Welcome to the Living Myth podcast with Michael Mead, where this shifting, changing world is looked at from a mythic perspective.

This episode explores how as the world becomes a more chaotic and conflicted place,

turning to creative practices can help us find ways to settle and center

and grow a greater sense of self and soul.

Throughout the ages, meaningful practices have served as primary pathways for psychological

and spiritual growth, as well as for finding moments of wholeness and inner unity.

Traditional roads of practice typically appear as the inward path of meditation and deep reflection

and the expressive path of creative arts,

such as music and dance, painting and writing. Both primary pathways can help us become more

vital and resilient and be more able to spring back no matter what befalls us.

Music spring back, no matter what befalls us. We now live in the midst of a world that is churning, that turns upside down over and over again,

where false things are taken as truth and truth gets lost, where mendacity rules instead of generosity

and all kinds of things like that. And it's happening near as I can tell all around the world.

And the disturbances are coming from

both nature and human culture, which makes it a very unusual and a very difficult time to be alive,

as if we are all feeling, whether we acknowledge it or not, the pressure coming from radical

climate crisis and the pressure coming from radical upheaval in most cultures.

We can avoid the news or we can turn away from the outer world, but it's in the atmosphere

and it gets to us anyway. Besides, each soul is really connected to everyone else, and at the

level of the soul, we feel the increase of pressure and the increase of suffering

that's happening to others, even if it's more slowly getting to our lives.

When we find ourselves in this condition, which we could call overwhelm,

...