Cultural mythologist Dr. Jody Bower offers her wisdom and keen insight into the evolution of the Heroine's Journey and how it is distinct from that of the hero. Dr. Bower is the author of two books:

Jane Eyre's Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine's Story and

The Princess Powers Up: Watching the Sleeping Beauties Become Warrior Goddesses

In this episode of the Mythic podcast, we touch on a range of topics such as

• the changing role of love in the hero myth, including Marvel superheroes

• Barbie

• The Color Purple

• Hero-dad Pedro Pascal in The Mandalorian

• the problem with the hero archetype in activism and politics

• the unique process through which non-binary people individuate

Toward the end of the interview, Jody shares about her near-death experience and other mysteries of life.

Enjoy!

Key Moments

• 02:08 - Jody's origin story
• 07:53 - Love, heroes, and villains in Marvel movies. From I to we.
• 14:24 - Barbie's individuation
• 19:00 - Heroic thinking and social activism. Myths of The Fall and Progress.
• 30:18 - The Heroine's Journey
• 38:57 - Non-binary individuation
• 41:46 - 5 Questions

Relevant Links

• The Virgin's Promise | Book by Kim Hudson
• Maureen Murdock | Author of The Heroine's Journey: Woman's Quest for Wholeness
• Christine Downing - Wikipedia
• Jody Bower's Website
• Amazon.com: Jody Gentian Bower: books, biography, latest update

Music composed by Kevin MacLeod

How You Can Support the Show

Share it with friends and on social media

Leave a review wherever you get your podcasts.

Become a patron by making a one-time contribution or sustaining subscriber

Support Mythic

Boston: 00:00:26

Welcome.

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And thanks for listening.

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My guest today is Dr.

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Jody Bower.

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Dr.

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Bower is a cultural mythologist and the author of Jane Eyre's Sisters: How Women

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Live and Write the Heroine's Story.

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And The Princess Powers Up: Watching the Sleeping Beauties

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Become a Warrior goddesses.

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She and I met at Mythologium Conference in 2023, where she was presenting.

Boston: 00:00:51

Her insights into archetypal themes and superhero movies blew my mind.

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And I was so stoked when she agreed to be a guest.

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In this episode, Jody and I discuss heroes and heroines in movies and

Boston: 00:01:03

look at how the Hero's Journey is distinct from that of the Heroine.

Boston: 00:01:08

We touch on Barbie, Marvel movies and The Color Purple.

Boston: 00:01:12

And a note.

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When I was editing this episode, I realized we'd made references to

Boston: 00:01:17

other mythologist Christine Downing, Maureen Murdock, and Kim Hudson

Boston: 00:01:20

without really offering any context.

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Rather than disrupt the flow with clunky editing and editorializing, I've

Boston: 00:01:28

just added links to the show notes.

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So you can learn more about them there.

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So now.

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Here we go, Dr.

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Jody Bower.

Boston: 00:01:42

Will you share your mythic origin story?

Jody Bower: 00:01:46

I was very fortunate I think in a way.

Jody Bower: 00:01:49

I was not raised in a religion, but I was raised by parents who were very

Jody Bower: 00:01:56

curious and they had moved out to the Seattle area from Boston and one of

Jody Bower: 00:02:01

the things they were curious about were the local Native traditions.

Jody Bower: 00:02:05

So we would spend weekends going out to reservations and going to

Jody Bower: 00:02:08

the dances, learning about the art.

Jody Bower: 00:02:11

We had a book of kind of native origin stories and We camped as our family

Jody Bower: 00:02:16

vacations and we would bring this book with us and read about, okay, this

Jody Bower: 00:02:20

mountain, to the natives is called Wye East and this is how it became.

Jody Bower: 00:02:24

So I grew up with this and I also grew up very curious about my friends and

Jody Bower: 00:02:31

what they did on Saturday or Sunday.

Jody Bower: 00:02:33

So I used to go with them.

Jody Bower: 00:02:34

I used to go to church and I used to go to synagogue.

Jody Bower: 00:02:37

I had a fascination with origin stories with people's ideas of how

Jody Bower: 00:02:44

things came to be without any bias

Jody Bower: 00:02:46

as to which was the right one.

Jody Bower: 00:02:48

It also became really clear to me going to church or synagogue with all my friends.

Jody Bower: 00:02:53

that belief is people believe, and I accepted that they believe

Jody Bower: 00:02:58

even when I didn't believe it.

Jody Bower: 00:02:59

but I had an understanding from an early age that different people had

Jody Bower: 00:03:03

different explanations for, why the world, how it came to be and why it is.

Jody Bower: 00:03:08

And I loved mythology, the little bit of Greek and Roman mythology

Jody Bower: 00:03:11

that we got in, elementary school.

Jody Bower: 00:03:15

and I also was a voracious reader.

Jody Bower: 00:03:17

And I was handed both Dune and the Lord of the Rings by my ninth grade

Jody Bower: 00:03:23

English teacher, when I was 15.

Jody Bower: 00:03:25

And that just sparked a whole other love.

Jody Bower: 00:03:29

but I was also, I was in a family the idea was that your life was

Jody Bower: 00:03:37

to be of service to other people.

Jody Bower: 00:03:38

And although I knew probably by age 11 that I was going to be a writer.

Jody Bower: 00:03:44

But I, everybody said, you can't get an English degree.

Jody Bower: 00:03:49

That's, that's just, you'll work at McDonald's the rest of your life.

Jody Bower: 00:03:52

You have to do something helpful.

Jody Bower: 00:03:55

so I did pre med, and got a degree in psychobiology.

Jody Bower: 00:03:59

And at some point during my undergrad, I discovered Jung and I discovered

Jody Bower: 00:04:04

dream work and I've been a dream worker since I was 20, basically, I can lucid

Jody Bower: 00:04:09

dream James Hillman says that whatever your daimon is, it's going to manifest.

Jody Bower: 00:04:14

And so I decided I didn't have what it took to be a doctor.

Jody Bower: 00:04:19

And I was floundering around as to what I was going to do.

