A Joseph Campbell companion

On a recent Saturday morning, I awoke to find my life in disarray. The details are not important but suffice it to say the source of my angst and confusion remains one of the great mysteries of human life — relationships between men and women. My head felt fuzzy. I had taken an all-natural herbal sleep aid the previous night and it left me feeling groggy.

That night marked the first time in a very long time I had difficulty sleeping and the feeling of detachment underscored my sense of being on unsteady emotional footing.

I grabbed my coffee and switched on my computer. Seeing no new messages in either my facebook or gmail accounts, I navigated to goodreads.com, a literary website that contains, among other things, a collection of quotes by mythology scholar Joseph Campbell.

With the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949, Campbell inspired a generation of storytellers by articulating the “monomyth” or the singular story of the hero’s journey that’s been told over and over again in every culture since time eternal. Joseph Campbell’s disciples include some of the greatest filmmakers ever including George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola. To see the best example of a true cinematic interpretation of the12 stages of the hero’s journey, watch the original Star Wars.

The Campbell quote at the top of the page read, “We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

Letting go — that’s a tough one, I thought, especially when you can’t figure out what’s happening in your emotional life. But in the days hence, I’ve come to realize the mistakes I made in my relationship. By focusing so heavily on the outcome,

I wasn’t fully appreciating the journey. I was missing the entire point of the adventure of being in a relationship.

By the end of that Saturday, I had come up with a quote of my own.

“Fighting the will of the universe is both humbling and exhausting,” I wrote.

The inspiration for this quote was the understanding that I had been waging an uphill battle for months — a battle I had no chance to win. My stubbornness was pure ego and it took a metaphorical punch in the gut to get my attention.

As I began the painful process of dismantling my ego and looking inward to see how I was the creator of my situation, I realized I wasn’t alone.

“It’s nice to wake up with the realization that the universe always has your back,” I wrote the following day.

As the days passed, I could feel the support of the universe. I reached out to the people in my life, and they responded with a tremendous amount of love. I felt a guiding force in my life throughout those days. Friends and loved ones called me out of the blue — many of whom had no idea what was going on in my life. For a day or so, I mistakenly believed that all the love and passion I had invested in my relationship had added up to nothing and I was deeply discouraged. Had I been living a lie? Were the feelings I perceived in my loved one merely romantic projections of my own making?

Did she lead me on intentionally? When I awoke that morning, the answers to all my questions were unknowable. Over the course of the next seven days, the universe would teach me why I made the choices that brought me to this point. I accepted that I could not control the actions of others, and I had to cope with feeling of being cut off from love — a feeling that had its source in my childhood. That feeling of being cut off led to anger, a lot of it. Once the anger passed, however, I made a shift in my energy, which led to a change in how I perceived myself and the universe felt the new vibration.

I heeded Campbell’s sage advice. As painful as it was to let go of my loved one and what we shared, I realized I had no choice. “If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living,” Campbell writes. “Follow you bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.” This quote brought forth the sobering realization that I have not been following my bliss. My first love is filmmaking. The world premiere of my documentary film, Any Given Friday, at the Reynolda Film Festival last year ranks as one of the peak experiences of my life. My close friends and family suggested I stop focusing on what my ex-girlfriend did and instead look closely at my part in creating a situation that caused me so much pain. Experience has taught me that everyone has a void to fill, and that we often mistakenly believe that the love of another can make us feel whole. I am the only person who can fill my void, and the only thing that works is self-love. The best expression of self-love is following your bliss. Once I came to that place, I read this, “Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold.”

I poured out my heart and soul to my ex-girlfriend during our time together. I made the greatest emotional investment of my life, and it was a time of growth. When everything came crashing down, I thought I was alone. But soon I realized I was at one with the universe. In the days since, I have come to learn that her feelings were equally strong and true; that her emotional investment was just as great as mine if not greater; and where I thought I had stumbled and fallen, I found the greatest treasure of all — the courage to be the man I was destined to be.