s as if I stand
once again by my desk
on the first day of school
and the teacher calls my name,
and I say, “Here.”

She looks up and smiles
at me and I at her. “Here,”
I say again, “Here.”

– David Romtvedt

A Practice of Unknowing

We will use the ‘Practice of Unknowing’ – for our compass heading for the adventure ahead. This grows the capacity to unbind ourselves from all that we already know – all that we cling to, all that helps us feel secure, and so certain about things – so that we can better see what we don’t typically see.

We will become more aware of the ways our particular ‘knowing’ cuts us off from others – those we feel a need to protect ourselves from; those who threaten our most basic sense of self; all those we view as ‘not like us’.

We will grow our appreciation for how our strivings to know not only limits us, but can contribute in confounding ways to the trouble currently at hand.