Jody Bower: 00:04:22

And I was working as a medical assistant at a major medical hospital, and the

Jody Bower: 00:04:28

doctors somehow or another discovered that I could write, and they started

Jody Bower: 00:04:32

hiring me to write patient education and to help them with their papers,

Jody Bower: 00:04:38

and that resulted in about a 30 year career as a medical and scientific

Jody Bower: 00:04:45

writer and editor, a good career, lucrative career, and then at midlife,

Jody Bower: 00:04:49

and, I decided, I have a lot of years left and I do not want to keep writing

Jody Bower: 00:04:54

about what can go wrong with the body.

Jody Bower: 00:04:57

And I'd heard about Pacifica.

Jody Bower: 00:04:59

And the other thing is that I had been reading, voracious reader all

Jody Bower: 00:05:03

my life, was in a women's book club, reading a lot of novels by women.

Jody Bower: 00:05:07

And I had seen this pattern that nobody seem to be writing about or noticing and

Jody Bower: 00:05:12

then this bit of serendipity happened.

Jody Bower: 00:05:15

I met a man who is an author of books on Gnosticism.

Jody Bower: 00:05:19

At one point I said to him what people say to published writers, which I've

Jody Bower: 00:05:26

since learned, which is I have a book idea, but he was very gracious.

Jody Bower: 00:05:29

And he said, tell me about it.

Jody Bower: 00:05:31

And I did.

Jody Bower: 00:05:31

And he brings out his card and he says, I'm the acquisitions

Jody Bower: 00:05:35

editor for Quest Books.

Jody Bower: 00:05:36

And we would be very interested in publishing that book.

Jody Bower: 00:05:39

And I thought that is a sign, but I knew that I didn't have the background because

Jody Bower: 00:05:46

I didn't have that English degree to, to write the book, and I actually made

Jody Bower: 00:05:50

an attempt at it for about a year and then It just became the excuse or the

Jody Bower: 00:05:56

reason why I could go to Pacifica and enroll in the myth program, which has,

Jody Bower: 00:06:01

one third of it is about literature.

Jody Bower: 00:06:04

so I did, and I wrote my dissertation on what I called recurrent

Jody Bower: 00:06:09

narratives in women's fiction.

Jody Bower: 00:06:11

And I turned that into a book, Jane Eyre's Sisters.

Jody Bower: 00:06:16

can we see this?

Boston: 00:06:17

Jane Eyre's Sisters, How Women Live and Write the Heroine's Story.

Boston: 00:06:21

And I'll be sure to link to that in the show notes, that's wonderful.

Jody Bower: 00:06:24

Yeah, so I had seen this pattern and really, I went

Jody Bower: 00:06:27

back into the 14th century.

Jody Bower: 00:06:29

15th century when women were first getting published and I was finding this pattern.

Jody Bower: 00:06:33

I found it in biographies, autobiographies, famous women.

Jody Bower: 00:06:37

so I That's what that's about.

Jody Bower: 00:06:40

and so then, since then, I have been doing a lot of lecturing, a lot of teaching,

Jody Bower: 00:06:45

and just working with, hero and heroine stories, and, but also, I'm aware that

Jody Bower: 00:06:52

this is one interpretation, and that, in fact, there are many ways to interpret

Jody Bower: 00:06:58

These stories, they're not monomyths, they're not monolithic, and so you've, you

Jody Bower: 00:07:03

heard me talk about how I see, the hero story being told differently these days

Jody Bower: 00:07:09

in, our superhero movies mostly, and I'm also I wrote another book and published it

Boston: 00:07:19

The Princess Powers Up, Watching the Sleeping Beauties

Boston: 00:07:22

Become Warrior Goddesses.

Boston: 00:07:24

Yeah.

Boston: 00:07:24

It's a fabulous title.

Jody Bower: 00:07:26

Tracing about 80 years from Snow White and Sleeping

Jody Bower: 00:07:30

Beauty to, the, Captain Marvel and, Elsa of Frozen who are goddesses.

Jody Bower: 00:07:35

basically, they're.

Jody Bower: 00:07:37

They're all powerful goddesses.

Jody Bower: 00:07:38

So we've seen this evolution through time.

Jody Bower: 00:07:41

And, I'm just interested in this.

Jody Bower: 00:07:44

I call myself a cultural mythologist and I'm just interested in how

Jody Bower: 00:07:48

myths are playing out in the current culture and how they're evolving.

Boston: 00:07:53

Something I want to grab hold of because I got to hear you talk about

Boston: 00:07:56

this, you talked about the role of love in this evolution of the hero's journey,

Boston: 00:08:01

that there was a time where the love object, like the love was the prize.

Boston: 00:08:07

And now the love is a requirement to be a hero.

Jody Bower: 00:08:13

Yes.

Jody Bower: 00:08:14

When you think about.

Jody Bower: 00:08:15

Joseph Campbell, you've got the princess who just waits at home and,

Jody Bower: 00:08:20

he, he has to earn her, he has to prove that he's basically an adult male.

Jody Bower: 00:08:25

I think, that he's individuated enough to, embrace the feminine and become a father.

Jody Bower: 00:08:31

but she just, she's just at home.

Jody Bower: 00:08:34

And this is, Maureen Murdoch and other people ask Campbell

Jody Bower: 00:08:37

about, what about the woman?

Jody Bower: 00:08:39

And he was like, she doesn't have to go on a journey because

Jody Bower: 00:08:41

she's the point of the journey.

Jody Bower: 00:08:43

And this was not satisfying to, Maureen or anybody else,

Jody Bower: 00:08:48

So love was something that got put off.

Jody Bower: 00:08:50

He had to prove his, really his masculine self, his courage and his intelligence

Jody Bower: 00:08:56

and his ability to persist and all this.

Jody Bower: 00:08:58

And then he got to have love.

Jody Bower: 00:09:00

But in the new hero stories, and this is the last 20 years

Jody Bower: 00:09:03

or so, if you look at any of the Marvel superhero origin stories.

Jody Bower: 00:09:08

What it really comes down to is that the difference between the hero and the

Jody Bower: 00:09:12

villain and the difference between a hero and a villain is two sides of a coin.

