January 30th, 2016

The Loss of Our Personal Mythology
 
Myth, of all the words in our multilingual dictionaries, this very simple word is perhaps the most misunderstood word that ever existed. The word itself conjures up images, images of stories and ideas that hit us with such force in both the heart and the mind that we can be momentarily stunned, after the sting wears off however we mostly just brush the idea of a myth away as mere fables that were thought up to try and explain life and it many mysterious facets, stories that were not true but try to get some point across, a story that tries to teach us something. There are two definitions of myth that try to explain what exactly it is, the first definition (a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events) provides us with an understanding of Myth but not really something we can relate to, we find that it’s not human enough,  and the second definition confounds us even more, (a widely held but false belief or idea), it subversively tells us that myth is false, not even real, some story that was made up, a story that is held to even though it is false. Many cultures have given us great myths and stories, stories of perseverance, stories of strength, of change, of power and will, stories of mistakes and choices made wisely. I have found in my work as a psychotherapist, that the idea of myth and the power of the myth, the power of that story often elude us, we find that we can’t relate to it. We find that we externalize the qualities and elements of that story as something outside of ourselves, but the fact is, that every myth resides inside of us; all the collective myths of humanity ever told are played out in episodic dramas as though Shakespeare or Ovid penned them themselves.