Mapping Your Hero’s Adventure: A Mythogenesis PlayShop

This is a program of self-knowledge and encounter with your personal myth that will be carried out by Robert Walter in California, in Esalen Institute in March 24th to 29th, 2024. The meeting will be held in English and for those who are seeking a deep path of wisdom and a dive into mythology, this meeting can offer you a beautiful journey. I had two opportunities to be with Bob Walter when he was president of the Joseph Campbell Foundation in the 90s and also with Jean Erdman Campbell, Campbell’s wife. During the meetings, my life and my trajectory were affected by the wisdom and inspiration that the myths brought me. The insights that were revealed in these meetings are engraved in my memory and my heart. I wish that others have the same happiness of being at Bob’s side and enjoying his knowledge, guidance and that their lives gain a new meaning.

I highly recommend participating in this program!

Regina Proença, founder of the cultural collective Fora da Caixa

Esalen Institute, Big Sur CA, March 24 – 29, 2024

Joseph Campbell used to celebrate his birthday at Esalen. Asked why, he’d recount how Carl Jung—wondering “What myth am I living by?” and realizing he didn’t know — wrote, “I took it upon myself to get to know ‘my’ myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks.” 

“That’s what a birthday is for,” Campbell would conclude, “and what Esalen is about.” In 1988, the year after Campbell died, his friends —recalling his dictum: “What you do, you do with play”—gathered at Esalen to inaugurate “Campbell Week,” a tradition that morphed into this PlayShop, which has continued annually ever since..

Who were you? What has inspired your biographical saga? What treasures hide in your basement or attic? Who are you? What’s displayed on your refrigerator? What dangles from your rearview mirror? Who do you aspire to be? What’s on your bucket list? Dare to re-vision yourself and join our springtime rebirth rituals. 

You needn’t be familiar with Campbell to relive dreams, rekindle visions, and experience mythogenesis. Toward that end, we will use myth-making tools—drums & dance, music & song, medicine bags, and masks; we will play D-PiCT™; The Game of Mythogenesis; and we will engage in small- and large group activities that provide reflective and expressive opportunities for revisioning the myths that have shaped your life. 

“Re-vision — the art of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, from a new critical direction — is for us an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves. We need to know  the past differently than we have ever known it, not to pass on a tradition, but to break its hold over us.” —Adrienne Rich

Please bring a meaningful but expendable totem, an unsung story, or an evocative song.

Recommended reading: Anything by Campbell. Anything that makes you laugh. Poetry. 

The details about the program and enrollment you can find in the link above:

https://www.esalen.org/workshops/mapping-your-hero-s-adventure-a-mythogenesis-playshop-032424