Inspired by Literature

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From heralds to threshold guardians, from the ordinary world to the innermost cave, we learn to uncover the transforming potential in our own lives of a damn good book.

It's one of the reasons book clubs are so successful.  Why we'll miss a car pool or forget a spa appointment but never, ever miss our book club.  The wisdom we uncover in a book and then share with our bookish friends, is really about our lives.  The original self-help, the meeting of a story on the page and our stories off the page.  Books remind us that it matters, that our seemingly trifling travails are epic, that it matters how we treat the sales girl, how we respond to our husbands and wives.  We are on journeys.  We meet mentors, and slay dragons.  We seek the elixirs that will re-imagine our lives, our communities, our worlds.

We remember that we are the hero and will determine how it all works out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cindy and her sisters Jana and Wendy guide us through the Hero's Journey in literature and off the page into our lives.

Great books were the original self-help guides, providing us with a roadmap to the obstacles we will face, the enemies we will encounter in overcoming the all travails, both mundane and epic, in our lives.

Literature was never meant to be stuffy, arcane, removed from our lives.  It was, is, and will always be relevant, inspiring, transforming.  The original self-help.  The Dyson sisters believe that literature serves to remind us that we are the heroes of our stories.  That we may be reluctant, afraid.  That we must gather allies and kneel before mentors.  That we must prepare.  That we can vanquish whatever fear is holding us back.

Drawing from Joseph Campbell’s groundbreaking work on the universality of literature across time and culture, the Dyson sisters lead us through the universal steps on the Hero's Journey and through a discussion of the universal archetypes of literature, which represent the breadth of relationships in all our lives.

They tell there own stories, framed in the Hero's Journey, from potty training a reluctant four-year-old, to meeting a mentor and herald at the smoking area of a Christian concert.

Audience members or guests play the Journey Game, describing a current struggle which the sisters frame in terms of the Hero's Journey, which gives insight into what must be accomplished to move forward; and the Arch Archetype Game, in which a difficult person is described in terms of the archetypal role they are playing in your journey.  Along the way, we also learn what roles we play in each other’s journeys.

As Campbell wrote, “… we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us ….  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; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”