Mythic Imagery and Embodied Storytelling for Psycho-Spiritual Development

Gustav Klimt The Tree of Life 1905

I performed my version of a Jewish folktale from India I call "The Tree of Gold" on the main stage Sunday Morning Closing Concert at the Florida Storytelling Festival April 3.

It's part of my personal Mythic Yoga repertoire of stories that have a significant spiritual value for me personally as well as collectively that have themes of reconciliation and renewal.

The imagery in this story pertains to many psycho-spiritual elements contained in yoga and yoga philosophy. When we listen to this story, we connect via the metaphors and archetypical images that re-link us to ourselves via the mythic dimension of our beings, largely forgotten in favor of the intellect.

Listening and creating these images internally within with our imagination activates the neglected feeling and intuitive functions of our psyche that is found and felt in the body.  Healing and answers are thus provided to our questions and ailments. "...myths are also profound dramatic descriptions of our interior emotional and spiritual experience as human beings, says Jeremy Taylor, and these myths also show up in our sleeping and waking dream life.

We become the characters, images and elements of the story, as we progress in the narrative structure and through the ritual of listening have a conscious participation in the story. We live the myth. We are the foolish king, who sends his young queen away. We are the queen abandoned and sent to the forest to live with an old man. We are the old man, those feminine qualities in masculine psychology that are expelled from our patriarchal culture. We are the tree of gold, which is constantly flowing liquid gold but always holding its shape of a tree.

The Cottonwood trees of my youth
growing up in Boulder, County
 Colorado have strong meaning for me.
Native Americans saw the tree as
sacred and was at the heart of the Sun Dance Ritual

These images activate the yoga within and reminds us something about the ineffable. That's the purpose of a mythic image, Mythologist Joseph Campbell says. It has one foot in reality and one foot in the transcendent. That is the Mythic Yoga, as stories and myths have that ability to wake us up and help us reach the goal of yoga, union with the divine.

When we act the story out with out body or take a position of a tree, I can feel immediately the Shakti, the kundalini, the chakras, the tree of life. I am at the center point, the axis mundi. I am the whole world. Tat Tvam Asi. Thou Art That. I am at one with the cosmos, the divine. My body is the container, just as the tree is, for cosmic intelligence and consciousness. The body's intelligence knows the way, we just have to realize it by hearing the stories and participating in the myth via the ritual of yoga.

For that is the purpose of myth, to help us live in accord with nature. We become Solis, the Latin word for sun. I am the sun. That is my personal mythology. And I am always amazed at the images and opportunities that present themselves in my life all because I dared to take a risk and follow my bliss. Dared to extract myself of the commodified trap American yoga has become.

 I feel the image resonate within me and it grounds me when I think of it or move with it. The Cosmic Tree is a powerful archetype of cosmic renovation. The Asvattha is the chief of trees and typifies that tree of life which is rooted in God. Great reminders during our secular life to handle all that arises and be rooted in myth and yoga in a world flattened out with just economic and political concerns rather than ecstasy and spirit.

Yama while instructing Naciketa describes the eternal Asvattha tree with its root upwards and branches downwards, which is the pure immortal Brahman, in which all these world are situated, and beyond which there is nothing else (Katha Upanishad Verse II.vi.1). But Krishna tells us that the Asvattha tree having neither end nor beginning nor stationariness whatsoever has its roots upwards and branches downwards whose branches are nourished by the Gunas and whose infinite roots spread in the form of action in the human world which, though strong, are to be cut off by the forceful weapon of detachment to seek the celestial abode from which there is no return (Bhagavad Gita Chapter XV Verses 1-4).

This tree my father bought at an end of season
 sale at K-Mart in Boulder in 1981 for .25.
 It now grows and has an uncanny look of a woman!
Folklore says that when you cut down
 a tree, you cut down a woman. 

