Leigh Melander offers a scholarly, playful and inquisitive look at what myth is and why it’s important in our lives. She shares voices on myth from ancient, mystical, academic and psyche-centered perspectives. She settles in for a longer view of myth as a living, shape-shifting process that can’t be pinned down or paired up with specific pathologies or motivations. What makes a myth useful for us is how it changes our vision in any given moment. What we see in the myth and through the myth will change how we see our life situation.
Leigh explains the views of Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, James Hillman and many others on myth, metaphor and image. She describes how myths become road maps, touch points, and reminders that our individual stories are fed by larger stories.
Myths can be metaphors that transfer meaning from the literal and concrete to the imaginal and intuitive. Leigh gives examples from her own life of how exploring a myth created a meaningful context and liberating space for a stifling personal situation.
Leigh encourages you to find an image, a metaphor that speaks to you, to pull it apart and see what it opens up for you. That’s how you learn to see with inner vision. That’s where the individual soul meets the vastness of the cosmos and the richness of the whole of human experience.
This course affirms that the archetypal gods and goddesses are always present in our lives and culture. As Jung said, the question is to find out in what form and to what purpose.
In our epoch myths are closer to the surface than they have been in recent history. Much is at risk as more people are living stories that are highly divergent. Learning to see events with a mythic lens is more important than ever as it helps us hold contradictions and avoid polarized positions.
Sitting with the paradox at the heart of myth is an art. Start your apprenticeship here, or come here to refresh your work with the story that is never ending.
Course Overview:
Class 1: Definitions of myth
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Leigh opens this class by encouraging you to value how myth brings life to your questions rather than answering them. She invites you to open the resource packet that includes Ovid’s myth of Narcissus and play with the images she’s included there.
Leigh explores the definition of myth as a falsehood or story that’s not true. Another definition of myth sees it as a subcategory of folklore. Leigh prefers psyche-centered ways of looking at myth. From this perspective we get a taste of James Hillman, Carl Jung, and Micheal Mead’s views on myth. You’ll learn Joseph Campbell´s model of the 4 functions of myth. All these scholars feel that myth can return the soul to a living sense of connection to the cosmos.
Leigh explains how myth and metaphor are intertwined, how they transfer meaning from the literal and concrete to the intuitive and imaginal.
As the paradoxes of myth break us out of binary ways of thinking, learning how to explore myth also helps us find new ground between the polarized postures that we find all around us in our time.
Class 2: Using myth in your own life
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In this class Leigh gives us examples of how to use myths as practical tools in our daily lives. She tells us how an emotional loop she was stuck in opened when the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice popped into her mind. She relates how feeling into the Orpheic energy of slogging uphill and Eurydice’s faith helped her reframe her complaints and see new choices.
Leigh takes a look at looking itself. From the attraction of lingerie that hides and reveals to the many frames of a divided windowpane, she gets us closer to sensing what “seeing through” an image, event or object might entail.
Leigh affirms that image is the basis of understanding. If you can see it you can understand it. Yet inner seeing that intuits what’s behind the literal image is needed to find the mythic juice. Orpheus blew it when he had to literally see Eurydice behind him. He couldn’t trust his insight to see for him, to trust that she would be behind him.
Leigh considers the pitfalls of an agenda driven quest to discover one’s “own” personal mythology. The dangers are of those of either inflating the ego or shrinking the myth.
Finally Leigh asks what it was that you were worrying about this morning. What was that cooking inside you? Where is the metaphor in that? Where is the image in that? If you sit with that question and invite a mythic image to come in, you’ll have put on the mythic lens. You’ll be living the bigger mythic life.