Sarah Howard from WISE FOOLS recounts her voyage through Paul Rebillot’s rite of passage The Hero’s Journey, which she is bringing to Eden Rise in July. She also explains its ‘gift economy’ ethos and why they are offering it as a present to you!
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I used to love getting presents as a child. The anticipation, the joy of unwrapping, the surprise – and perhaps even some kind of treasure inside. As an adult, my feeling towards gifts is more ambivalent. I’m more aware of the burdensome side of accumulating too many material objects, but secretly my heart still skips a beat when someone says “I have a present for you…”!
Perhaps it was this gift-loving part inside me that pricked up its ears when I first heard in passing of the ‘gift of the Hero’s Journey’. Back in 2012, I was training to be a bodywork practitioner in Berlin. As someone was leaving at the end of a free trial session, she thanked me heartily for the gift, adding: ‘”It’s like something I’ve heard of called the Hero’s Journey, a creative transformation ritual where you meet your inner hero and demon. It’s offered as a gift, and you can donate afterwards if you want”.
Something about this stuck, and I eventually tracked it down. An organisation called Irgendwie Anders (‘Somehow different’) offered a 6-day ‘creative transformation workshop’ called the Hero’s Journey. You paid the price of accommodation and food, but the workshop itself was a gift. Afterwards, if you had benefited, you could choose to contribute towards someone else receiving this gift, either through gifting money, time, or both. As a financially struggling 30-something-year-old, with a thirst for adventure and safe spaces, I was sold.
The interesting thing about receiving a gift is that you open up towards it with a little more humility and grace than you might otherwise. I arrived at the workshop with little expectation, and only a vague notion of what it was about. When people had asked where I was going, I couldn’t really explain. It was simultaneously a risky and refreshing step into the unknown, which had woken up my courage before I even arrived. I felt an enlivening tingle to have chosen to follow the “why not?” in me rather than the “why?” . As it turns out, this is the qualifying step for showing up as a hero/ine. Not fearlessness. Just the fact of taking the step into the unknown, from where a new path unfolds.
And how was it? Honestly the best week of my life!
Initially, in the opening circle, my mind was unable to pinpoint what it is I really long for. But then gradually, through an extra-ordinarily rich, chocolate box of experiences, each one more deeply satisfying than the last, we travelled to inner realms which knew these answers. Tracing the emerging story of the inner part which longs for life (the ‘hero/ine’) and the one who blocks it (the ‘demon’), and getting to know these in a very visceral way, I was astounded by the underground caverns of unlived life energy and creativity, and realised exactly how I manage to squander so much life energy, which, it turns out, is desperate to be lived. And through some sort of magic alchemy, as it seemed, these two sides came to an agreement. It wasn’t always easy, but it was effortless – the process unfolded like a tale I was spellbound by, and I emerged feeling like myself, for the first time.
At the end of the week, a very transparent talk on the gift economy concept gave me the option to donate what I could in order to enable another person to have this experience. For what felt like the first time in my money-worry-beset life, I gave joyfully and with a sense of trust and freedom. I also signed up as a volunteer cook at another workshop which was another way to give this gift (and partake in some of the magic again). It actually felt so nourishing to feel myself as part of this flow of receiving and giving that my relationship to money has changed as a result, and I am really grateful to experience much more of a sense of abundance and trust.
A few years later, I went on to train in Gestalt Therapy with Irgendwie Anders, and then to assist and finally facilitate these workshops in Germany and Austria. I hugely enjoyed being a part of such a spirited and floushing organisation – the two or three workshops they were offering per year in 2012 have since turned to over 120. The Hero’s Journey seems to have such a profound and universal appeal! That’s something else that I love about this work: its huge accessibility, not just financially, but also as an experience.
The work was originated by Paul Rebillot, an American theatre director and Gestalt therapist who, in my view, was an absolute genius in crafting and staging transformation rituals. Inspired by ancient Greek healing theatre, the Hero’s Journey provides a stage – for our life-defining inner conflict between life and stagnation to unfold to the only audience it is intended for – ourselves – like the most satisfying piece of theatre possible, and to find resolution (and by the way, no performing is required!).
Since moving back to the UK, my next journey has begun. Together with my colleague and friend Sven Werner, who also trained with Irgendwie Anders, we founded WISE FOOLS with the vision of bringing this work – with its gift economy roots – to the WISE (Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England) Isles. This July’s Hero’s Journey in Eden Rise has already been paid for joyfully and enthusiastically by our first cohort of pioneering hero/ines last December in Wales.
So, we have a present for you!
Will you take the step and join us?
You can find out more here.