Jody Bower: 00:09:17

It is so easy for a hero to become a villain, especially if actually they win

Jody Bower: 00:09:22

because then they often end up a tyrant.

Jody Bower: 00:09:24

Kim Hudson in, The Virgin's Promise talks about this, the problem with the

Jody Bower: 00:09:29

hero winning is that then he has to.

Jody Bower: 00:09:32

maintain the winning, and so he has to become a tyrant and control people.

Jody Bower: 00:09:36

and in the superhero origin stories, there's always a double.

Jody Bower: 00:09:41

There's another character with similar powers, maybe even more powerful than

Jody Bower: 00:09:45

the hero, but The difference between them is that the hero can love, and

Jody Bower: 00:09:53

the hero calls, it's love that keeps them from turning into a villain,

Jody Bower: 00:09:58

and it's like the Final Fist, and it, it's more in the books than in

Jody Bower: 00:10:02

the movies, but the real difference between Voldemort and Harry Potter is

Jody Bower: 00:10:08

that Harry Potter has this family of friends, and, and supporters and people.

Jody Bower: 00:10:13

And when he's in the crisis, he remembers his love for these people.

Jody Bower: 00:10:18

And that's what pulls him through it.

Jody Bower: 00:10:21

And when he goes into the forest to face Voldemort at the end, he brings

Jody Bower: 00:10:25

the spirits of his parents and his two strongest mentors with him because

Jody Bower: 00:10:32

he's not a, he's not doing this alone.

Jody Bower: 00:10:35

He's, and it's the love in his heart that, that makes him win.

Jody Bower: 00:10:39

So this is, and the love comes in very early.

Jody Bower: 00:10:42

There's always a character who's a.

Jody Bower: 00:10:45

It doesn't have to be a love character, it can be a friend, it can be, what we're

Jody Bower: 00:10:50

seeing lately is a lot of the hero is a father figure to a child that needs help.

Jody Bower: 00:10:57

So we're seeing, Pedro Pascal is playing this repeatedly, he's this

Jody Bower: 00:11:02

loving father figure who protects the child in the Mandalorian, or The

Jody Bower: 00:11:08

Last of the Best, what's it called?

Jody Bower: 00:11:10

The Last of Us.

Jody Bower: 00:11:10

The Last of Us.

Jody Bower: 00:11:11

The Last of Us, yeah.

Jody Bower: 00:11:14

And it can, it can be a group of people, like in Stranger Things or

Jody Bower: 00:11:22

Harry Potter, it's this group of people who come together and the hero is just

Jody Bower: 00:11:26

supported by it, but they have to have.

Jody Bower: 00:11:29

This love.

Boston: 00:11:31

One of the things that I'm that's occurring to me right now

Boston: 00:11:33

is this evolution in story from the hero as that individual, as the one

Boston: 00:11:37

who's raised above everybody else.

Boston: 00:11:41

what I'm actually thinking of is I don't remember which Spider Man

Boston: 00:11:44

movie, what the title was, but it had the three generations of

Jody Bower: 00:11:47

Spider Men.

Jody Bower: 00:11:48

Into the multiverse and or the latest one.

Jody Bower: 00:11:50

no way home.

Jody Bower: 00:11:51

I

Boston: 00:11:51

think I think it was maybe no way home And you have the three

Jody Bower: 00:11:55

generations the three Yeah

Boston: 00:11:56

And the youngest what set him apart was he had been part of a team The

Boston: 00:12:01

youngest one this millennial generation is so interconnected and that's showing up in

Boston: 00:12:06

the children's stories and the children's myths, He Man and the Masters of the

Boston: 00:12:10

Universe has been reimagined recently.

Boston: 00:12:12

And it's very, it's about sharing power instead of I have the power, it's we.

Boston: 00:12:18

And there's this movement from I to we, and I hadn't thought about that

Boston: 00:12:21

until, I was thinking of romantic love in the beginning of this, but

Boston: 00:12:25

no, the love of friends, the mutual support, which is the only way I

Boston: 00:12:31

think we can get through some of what we're facing right now is together.

Jody Bower: 00:12:35

Yeah, and I, I don't want to spoil this too much for

Jody Bower: 00:12:38

him, but I know that John Bucher of the Joseph Campbell Foundation is

Jody Bower: 00:12:43

working on the idea that we are moving from an individual to a collective.

Jody Bower: 00:12:49

As hero.

Boston: 00:12:51

I want to get him on the podcast.

Boston: 00:12:52

Yeah,

Jody Bower: 00:12:53

you get him on , he's working on it.

Jody Bower: 00:12:55

We've talked, but I don't wanna say anymore because this is John's thing.

Jody Bower: 00:12:59

Deal.

Jody Bower: 00:12:59

but when he told me about it, I said, wow, stranger Things and Harry Potter.

Jody Bower: 00:13:04

I could think of all of these examples and that is new.

Jody Bower: 00:13:07

the older hero idea was he had a lover.

Jody Bower: 00:13:10

You know, um, Captain America has Peggy and, Thor has Jane Foster and yes,

Jody Bower: 00:13:16

they have a human lover who keeps them.

Jody Bower: 00:13:20

I think one of the part and problems if you're a superhero is hubris, right?

Jody Bower: 00:13:25

And, if you can connect to somebody who's human, that grounds you.

Jody Bower: 00:13:31

And it can be a friend, he's got a human male friend, that grounds him.

Jody Bower: 00:13:36

It's not his lover, his, Whoever she was, it was his wife through the ages, but

Jody Bower: 00:13:42

it's the human friend who redeems him but it is, I do see an evolution, in moving

Jody Bower: 00:13:49

from the hero as a solo practitioner to a collective or a fellowship, and

Jody Bower: 00:13:56

even Tolkien had, Tolkien He had his finger on some things, I think, and

Jody Bower: 00:14:00

even he, realized that one hero probably would fail, and Frodo does fail in

Jody Bower: 00:14:08

the end, and if it weren't for Sam, being the backup hero, and actually,

Jody Bower: 00:14:13

rescuing him from that whole situation.

Jody Bower: 00:14:16

yeah, so I, I think there's It's very interesting to watch.