Powerful medicine. That's the power of the oral tradition. That's the power of storytelling and listening and the oral tradition, especially when you act out the myth as ritual with yoga and it becomes the yoga. Something reading won't get you (now will following a guru. Look within for your own sat guru. It's right here all the time, like a jewel in the middle of your forehead.

Forget expensive trainings and workshops by flying all over the world. America, always trying to make a buck. Simply sit down and mediate every day and get to know thy self!  For yogic wisdom for thousand of years has been passed down in such a manner, for the transmission is a psycho-spiritual knowing via the energy of the image that guides us to knowledge and liberation. It's perfect for modern times. Just to re-acquaint yourself with this silent aspect of your being.

For this is our yoga. Mythic Yoga, using images and symbols to find union. "To transcend profane time and re-enter into mythical Great Time is equivalent to a Revelation of Ultimate Reality. Reality that is strictly metaphysical and can be approached in no other way than through myths and symbols," Mircea Eliade says in his book Images and Symbols studies in religious symbolism.

Join me May 14 at Yoga Circle and Dance in Ormond Beach for a Mythic Yoga Workshop to discover your personal mythology. Or join me online starting September 12 for the Mythic Yoga Online Training and discover your myth through dreams and journaling, yoga and the global community. Amazingly we start dreaming together, experiencing the synchronicity that arises when we connect to our depths and share our hearts. We are all one!

OM SHANTI

Know Thy Self: Mythic Yoga Online Classes Start Sept. 12. Early-Bird Registration and Save

A mythic image has one foot in reality and one
 foot in eternity, says
Mythologist Joseph Campbell.

"The Endless" Lord Vishnu sleeps enclosed in the coils of the serpent Ananda Sesa. Inside the god lies the cosmos, and outside the divine dreamer lies darkness.  Upon hearing ancient myths such as these from the Vishnu Purana, the mythic images awaken the world within us. The soul speaks in an image, and our body is the container to hold the cosmic ocean and the infinite within it as well as outside of us.

Working with myths and the body stops the rational, intellectual mind and kicks in the lost connection we have to the other parts of our psyches, such as the intuitive and feeling sides. Just as in the Grail Myth the King was wounded in the thigh, the feeling function, we must restore this connection to ourselves to provide wholeness not only for ourselves, but the entire world. Because the work we do in the silent depths of our meditation, yoga asana and Mythic Yoga practice is unfathonable in influence. For it is the depths were we meet all in undifferentiated consciousness.

Mythic Yoga classes start again this fall Mondays 8 pm EST. Started in 2006, The Storytime Yoga and Mythic Yoga online classes were the first yoga classes offered online. I took my mythic journey with my kids and lived my myth, and now I am back for the mythic return to share the gifts I have acquired from my journey.

Mythic Yoga is deep work that goes beyond yoga asana
and connects to your dreams, personal myth, imagery, and art
From the Personal Mythology Series of photo and mixed-media
collage by Sydney Solis

Myths and yoga are powerful combinations for self-growth and healing from trauma. Mythologist Joseph Campbell teaches us that myths guide us on how to live in the world, how to cope with duality but not just survive but to "joyfully participate in the sorrows of the world." Because we cannot judge what happens to us in life. The suffering obstacle is the path, he says.

"Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror -- but by god, you are alive," Campbell says.

Dreams, stories, myths and putting our bodies and selves into the center of the universe and aligning it with the cosmos takes us on a journey into the ineffable and toward liberation. It's raja yoga, direct.

The physical asanas are only one step, but the psycho-social and spiritual aspects of Mythic Yoga are just being known as the images from our personal mythology arise and point us into the direction of liberation and ecstatic union with the divine.

Listen deeply to the body and discover
your personal mythology! It won't be from the head! 

Join me for your Mythic Journey! 

• Four weeks of original Mythic Yoga online course work, group interaction in a forum to post your questions and comments, dream work, guided home work and exercises, plus a live class every week for feedback and coaching that will be recorded if you can't make it.

