How to Find Your Bliss (and other life lessons from The Hero’s Journey)
My day job as an English professor includes teaching students how to write a great research paper, or sometimes more mundanely, how to fix grammar errors.
But now more than ever — perhaps due to the increasing chaotic and tumultuous plurality of our world — I’m finding that my real responsibility (and passion) has become encouraging and motivating students towards making impactful, meaningful changes in their lives. Because at the end of the day, we are all trying hard not only to survive, but thrive in this funny little thing we called life.
So when I had the chance to teach the many nuggets of wisdom in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I embraced the opportunity— and so did my students.
They were starved for it — and so was I. Beneath the facade of academic pursuit, we were a bunch of tender, vulnerable, hurting, and lost human beings who went through the motions of school, work, and life while searching for answers to the biggest questions in our hearts: What gives me meaning? How do I navigate this? Where do I put the pieces of my broken heart? When should I let go? Who am I?
Ah, the basic human condition.
After we pummeled through The Hero’s Journey and dissected our own life journey through that…