Boston: 00:14:22

I want to turn the corner here, Barbie has been a massive cultural

Boston: 00:14:27

phenomenon, and it is truly a movie of mythic proportions with mythic dimensions

Boston: 00:14:33

and is functioning on all kinds of levels.

Boston: 00:14:37

what do you think is going on there?

Jody Bower: 00:14:39

This is one of the instances of where somebody asked

Jody Bower: 00:14:42

me a question and it just, blah.

Jody Bower: 00:14:45

I was at my dissertation defense and The pattern that I saw in women's

Jody Bower: 00:14:50

literature, it is not a dissent story.

Jody Bower: 00:14:52

It is rather a leaving and going away story.

Jody Bower: 00:14:56

it's a woman who says, I can't live in this situation, but usually she is

Jody Bower: 00:15:02

somebody who's kind of oppressed anyway.

Jody Bower: 00:15:05

The Color Purple is an example of a woman who is so oppressed.

Jody Bower: 00:15:10

She doesn't even dare speak.

Jody Bower: 00:15:12

And yet eventually she does this journey where she leaves the situation and finds a

Jody Bower: 00:15:18

place where she can be her creative self.

Jody Bower: 00:15:21

That's Celie's journey perfectly, and I, that, so I wrote about all the

Jody Bower: 00:15:27

variations, Jane Eyre leaves, I mean she leaves so many situations, she leaves

Jody Bower: 00:15:31

home, she leaves the school, she leaves Thornwood, Thornfield, she just, she

Jody Bower: 00:15:35

has to keep leaving to, cause people keep telling her, no you need to be

Jody Bower: 00:15:39

this for me, and she's not having that.

Jody Bower: 00:15:43

Chris Downing asked me, why do you like this story, which has no

Jody Bower: 00:15:47

interest to me personally, she said.

Jody Bower: 00:15:50

Instead of the descent story, which I love and so many women love, so many

Jody Bower: 00:15:56

women love the descent story, and I said to her, the descent to the Cave

Jody Bower: 00:16:01

of the Dark Goddess has no meaning for me because I grew up in that situation.

Jody Bower: 00:16:06

I, I had a alcoholic mother and I we had a severe family trauma when I was 11.

Jody Bower: 00:16:14

My brother was killed in our backyard, threw the family into disarray for many

Jody Bower: 00:16:20

years, and, I was left to deal with it on my own, basically, which thankfully

Jody Bower: 00:16:27

also found some very good counselors.

Jody Bower: 00:16:29

so I grew up in a very dark sort of situation with an

Jody Bower: 00:16:34

unhappy, difficult mother.

Jody Bower: 00:16:36

And I said to Chris, I don't have to go down to the cave.

Jody Bower: 00:16:39

I've been there.

Jody Bower: 00:16:41

I need something different.

Jody Bower: 00:16:42

And that's the story that I was finding of women who really their childhoods

Jody Bower: 00:16:46

were not good and they got out and they built a life for themselves.

Jody Bower: 00:16:52

But the descent story, as we talked, And Chris told me her own story.

Jody Bower: 00:16:59

The descent story, I think, appeals to women who maybe

Jody Bower: 00:17:04

were overprotected as children.

Jody Bower: 00:17:07

And maybe everything was made easy and fine for them, and they got to a

Jody Bower: 00:17:12

certain point in life and they just felt like this is not all there is to life.

Jody Bower: 00:17:18

I need something more.

Jody Bower: 00:17:20

Chris felt a very strong need to find what she said, her, to find the dark

Jody Bower: 00:17:26

feminine, to find this whole shadow self that was not part of her upbringing.

Jody Bower: 00:17:33

It was not acknowledged.

Jody Bower: 00:17:34

It was not allowed.

Jody Bower: 00:17:35

And we look at Barbie who's more cosseted and privileged and happy.

Jody Bower: 00:17:42

than Barbie and but she is not whole she and you know that the whole

Jody Bower: 00:17:48

thing when she starts saying do you ever think about death, death in the

Jody Bower: 00:17:51

Barbie world and everyone is just horrified because this doesn't enter

Jody Bower: 00:17:55

in there's no such thing but Barbie, willingly or not, has to go find that.

Jody Bower: 00:18:02

And she does and that's when she starts to become a whole person.

Jody Bower: 00:18:08

So I think there, this is why I'm not wedded to one particular journey,

Jody Bower: 00:18:12

because I think what you need for individuation can be very different,

Jody Bower: 00:18:19

depending on where you're coming from, what your life experience has been.

Jody Bower: 00:18:24

But I had not even thought about that till Chris asked me that question.

Boston: 00:18:28

Thank you.

Boston: 00:18:29

Thank you for that.

Boston: 00:18:30

That exploration and that juxtaposition between the story of leaving the story of

Boston: 00:18:35

that journey and the story of the descent.

Boston: 00:18:38

that's something that I'm going to ponder some more whether the descent

Boston: 00:18:41

is what is needed or if you are, if you spend childhood in the cave.

Boston: 00:18:45

it's about ascent.

Boston: 00:18:47

One of the, one of the topics that you had said you wanted to bring

Boston: 00:18:51

into this conversation was around the hero's journey and social activism.

Boston: 00:18:55

What do you see there?

Jody Bower: 00:18:57

Yeah, this was, this is something I've, done

Jody Bower: 00:19:00

a great deal of lecturing at, mostly in, like liberal churches.

Jody Bower: 00:19:05

But it just.

Jody Bower: 00:19:07

One day it occurred to me that the way most people pursue activism, political

Jody Bower: 00:19:14

activism, especially, is very, it's very much what I call heroic thinking.

Jody Bower: 00:19:20

And, first I'd like to just sidetrack a little bit because I think it's important.

Jody Bower: 00:19:24

James Hillman said that we have two opposing myths in American politics.

Jody Bower: 00:19:29

There's the myth of the fall, which is that things used to be.

Jody Bower: 00:19:35

Much better.

Jody Bower: 00:19:35

We had a golden age in the past.

Jody Bower: 00:19:37

We have fallen away from it, and we must get back.