• I will be sharing my personal mythic journey, how I started Mythic Yoga and Storytime Yoga for Kids in Boulder, Colorado in 2003, went on a personal mythic journey in 2010 abroad with my kids after my husband's death, and losing everything three more times after that...... Loss is continual.... but what is it that lasts within? It's the Little Piece of Paradise I say. It's always with you. Use personal mythology and yoga to find it!  You don't survive, you thrive, prevail, triumph!

• Contact us today to register!  Price is $250 and SAVE $50 if you register by May 15!

• Includes all coursework, online platforms as well as the e-book Mythic Yoga: Ancient Hindu Myth and Personal Myth by Sydney Solis and her childhood memoir of war Outside the Concentration Camp, all to get you inspired to share your story of healing with yoga and story.

• All you need is high-speed internet access and a webcam!

• Check out all the fun Mythic Yoga The Story in the Body participants had on our 5-day Retreats held in Boulder, Colorado 2008-2010. 

The original Mythic Yoga! Live your myth, don't just talk about it! Find the courage to go deep within. OM SHANTI

Align with your Divine. Follow your dream images and they
 will awaken you in all of your life and mythology.

If you are in DeLand, Florida, join me and others for the Joseph Campbell Foundation RoundTable meetings third Monday of the month! I ran one in Colorado for four years! YOU are the MYTH-ing link!


Suggested Reading

The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell)  by Joseph Campbell

The Heroine's Journey by Maureen Murdock (I met her at the Mythic Journey's Conference in Atlanta in 2004)

The Heroine's Journey Workbook by Maureen Murdock

Mythic Yoga: Epiphany

Mythic Yoga: Epiphany 2016 mixed media collage on
recycled wood, as part of the
Personal Mythology Series 2003-2016  

The greatest gift of connecting yoga and mythology is that it aligns your body and consciousness with the cosmos. You pay attention to the seasons, their energies and you in relationship with it.

When that is achieved, magic and miracles happen. Or rather, the boons of the Gods. Most definitely, healing ones appear that can affect the entire planet.

Aligning with the cosmos, reconnecting to the depths, healing the planet by healing ourselves. Mythic images take us there, as does meditation, spending time in nature or creating ritual as we participate in the seasons and delight in uniting with the powerful planetary pulls on our bodies, elements and emotions.

The Mythic Yoga process creates amazing, mysterious results. Over the years I have expressed it in art and poetry via my Personal Mythology series of mixed media collage.

I made one of my first photo paper collages in 2003 a few months before my husband died.
Remarkably, nearly 14 years later, after many years of practice and a personal mythic journey abroad, I made another one.  It symbolized an end of an era. Constant renewal. A new era.

Rose Cross 2003. Mixed Media collage
on handmade paper. Part of the Personal Mythology
Series for Mythic Yoga

I made the collage during Epiphany 2016. Three Kings Day. It revealed the gifts from doing the work of spirit, of yoga. Of letting go. Surrendering. It revealed the gifts from surrendering to the process of dying during winter solstice, rather than participating in a cultural commercialism that obscures this powerful event. It makes way for a true participatory rebirth of the light, Christmas, within. And then the subtle time afterward gathers energy and space needed to reflect. That's when the Epiphany, awareness, comes.

So much healing. So much joy. That in all of our story, our personal myth, our history is that it brings the gifts, it renews itself in the cosmos as you. And continues to grow and once again cycle through great time and space before its ready to cast everything off once again. The eternal cycle of birth, death, rebirth. That's why letting to so powerful. Constant renewal requires constant release.

Aligning with the cosmos by celebrating the great planetary events such as solstice, puts you in deep connection with the depths. Now we continue with the year, building psychic energy with the gifts in January's winter depths.  As if it were inseminated inside a womb. A seed buried in the earth. A seed sprouting along a river, in a dream, now awakening to consciousness and bliss at midwinter before it sprouts above ground, in new consciousness, birth, in the spring before yawning toward the fullness of summer, only to repeat the cycle all over again. Eternal life.

