Episode 475 - How Stories Heal and Make Us Whole
Living Myth
Michael Meade
4.8 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Michael Meade explores how stories enable us to understand the world and our place in it. Mythic narratives weave the divine and natural realms together in ways that become antidotes for our anxieties and fears. To be modern can mean to have fallen out of story or to be living in opposing stories as many people believe at this time. Yet, stories are how we understand our lives and how we make meaning of even the most overwhelming and tragic aspects of life.
At each critical juncture or time of change, the story of our soul tries to break through and become more conscious. Since myths speak to each soul differently, they can deliver to each listener the psychic facts and healing factors they most need. In that sense, stories are a form of medicine that can operate at the deepest levels of self and soul.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Living Myth podcast with Michael Mead, where this shifting, changing world is looked at from a mythic perspective. |
| 0:19.3 | On this episode, Mead explores how stories enable us to understand the world and our place in it. |
| 0:26.6 | Mythic narratives weave the divine and natural realms together |
| 0:30.6 | in ways that become antidotes for our anxieties and fears. |
| 0:35.6 | To be modern can mean to have fallen out of story or to be living |
| 0:39.9 | in opposing stories as many people believe at this time. Yet, stories are how we understand |
| 0:46.9 | our lives and how we make meaning of even the most overwhelming and tragic aspects of life. |
| 1:13.0 | First of all, stories have been mostly lost, especially mythical stories, have been lost as a vehicle of knowledge, as a kind of vehicle of holding, of containing. People used to go into stories |
| 1:20.1 | to be able to resolve issues that can't be resolved in a daily world. And so that has been lost. |
| 1:26.8 | People think that myth means something patently |
| 1:29.5 | false when myth used to mean emergent truth. You know, a myth is a lie that tells the truth, |
| 1:36.4 | a series of lies that reveals the truth. We've fallen out of story. And that's part of the world going |
| 1:43.0 | wrong. And it makes it more difficult to contain, |
| 1:47.0 | to maintain, to resolve our own lives if we can't find ourselves in cohering stories. |
| 1:56.1 | Myths say, songs say, this has happened before. So that means people made their way through it. |
| 2:03.4 | Myth and mythic imagination is something that is ancient and immediate at the same time. |
| 2:09.6 | And so a lot of people don't understand that. People think that myth is something simply in the |
| 2:13.6 | past, but it's in the past, but it has a capacity to open in the present. |
| 2:20.9 | And one type of myth that we need to find now, that we need to live with now, are the |
| 2:27.7 | myths of creation, or I call them recreation. In a sense, we're living in creation times again. Most mythologies of creation |
| 2:38.3 | begin with chaos, the eternal dark ocean, and then the ocean and the heavens divide, |
| 2:45.2 | and light comes in, and then the world is made. In mythology, when the world is falling apart, it's falling into chaos, |
... |
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