Jody Bower: 00:19:40

We must go back to it.

Jody Bower: 00:19:42

This is the, and the past, is glorified, and the future is, scary.

Jody Bower: 00:19:48

We don't know, so we're better off going back.

Jody Bower: 00:19:50

The other myth is the myth of progress.

Jody Bower: 00:19:53

The idea that the best is yet to come.

Jody Bower: 00:19:56

and we have a moral duty to make it happen.

Jody Bower: 00:20:00

So, getting back is a setback, and we fear the past was worse,

Jody Bower: 00:20:07

the future is going to be better.

Jody Bower: 00:20:10

I would say neither group is living in the present.

Jody Bower: 00:20:13

and I think personally that the cultures do evolve and we do progress,

Jody Bower: 00:20:17

and a lot of our politics is about the people who are fearing that

Jody Bower: 00:20:23

versus the people who want that.

Jody Bower: 00:20:24

and that is, there's the tension.

Jody Bower: 00:20:26

I think the bulk of people in the society are okay with change if it happens slowly.

Jody Bower: 00:20:34

But so I think really, and I've heard this from others that in a way,

Jody Bower: 00:20:39

the conservatives hold us back from changing faster than the society can

Jody Bower: 00:20:44

actually handle and the progressives.

Jody Bower: 00:20:46

Meanwhile, trying to pull us the other way, but so there that's part of it.

Jody Bower: 00:20:53

So there's a fear that's behind a lot of it.

Jody Bower: 00:20:57

there's a fear that we.

Jody Bower: 00:20:59

That we will change and go away from what's good.

Jody Bower: 00:21:02

There's a fear that we will not get to what's good because we'll

Jody Bower: 00:21:06

be dragged back into the dark ages.

Jody Bower: 00:21:07

There's this, and fear based, leads to anger.

Jody Bower: 00:21:10

And I, this leads, I think, into heroic thinking.

Jody Bower: 00:21:14

I'm going to pick apart the heroic mindset, if you don't mind.

Jody Bower: 00:21:19

Heroes fight on behalf of other people.

Jody Bower: 00:21:23

They fight on behalf of the community.

Jody Bower: 00:21:27

And they fix the problem through what Sherry Tepper, who was a,

Jody Bower: 00:21:34

a fantasy author, she wrote The Gate to Women's Country, I think

Jody Bower: 00:21:37

was her most favorite book.

Jody Bower: 00:21:39

She talks about how the hero fixes it to the, what she

Jody Bower: 00:21:42

calls the single wondrous act.

Jody Bower: 00:21:43

he pulls the sword from the stone, he destroys the One Ring, it's all good.

Jody Bower: 00:21:48

He defeats the bad guy and everything becomes perfect.

Jody Bower: 00:21:51

what she didn't mention, but that I've also noticed is that, and Kim

Jody Bower: 00:21:57

Hudson also says this, that actually we go back to the status quo.

Jody Bower: 00:22:02

So that's what the hero does.

Jody Bower: 00:22:03

He actually defends the status quo.

Jody Bower: 00:22:05

again, it's very emotion based.

Jody Bower: 00:22:07

There's a righteous anger to heroic thinking.

Jody Bower: 00:22:10

I have a lot of friends who say, if you're not angry, you're not paying attention.

Jody Bower: 00:22:15

Hey, you must be angry.

Jody Bower: 00:22:16

I'm going to post all this stuff on the internet to make you angry because this is

Jody Bower: 00:22:20

how, people, this is motivational, not for me, but, it is to a lot of people, heroic

Jody Bower: 00:22:29

thinking is right and wrong thinking.

Jody Bower: 00:22:31

I'm right.

Jody Bower: 00:22:31

You're wrong.

Jody Bower: 00:22:32

My hero is right.

Jody Bower: 00:22:33

Your hero is wrong.

Jody Bower: 00:22:35

Therefore, your hero is villain, so we have two hero villains fighting each other

Jody Bower: 00:22:40

and people tend to, because we think it's a single act that's going to make it.

Jody Bower: 00:22:46

There's this hero worship that goes on and we see it in politics.

Jody Bower: 00:22:51

My guy versus your guy.

Jody Bower: 00:22:53

My guy is better than your guy.

Jody Bower: 00:22:54

And I've seen this on both sides.

Jody Bower: 00:22:56

people worship their political candidate on both sides, and they

Jody Bower: 00:23:02

really think that if only we could get our guy into position, then

Jody Bower: 00:23:07

everything will turn out okay.

Jody Bower: 00:23:08

And I saw that a lot, during the Obama administration, there was

Jody Bower: 00:23:12

all this, Oh yeah, we get Obama.

Jody Bower: 00:23:14

We elected our guy.

Jody Bower: 00:23:15

Yay.

Jody Bower: 00:23:15

Everything's good.

Jody Bower: 00:23:16

And then because there was too much opposition, not much

Jody Bower: 00:23:22

happened, and people blamed Obama.

Jody Bower: 00:23:25

And we're disappointed in their hero, but the other side of that is that you get

Jody Bower: 00:23:31

your hero working for you and you can go.

Jody Bower: 00:23:33

Yeah.

Jody Bower: 00:23:34

Okay.

Jody Bower: 00:23:34

Yay.

Jody Bower: 00:23:35

I don't have to do anything like

Boston: 00:23:37

the election is the big event.

Boston: 00:23:39

That's the polling that's pulling the sword

Jody Bower: 00:23:41

or that's right.

Jody Bower: 00:23:43

And once, my part in that is to vote and then it's not anything else.

Jody Bower: 00:23:50

There's actually, I think, a little bit of, reinforcement

Jody Bower: 00:23:53

of low self esteem that I can't personally deal with these problems.

Jody Bower: 00:23:57

And, the problems are really overwhelming, but my guy can't, if I get the right

Jody Bower: 00:24:02

guy and if I vote for the right person, but this, then you can imagine

Jody Bower: 00:24:06

the burden that it puts on the hero.

Jody Bower: 00:24:08

And I take this back to just, to scale it down, if you've ever been

Jody Bower: 00:24:12

the person in a organization that everybody asks to do everything.