A fig, a rose, a dove, a swan, the god Rudra, as us, always transforming our lives in our dreams, our thoughts, as we become aware of them and awaken from the dream and become sat, chit, ananda, being, consciousness and bliss. OM SHANTI and happy new year, eternally.

Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body

Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body at Lighthouse Writer's
Workshop Literature Fest Denver 2015

It was my Mythic Return, leaving Colorado for 5 years on a personal Mythic Journey to heal and putting my Mythic Yoga and Storytime Yoga business on hold so that as a widow I could focus on being a homemaker and raising my two kids after the great trauma of my husband's death. Read my E-book, Mythic Yoga: Vishnu's Dream, Ancient Hindu Myth and Personal Story, which I first performed at the Boulder Public Library in 2004 and used myths to tell my story.

Rose Mandala 2000 Mixed Media Collage by Sydney Solis
Part of the Mythic Yoga Personal Mythology Series

Into my depths I went, practicing restorative yoga, meditation, eating locally, cooking from scratch, learning to knit and yoga homeschooling my kids in Buenos Aires, Argentina and for a bit in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands where we ended up and spent 2 1/2 years.

It took me two years to adjust back to the U.S. mainland and its hyper-consumerist society before starting Studio Solis. I won't even get into the commodification of yoga in the U.S. now. But the deep, real work continues, as my kids are now teens and I can venture a bit back into the world with my work. which has taken a big yoga therapy turn, as the healing powers of yoga and storytelling, myth and the body are deep.

Contemplating myth while moving the body brings insight via
mythic imagery

I taught my original Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body at Lighthouse Writers Workshop Literature Fest in Denver this June. The first time in 5 years since I left Colorado. Conference are always so head and intellect heavy. The body thinks! Jung's four functions of the psyche let us know we don't even tough the intuitive function, all in favor of the intellect.

So via the body we can listen deeply for inspiration in our creative writing endeavors for svadyaya, self-knowledge. And by listening deeply and contemplating ancient myths, knowledge bubbles up with the symbolic mind we have long forgotten with great secrets, insights and information we never realized before with just our thinking minds. Through our art, memoirs, poetry, we create memorials and testimonies of our lives. We become living yoga and through our art transcend death.

Images bubble up from the soul with the realm of the imagination, the heart, within the body, the organs, our dreams. We return to our depths and unconscious via the body, and movement with symbols and imagery suspend intellectual thinking and activate the symbolic mind. We think in more ways than one! By listening to the story in the body, via chakras, body parts, yoga nidra, imagery, we can then articulate emotions, ideas, feelings and stories better via creative writing prompts.

Listening to mythology activates energies within us to
enable us to listen to ourselves and link via yoga. It's more
than yoga asana, it's Raja Yoga. Direct via the mythic imagination

Register for the Next Mythic Yoga The Yoga of Story training. Denmark June 2016. 

I still am a home-body, content living a simple, sustainable life with my kids rather than running around too much teaching. I will be adding more dates soon. Visit the calendar for one-day Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body trainings.

Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body Retreats were held each June from 2008-2010 in Boulder, Colorado and Rollinsville, Colorado in conjunction with Artist Wendy Rochman as required for master training in the Storytime Yoga for Kids Yoga Teacher Training and Certification. 

The Yoga of Story Residency June 22-26 in Denver with Sydney Solis - Connect Mythology with Yoga

Learn Hindu Mythology as you learn to use the oral tradition
 to teach yoga to kids, teens and adults.

Connect to the power of the oral tradition in this 5-day comprehensive and in-depth residency. Hear folktales, myths, legends and personal stories and how to tell and make your own. Connect to your own personal story and see how to help others connect too. Learn to stand out from the crowd! Teach kids, teens and adults more than yoga asana – give them the direct yoga using story and image as well as the psycho-spiritual aspects of yoga! Learn Sydney Solis’s pioneering story and yoga methods of Storytime Yoga®, Sleepytime Yoga™ and Mythic Yoga™.

