Hello and welcome to Inner Work, a spiritual growth podcast. I'm your host, Josephine. I have a PhD in English literature and I spent 10 years teaching college before transitioning to full-time spiritual work. I'm a certified energy healer, certified Akashik Records trainer, an intuitive business coach for healers and spiritual entrepreneurs.

I help you get clear and get visible so you can get clients consistently.

To learn more or connect with me, please visit www.josephinehardman.com.

Thank you for being here and now, on to the show.

Hello, dear listener and my fellow spiritual worker, and welcome to a new episode of Inner Work.

In the last episode of this podcast, episode 91, I talked about how to deal with healing setbacks, and I alluded to the idea of

healing as a spiral or as a labyrinth, which is as a metaphor much more representative of the

healing path than any kind of a linear sequence, because the healing path is not not linear and to expect it to be so often

sets you up for disappointment, impatience, and frustration with your progress. And that's obviously

something we want to avoid. So in this episode, I want to go deeper into this metaphor of the healing path as a labyrinth.

Of course, the labyrinth itself is a powerful, very old, mythological symbol that has been used throughout time to describe different kinds of experiences and journeys. So for our purposes in this episode, I want to

begin with a quote from Joseph Campbell from his very important book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

So Campbell says, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone

before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path,

and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. Where we had thought to slay another,

we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own

existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.

So these are potent words that's a really meaningful quote, and there's a lot to unpack here.

Let's start with this idea of the hero's journey, which is so essential to this whole topic.

And so the hero's journey is an idea that was conceptualized in great detail by Joseph Campbell. The figure of the hero is an archetype, and I often think of the hero in my own perspective as the fool from the tarot deck.

So he or she can be a hero or a hero.

We don't want to just gender the hero as masculine, of course.

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