Jody Bower: 00:24:17

could you run this?

Jody Bower: 00:24:18

Could you do this?

Jody Bower: 00:24:19

After a while, people just get burnt out, but everybody else is

Jody Bower: 00:24:22

going, Oh, they're so capable.

Jody Bower: 00:24:24

They're so good at this.

Jody Bower: 00:24:25

Let's ask them instead of saying, maybe we need to share the load a little bit.

Jody Bower: 00:24:31

So I've seen it in almost every organization I've been a part of, is

Jody Bower: 00:24:36

that you have these heroic few take on everything and then burn out.

Jody Bower: 00:24:41

and burnout is a.

Jody Bower: 00:24:43

A scary thing, because I think the people who are shouldering most of the load,

Jody Bower: 00:24:50

the problems are not solved by one act.

Jody Bower: 00:24:55

They realize that they can't do it all themselves.

Jody Bower: 00:24:57

They ask for help.

Jody Bower: 00:24:58

They try to enlist help.

Jody Bower: 00:25:00

If they don't get help.

Jody Bower: 00:25:02

And the problems can seem so overwhelming that you can.

Jody Bower: 00:25:07

You can become obsessed.

Jody Bower: 00:25:09

I had a friend who was so obsessed about an issue in my town that every time

Jody Bower: 00:25:13

I saw her, she'd talk at me for two hours about, trying to enlist me to the

Jody Bower: 00:25:18

cause because the problem was too big for her and she needed to get everybody

Jody Bower: 00:25:22

else in line and she couldn't do that.

Jody Bower: 00:25:25

And then she got very burnt out and angry and frustrated.

Jody Bower: 00:25:28

And I actually think that, sometimes you lose your really good people

Jody Bower: 00:25:33

because they're burning out.

Jody Bower: 00:25:35

But the real danger is, I think this is the roots of terrorism.

Jody Bower: 00:25:40

I think, because people have been trying maybe who knows for decades

Jody Bower: 00:25:44

to say, there's a problem here.

Jody Bower: 00:25:46

Listen to us.

Jody Bower: 00:25:47

We need, nobody's listening.

Jody Bower: 00:25:48

Nobody's helping.

Jody Bower: 00:25:50

And at some point I think people can become so frustrated and angry.

Jody Bower: 00:25:55

That they feel like I've got to get people's attention somehow, I've got

Jody Bower: 00:26:00

to call attention to this problem that nobody's, that's not being fixed.

Jody Bower: 00:26:06

And I do think that this is where some of the terrorism comes from

Jody Bower: 00:26:10

is just sheer frustration with the inability to get other people to

Jody Bower: 00:26:16

pay attention and fix the problem.

Jody Bower: 00:26:19

So where I see heroic thinking, how that plays out in our politics

Jody Bower: 00:26:25

and what I usually challenge the audiences in these liberal churches.

Jody Bower: 00:26:30

I say how much of this is in keeping with progressive values, you know,

Jody Bower: 00:26:35

seeing people as the enemy, all of this,

Boston: 00:26:39

I want to grab hold of something that's percolating there.

Boston: 00:26:42

There's, The thread, when we were talking about the hero earlier and you

Boston: 00:26:47

said the hero, if he keeps winning, he becomes a tyrant, so that's one destiny,

Boston: 00:26:53

or the heroic personality becomes so overwhelmed, he becomes a terrorist, or,

Boston: 00:27:00

which then constellates a villain, either way, this is that sort of old parable

Boston: 00:27:05

that says you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the

Boston: 00:27:08

villain, but there's this, but the hero,

Boston: 00:27:12

The hero is, seems to be a stage or a step along the way.

Boston: 00:27:16

that it's destined to become, I don't dunno if destined, this is one

Boston: 00:27:20

way, it can go two different ways.

Boston: 00:27:22

It can become a villain.

Boston: 00:27:25

Overwhelm, either way, faced with this inability to, assert control.

Boston: 00:27:30

In a inability to win to

Jody Bower: 00:27:33

win permanently to win permanently.

Jody Bower: 00:27:35

That's and this is part of heroic thinking this idea that it's possible

Jody Bower: 00:27:41

to win permanently, it's possible to do one thing and have everything be okay.

Jody Bower: 00:27:48

This is an idea I think we really need to let go.

Jody Bower: 00:27:51

this is fundamentalism.

Jody Bower: 00:27:52

Yes, it is.

Jody Bower: 00:27:53

It's the best.

Jody Bower: 00:27:54

Again, it's the very right and wrong black and white sort of thinking.

Jody Bower: 00:27:58

but yeah, the hero.

Jody Bower: 00:28:01

Part of it is the hero worship.

Jody Bower: 00:28:03

Everybody's putting them on a pedestal and that can, of course,

Jody Bower: 00:28:07

what does that do to your ego?

Jody Bower: 00:28:08

And I think I'm not going to mention any names of any political candidates

Jody Bower: 00:28:11

right now, we can see the ego, getting over and, or the burden

Jody Bower: 00:28:19

and because you, your side can win.

Jody Bower: 00:28:24

But that doesn't mean the other side goes, Oh, okay, we're all in

Jody Bower: 00:28:28

line now, the other side, as we see, is going to keep fighting.

Jody Bower: 00:28:35

And the more you try to, so then you're put in the position of your job.

Jody Bower: 00:28:41

And, the idea, of course, is your hero wins and becomes a hero.

Jody Bower: 00:28:45

The wonderful king who you know, fixes everything, fixes the roads

Jody Bower: 00:28:52

and fixes the, the infrastructure and everybody lives happily ever after.

Jody Bower: 00:28:56

But instead, the king's energy has to go into quelling all of the people

Jody Bower: 00:29:02

who do not want to live in that.

Jody Bower: 00:29:05

And so what happened?

Jody Bower: 00:29:07

Nothing much happens.

Jody Bower: 00:29:09

that's.

Jody Bower: 00:29:11

And then of course, everybody else can say, see, they failed.

Jody Bower: 00:29:14

And, we do this tug of war and worst case, we get into, I think, a

Jody Bower: 00:29:20

situation like the Middle East where people are now in this thing of, we

Jody Bower: 00:29:25

just have to wipe the other side out.