Certificate of Completion given and Yoga Alliance Continuing Education Credits Available. 

Reserve your spot today. More info here!

Also coming up

• July 20-26 Buenos Aires, Argentina – Yoga para niños con cuentos! El Yoga del Cuento! The Yoga of Story and Charitable Kids Yoga Classes at Saludablemente Yoga. Contact Marcela Larrosa at Saludablemente to register.

Contact us with questions! 

Mythic Yoga: The Heroine’s Journey - Modern Feminist Mythological Guidance for Life

by Sydney Solis

The Heroine’s Journey offers women a distinctly different psychological process than the masculine Hero’s Journey. I put it to use in my mythic journey of healing when I spent three years abroad with my two children. You can take your own mythic journey too.

Inanna - The Heroine's Journey
via Mythology and Yoga

The Hero’s Journey, recognized by mythologist Joseph Campbell as found in all the world's cultures, is used time and time again to apply a mythic model as a roadmap to life. The traditional journey of having a call to adventure, gifts and then return, outline a masculine approach to the psychological experience. The Heroine’s Journey, however, is different, and this is the model I find as a woman more true to my experience and connects me to a deeper dimension of my life.

I first heard about the Heroine’s Journey at the Mythic Journey’s Conference in Atlanta in 2004. I took author and therapist Maureen Murdock’s eponymous class of the Heroine’s Journey. At Joseph Campbell’s behest Murdock created the feminine model of the mythic journey, outlined in her excellent book The Heroine’s Journey. From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine's Journey Through Myth and Legend by Valerie Estelle Frankel is another excellent book on feminist mythic journeying. I remember taking a playwriting class at CU Boulder with Laura Shamas. She, too, pointed out that there are different mythic models out there for life. One not about rising action and climactic events followed by denouement that models male orgasm, but a feminine one that features a series of events in dramatic cycles, much like the multiple orgasms of women. There really is a different feminine guiding mythology of which to view the world and live in its matrix with.

The myth Murdock called attention to in the workshop was the Sumerian Inanna, who, after shedding her posessions, descends to the underworld after she hears the cries of her sister, Ereshkigal, whose husband, Gugalanna the bull of Heaven, was murdered. Ereshkigal kills Inanna, and two creatures who descended after her showed compassion to the Ereshkigal, who moaned as if giving birth. She granted anything they wanted as a gift for their compassion. The two asked for Inanna, who was hanging on a hook like a piece of meat. The two beings sprinkled the waters of life and death on Inanna. This process of three days, much like the days before a new moon, returns Inanna resurrected to the surface world world, reborn. It’s a pre Persephone and Demeter (De- mater - the mother) myth, as well as pre-Christian. Joseph Campbell mentioned that women don’t really go “out” on a journey, because women are it. Where everybody is trying to get to. As life happens to women, such as the onset of menstruation, and a woman's body is identical to the universe, Campbell said. Whereas men have to go out on a journey and have experience special clubs and rites of action in secret societies to connect and find meaning to connect to the mysteries of life and death. 

Murdock outlined a woman’s journey, which begins with a split from the feminine. Our world is filled with many-a frustrated, angry and mean mother trapped in a patriarchal world or the isolated drudgery of housewifery. Women split from the mother aspect and identify with the father. This leads women to behave like men and value patriarchal ideals - wear the shoulder-padded suit, climb the corporate ladder, make money and be a “success.” But even when this is reached women enter a dry period or other crisis, such as an illness, Murdock says. Success and recognition fail to fill women up. Notice how many “successful women” may get breast cancer or other disease or become alcoholics in their pursuit of the masculine ideal, ignoring their feminine nature, values and processes of non-doing, nurturing and non-dollar-economy denominated work. After the “dry” period, women bottom out. A woman faces the lowest point - the abyss. That’s where the paradoxical shift comes. After that experience, woman is then on the upswing, reconciling with the mother, and then the father before ascending and returning to wholeness.