Jody Bower: 00:29:27

That's never going to happen.

Jody Bower: 00:29:29

How many times have people tried to wipe the Jews out?

Jody Bower: 00:29:32

And people try to wipe out gay people.

Jody Bower: 00:29:34

That's not working.

Jody Bower: 00:29:35

it's it does.

Jody Bower: 00:29:36

They just keep coming back.

Jody Bower: 00:29:38

And so we have to find another way of thinking about it.

Jody Bower: 00:29:43

Besides, but this is hard when you're dealing with fundamentals thinking, which

Jody Bower: 00:29:47

says that only evil people do evil acts.

Jody Bower: 00:29:50

So it's okay to wipe them out.

Jody Bower: 00:29:52

rather than having the mindset that maybe there's a cause.

Jody Bower: 00:29:57

That we could address, we know that abused people become abusers.

Jody Bower: 00:30:02

So how do we break the cycle of abuse?

Jody Bower: 00:30:06

in families, how do we break the cycle of abuse in a political

Jody Bower: 00:30:13

arena, because it is abusive.

Jody Bower: 00:30:15

I think a lot of it is abusive.

Jody Bower: 00:30:18

Do

Boston: 00:30:18

you have an idea for an alternative archetype or an

Boston: 00:30:21

alternative type of thinking?

Boston: 00:30:23

I'm so glad you asked that question.

Jody Bower: 00:30:26

Well, I do because I started thinking about the heroine

Jody Bower: 00:30:29

journey that I had written about and how she approaches life and i'm going

Jody Bower: 00:30:34

to just say at the outset that Ireland they got past a lot of this because

Jody Bower: 00:30:40

the mothers stood up and said we are done And this happened in my lifetime.

Jody Bower: 00:30:46

I'm a boomer.

Jody Bower: 00:30:47

I remember in the 70s when the women of Ireland just rose up and said, no more

Jody Bower: 00:30:53

of this, Protestant versus Catholic, Northern, you know, all of this,

Jody Bower: 00:30:57

we're just, you're killing our babies.

Jody Bower: 00:30:59

Stop it.

Jody Bower: 00:31:00

And they stopped it for the most part.

Jody Bower: 00:31:02

so it was the feminine energy of love that came in and said, no, stop.

Jody Bower: 00:31:08

Enough.

Jody Bower: 00:31:08

and I, I pray with all of my non denominational, non defined

Jody Bower: 00:31:16

energy that this happens.

Jody Bower: 00:31:18

elsewhere, but in the heroin journey, what happens is that she

Jody Bower: 00:31:25

is, she's in a situation where people are telling her who to be.

Jody Bower: 00:31:29

And she says no.

Jody Bower: 00:31:30

And so her resistance is part of her being.

Jody Bower: 00:31:34

She just resists what she doesn't want, but she doesn't fight them.

Jody Bower: 00:31:39

She doesn't try to conquer the people who are trying to control her.

Jody Bower: 00:31:44

she actually, the very first thing she usually does in the stories is she goes

Jody Bower: 00:31:48

exactly where they tell her never to go.

Jody Bower: 00:31:51

So she goes into the forest where the witch is, or she goes to the big

Jody Bower: 00:31:56

city, or she goes to where, she goes to where the enemy is, and she learns.

Jody Bower: 00:32:04

She, so she embraces, she goes to the witch, and the witch to the hero

Jody Bower: 00:32:09

is a villain who must be killed.

Jody Bower: 00:32:12

But she goes there, and she humbles herself before the

Jody Bower: 00:32:17

witch, and she says, teach me.

Jody Bower: 00:32:19

And the witch is usually, well, prove to me that you're worthy of my being taught.

Jody Bower: 00:32:24

Because I'm not wasting my time with you, otherwise.

Jody Bower: 00:32:27

The whole story, the devil wore product is such a, going to the which to

Boston: 00:32:34

learn.

Boston: 00:32:35

I was thinking of the Little Mermaid, but,

Jody Bower: 00:32:37

yeah, she's got to learn and she gets tested.

Jody Bower: 00:32:41

it's, she's learning, it's very experiential how she learns and

Jody Bower: 00:32:45

she gets handed, impossible tasks.

Jody Bower: 00:32:48

And there's a magic element that comes in, usually it's a mother energy that she's

Jody Bower: 00:32:52

got with her somehow, who advises her.

Jody Bower: 00:32:55

But what she learns, she has to sort out seeds, right?

Jody Bower: 00:32:58

It's a pile of seeds and she has to sort out the wheat from the chaff and

Jody Bower: 00:33:02

the black seeds and the white seeds.

Jody Bower: 00:33:04

This is a test in discernment.

Jody Bower: 00:33:07

How do you know what is good?

Jody Bower: 00:33:09

how do you know what is of value?

Jody Bower: 00:33:11

And your job is to choose what is of value and what will feed and nurture people.

Jody Bower: 00:33:20

So her focus is not, she's picking out the black seeds, but she's not

Jody Bower: 00:33:24

spending a lot of time going, Oh, these horrible black seeds must be burnt.

Jody Bower: 00:33:28

They must be destroyed.

Jody Bower: 00:33:29

They must be, it's no, they just go off to the side.

Jody Bower: 00:33:32

And this is what we need.

Jody Bower: 00:33:33

This is what we're taking.

Jody Bower: 00:33:34

This is what we're planting.

Jody Bower: 00:33:37

So her whole learning is about how to focus on what is a value

Jody Bower: 00:33:43

and how to have more of it.

Jody Bower: 00:33:46

It's, it's everything that the manifesters talking about, what

Jody Bower: 00:33:49

are you putting your energy into?

Jody Bower: 00:33:51

Because whatever you put your energy in to, there will be more

Jody Bower: 00:33:54

of it will come back at you.

Jody Bower: 00:33:56

And so She's also learning how to see things as they really are,

Jody Bower: 00:34:03

not to be fooled by the seeds that are masquerading, maybe,

Boston: 00:34:08

And I'm just thinking about that distinction between you're not

Boston: 00:34:11

sorting things into good and evil, you're sorting things in discerning value.