Sydney Solis and Sergeant Pepe in
St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands

Every woman is able to experience her own Heroine's Journey. I myself lived it. I used story, mythology and yoga. More than ten years ago after my husband died, I pieced together my life with what I called Mythic Yoga, attending the Mythic Journeys conferences, joining the Joseph Campbell Foundation and attending the mythological toolbox at Esalen. I began poring again through the Hindu myths my older sister and Hare Krishna yoga practitioner told me growing up. My father, who was born in the Dutch East Indies a concentration camp survivor, also pointed me on the mythic path, ascertaining throughout my life through his stories of the camp that there is no death. In order to "re-story" my life, I created my personal mythology of "The Queen of Bohemia"(In 1904 The St. Louis Dispatch ran a headline reading "The King of Bohemia" about my Czech great-grandfather Louis J. Tichacek, a Missouri senator) and started in 2009 a blog to help me deal with a difficult time in my life and, understand see myself clearly in order to forge a new identity that is healed.

As a child I never had a good relationship with my mother and did then identify with my father’s spiritual pursuits of yoga and meditation. I suffered a great deal of post traumatic stress disorder after my husband's sudden suicide in 2003 after his business went bankrupt, a casualty of post 9/11, leaving me and my 2 and 5-year-old penniless for a good month. Thereafter I bolted out into the world at hyper speed, creating the business of the Mythic Yoga Studio and Storytime Yoga® for Kids, bringing my kids with me to the kids yoga classes I taught.  I was going a mile-a-minute, doing so much I can hardly believe it now. The business grew quickly being in kids yoga and mythic yoga, including being featured in Yoga Journal magazine and on PBS. But the aridity hit. It was not easy to be a mom, run a household and a business. My kids’ were growing up and had many needs. I hit my dry period and bottomed out, had irregular pap tests and high-risk HPV. I wanted to return to being a mom and homemaker for their sake and mine. And to heal us all.

Spending time in nature leads to aesthetic arrest
and revealing maya.

I descended in true mythic fashion and just like Inanna, stripping away and selling most my possessions, putting the rest in storage, putting my business on hold and moving from my hometown of Boulder, Colorado to Buenos Aires with my kids to learn to live simply and well, by cooking from scratch, living simply and yoga home schooling them. ( Visit the Householder Yogini blog!) Together we experienced fabulous art and culture rather than the faceless suburbia Colorado and much of car-obsessed America had become. 

I practiced restorative yoga, ayurveda, meditation and ventured to every historic cafe in Buenos Aires, writing personal myth and memoir for myself and rediscovering who I really was - beyond the painful identify of a traumatic childhood and as a suicide survivor.  My personal fairy tale of the Queen of Bohemia, backed by the Hindu myth of Kali and Durga, enabled me to find courage, strength and clarity of who I was and make sense of the events in my life. I could fortify and recreate my self away from an identity of pain and trauma to one of healing and wholeness with this personal myth. For the third person narrative gives one the ability to self-reflect, svadyaya, one of the niyamas. Like meditation, it gives one distance to observe the ego self. Through story, photographs, meditation and yoga/body work, the ego mind is recognized and understood for what it is. Neti, neti. Not that, not that. Frank Bures says, "The ability to see one's life as a story is at the heart of identity. In fact, our ability to '"narrate" our life's events may even be the defining mark of consciousness." One can find thus find a transcendent state in viewing one's story, and start from there to recreate oneself after identifying with the divine. It’s used as long as needed for guidance and strength. Then, the story and image is abandoned when it's purpose as a boat to get one to the other shore is accomplished. 

After 5-months in Buenos Aires, we moved to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The kids enrolled in school there, and I continued my yoga and mythic yoga writing/story practice, isolated from the world but immersed in the resplendent nature of the garden, witnessing life and death as a constant and experiencing the nature behind it all in meditation and what Campbell would call "aesthetic arrest." I befriended a 73-year-old Puerto Rican Farmer, who I consider like a shaman, living simply but in the greatest wealth of all - the spirit. No wonder Jesus went to the garden to pray. It was a profound experience, connecting to the depths and the mystery of it all. And using Kali and Durga to slay my demons of fear, disease and negativity by uncovering stories that mythic yoga body work revealed. I had to die to one identity in order to be reborn anew with consciousness, the cosmos periodically renewing itself through me.

I found my “Little Piece of Paradise” as I call it, a piece of metaphoric real estate that is the blissful state of the transcendent.  Kali cuts off my thoughts, for as in Yoga Sutra 1.2 says, yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind, allowing the true self to arise. This unity, for me to describe it’s like watching yourself wave to yourself riding on a float in a parade, but you are also there on the float waving back! Or you are the one watching the movie of yourself from the theatre seats, all the while performing in the movie of your life on screen. That dual/one nature, the paradox, blends and melts one’s mind into the ineffable, joyful and loving experience of being. From then on I felt grounded in my little piece of paradise, to carry it with me, and to abandon my Queen of Bohemia fairy tale and myth (she is still used in kids yoga!) After living a quiet lifestyle of yoga and storytelling on my little Yoga Farm St. Croix and living off of fresh food from the garden, my pap tests returned to normal and I was free of the virus.

That deep peace and grounding that followed this experience was revealed not in a flash but through a series of practice and time, like a slow release capsule. Of course, then, there was the mythic return left. To ascend again in wholeness. And so I did. Numerous problems with St. Croix ushered in our leaving island after living there for 2 1/2 years and returning to the U.S. Mainland. The main employer, Hovensa Oil Refinery, closed a year after our arrival and decimated the local economy. A mass exodus ensued. I didn't want to return to Colorado, for I left it to leave all my past. I thought it was painful to return, as each summer that I did visit my father and family the past three years confirmed in sorrow and difficulty. The climate also bothered me; cold, dry, windy, brown, high-altitude Colorado aggravated my vata. I am much healthier and happier in a green, humid, sea-level environment.

Dream work and dream yoga
provides ample opportunity
for personal mythology and healing.
This from aboriginal peoples of Australia

The kids and I settled in DeLand, Florida based on some dreams I had. As sychronicity would have it, my neighbors are filmmakers who worked on the Power of Myth video! I did visit my home in Boulder and my father this past Christmas. I aligned my body and mind through the ritual of Advent to the sacred and by not participating in traditional American consumption of the holiday. What died away in the season was the old me, for when I visited my father, not only was he more healthy and happier than at any time I had known him in my life, but the house I grew up in, which always was in disrepair and dysfunction, was remarkably fixed up and functional. My mother's anger and upset was replaced and healed by cleanliness and orderliness - and forgiveness. My younger sister, who had committed suicide during my time abroad, also hung close and things felt more healed.

 Psychologist James Hollis says that this is the retroactive healing of the ancestors. I had always intuited this, feeling that my father and my late mother healed through my own healing. And vice versa. It healed my late sister, my grandmother, all who suffered were now healed in the depths. All the suffering was transformed and it led to faith. Faith in the Self and the eternal presence. When we do our inner work, it affects the whole world. For it is in the collective depths that it takes place and it is united in love and grace.  

There is the eternal return. Life continues and periodically has an urge to renew itself,  So life goes on. New trials await, new experiences. But I am reborn, and always behind the scenes I have taken up real estate in my little piece of paradise, and my Heroine’s Journey was infused by feminine mythology and yoga that guided me there every step of the way. 

YOUR OWN HEROINE'S JOURNEY

Create your own Heroine's Journey
with personal mythology and yoga.

There is nothing to do to start your own Heroine's Journey except start where you are. Practice yoga and meditation. Reflect on your life's story. Listen to your dreams, for Campbell says that dreams are private myths and myths are public dreams! Imagine yourself like a butterfly, dipping into and out of the dream and waking world with ease. Read and listen to the old myths. Dance, make art, sing, walk in nature as a personal ritual. Spend time with children. Attend storytelling events and start a storytelling circle. Keep a journal. Bring awareness to everything you do and turn it into the third person narrative. Make your own fairy tale and tell about your life. What myth arises? Read my example of combining Hindu Myth with my life story in the Mythic Yoga E-book, Vishnu's Dream. Use the Mythic Yoga E-course to guide you in using the myths in connection with your own personal story and in creating a personal body myth and ritual. 

Connect with others. For it is the present moment physical awareness and witness aspect of storytelling that connects us and heals us.  For mythology restores the neglected part of our psyches, the symbolic, instinctual part that has been cut off in favor of the intellect. Our mythic imagination guides us to our selves, as the universe continues to become self-aware of itself through us. It's imperative we bring mythology back to awareness for society's sake, especially youth. 

So! Start your journey! Re-imagine the world! Re-enchant it with mythology, yoga and story!

Namaste and have a magical day!

RECOMMENDED READING

The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock

The Heroine’s Journey Workbook by Maureen Murdock

From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine's Journey Through Myth and Legend by Valerie Estelle Frankel

Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer by Diane Wolkstein 

The Mythic Path: Discovering the Guiding Stories in Your Past - Creating a Vision for Your Future by David Feinstein.

The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell

Sukhavati by Joseph Campbell

The Myth of the Eternal Return by  Mircea Eliade 

Recommended Reading for Regaining the Feminine

Suggested Reading for Dream Work

Parabola Magazine

Mythic Yoga: Vishnu's Dream - Ancient Hindu Myths and Personal Story available on Kindle!

Mythic Yoga: Vishnu's Dream -
Ancient Hindu Myths and Personal Story
 by Sydney Solis
available on Kindle
Learn about Mythology and Yoga
and how it relates to your personal story

by Sydney Solis

I first performed Mythic Yoga: Vishnu's Dream - Ancient Hindu Myths and Personal Story at the 2005 Boulder Public Library’s Winter Festival of Stories, recounting ancient Hindu myths and interweaving them with my personal life story. It is now available on Kindle as an ebook!

These myths, such as Vishnu’s Dream, The Fabric of Life, Durga and Kali, The Birth of Krishna and more inspire you to begin your own mythic journey and connect with the ancient symbols and metaphors. These point us to our depths to become aware of a personal myth and connection with all the universe. It leads to the ultimate boon: to appreciate your life with awe and recognize that you are one with the divine. That's the power of Mythic Yoga! 

The myths guided me to recount funny childhood stories of my Hare Krishna sister in Boulder, Colorado in the 1970s and my first encounter with yoga and the myths. They also helped me deal with to the tragedy of my husband’s suicide in 2003. It is a journey to ultimate healing using yoga and story. 

You too can find a healing journey with yoga and story by using ancient myth and telling your own story with this ebook. Vedic ayurvedic storytelling even says enlightenment comes from hearing the stories!

Mythic Yoga: Vishnu’s Dream has been used in the Mythic Yoga Studio’s e-course Mythic Yoga: the Story in the Body that is required training for Storytime Yoga® for Kids Teacher Certification. Get inspired to discover your own story in the body using myth, yoga and image. Classes start  Use it to go fishing in your depths and see your life as the dream of narrative for transformation and point you toward ultimate Self-realization and freedom. 

Namaste and Have a Magical Day!

Recommended Reading and Websites

• Receive Mythic Yoga: Vishnu's Dream FREE when you become a member of the League of Yogic Storytellers. Receive premium content, audios and more. 

• Visit the Joseph Campbell Foundation Website.

• Visit the Mythic Journeys website.

• Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion - By Diane K. Osbon - One of my all-time favorites and chock full of great yogi wisdom from Campbell.

• The Power of Myth - The classic Bill Moyers and PBS interviews with Joseph Campbell. As fate would have it, the audio and video team that filmed the series are my next-door neighbors and landlords!

• Our Secret Territory: The Essence of Storytelling by Laura Simms