Boston: 00:34:17

So you and you can do either one is a way you can approach a situation,

Boston: 00:34:22

but this is blameless discernment.

Jody Bower: 00:34:24

Blameless discernment.

Jody Bower: 00:34:26

What do you want to foster in life?

Jody Bower: 00:34:30

So focus on that.

Jody Bower: 00:34:31

And do you want to spend all your time putting angry stuff up on the Internet?

Jody Bower: 00:34:37

Or do you want to look for what's good?

Jody Bower: 00:34:39

What's working?

Jody Bower: 00:34:40

I follow all of these Goodable and all these other sites on Instagram, which are

Jody Bower: 00:34:46

just people giving you news about good.

Jody Bower: 00:34:49

There are people who have cleaned up that enormous patch

Jody Bower: 00:34:54

of plastic crap in the ocean.

Jody Bower: 00:34:57

They've cleaned it up.

Jody Bower: 00:34:59

There are kids inventing amazing things that are helping people.

Jody Bower: 00:35:05

There's a girl who came up with a $400 dialysis machine.

Jody Bower: 00:35:11

Honestly, I believe it's the kids of today who, where we really have

Jody Bower: 00:35:14

to look because they are, they're doing, but there's a lot of people

Jody Bower: 00:35:18

who are doing amazing stuff out there.

Jody Bower: 00:35:21

Yeah, it's so hopeful.

Jody Bower: 00:35:22

There's some guy, all he does is the positive climate news.

Jody Bower: 00:35:27

Because there is a lot going on with addressing climate change.

Jody Bower: 00:35:31

There was a lecture at the Mythologium about, or there

Jody Bower: 00:35:35

was a whole panel on mushrooms.

Jody Bower: 00:35:38

They're discovering how mushrooms can help us in everything.

Jody Bower: 00:35:42

I mean, you, you mix a fungi into concrete and the concrete doesn't fall apart in 20

Jody Bower: 00:35:47

years, like our, our bridges are falling apart because the mycelium heals it.

Jody Bower: 00:35:53

and what it's doing for our health.

Jody Bower: 00:35:55

I mean, there's so much good news.

Jody Bower: 00:35:57

and then I think the amazing thing too, is that Once you get

Jody Bower: 00:36:04

somebody who's doing this good work.

Jody Bower: 00:36:07

what happens in all the heroine stories is that she Starts creating

Jody Bower: 00:36:12

this wonderful life for herself based on her own values and other people

Jody Bower: 00:36:16

look at her and go wow I like that.

Jody Bower: 00:36:20

I want to try that.

Jody Bower: 00:36:22

Celie, you know who came out of just the worst kind of life just so oppressed

Jody Bower: 00:36:29

and so beaten up and so abused and she comes to the sense of self and then she

Jody Bower: 00:36:35

starts She actually creates community and she attracts all these people to her

Jody Bower: 00:36:40

She even attracts her abusive ex husband who looks at what she's doing in life.

Jody Bower: 00:36:46

she's making pants.

Jody Bower: 00:36:47

She's making pants for women because she, for her pants represented a stepping

Jody Bower: 00:36:53

out of her role as a subservient, basically slave to other people.

Jody Bower: 00:36:58

And she makes these beautiful, wild, crazy pants.

Jody Bower: 00:37:01

And her ex husband comes to live nearby and says, I will make shirts.

Jody Bower: 00:37:08

And they have this wonderful conversation at the end where he talks about how

Jody Bower: 00:37:12

once he stopped trying to control other people and get them to do what he

Jody Bower: 00:37:17

wanted to do, he was so much happier.

Jody Bower: 00:37:21

And she said, yeah, and other people like you better too.

Jody Bower: 00:37:25

So there's this, in all of the stories that I read, there is usually a man

Jody Bower: 00:37:32

who looks at what she's doing and goes, that is a better way of being.

Jody Bower: 00:37:37

And I'm gonna.

Jody Bower: 00:37:38

I'm going to go with you rather than go, with what my parents, my

Jody Bower: 00:37:44

parents want me to be all this.

Jody Bower: 00:37:45

They want to say, in Sense and Sensibility, Edward Ferrars, the family

Jody Bower: 00:37:50

wants him to be a politician and they want him to make a name for himself

Jody Bower: 00:37:54

and, further the family's thing.

Jody Bower: 00:37:56

And he just wants to be a minister, take care of people.

Jody Bower: 00:38:00

And he wants to go with Eleanor because she understands that about him.

Jody Bower: 00:38:06

And, he sees his path with her, his path to being who he wants.

Jody Bower: 00:38:12

So, this is what I think that we do a lot better with a role model

Jody Bower: 00:38:18

that we choose to follow rather than a tyrant who tells us how to be.

Jody Bower: 00:38:25

Because there's no need from that point on to be enforcing anything.

Boston: 00:38:30

It's a chosen path.

Jody Bower: 00:38:31

It's a chosen path, which is chosen not because out of

Jody Bower: 00:38:35

belief, but rather out of experience.

Jody Bower: 00:38:38

And looking at, seeing that it works.

Jody Bower: 00:38:41

I'm, I think essentially I'm a pragmatist.

Jody Bower: 00:38:44

And the question I always ask is, how's that working for you?

Jody Bower: 00:38:47

Yes.

Boston: 00:38:47

Yes, I love that question.

Boston: 00:38:50

Yeah, yeah.

Jody Bower: 00:38:57

What I'm also excited about, There's a lot of work being done,

Jody Bower: 00:39:02

by non binary people, and non binary people, by definition, don't do well

Jody Bower: 00:39:10

with black and white either or thinking.

Jody Bower: 00:39:14

And I've been venturing out and reading, some really exciting work

Jody Bower: 00:39:19

by people who are talking about how a non binary person individuates.

Jody Bower: 00:39:26

It is not by incorporating the other because there's not that, I'm male,

Jody Bower: 00:39:32

that person's female, I don't have any real, I don't understand female energy.

Jody Bower: 00:39:36

There's not that.

Jody Bower: 00:39:38

and there's this wonderful theme that keeps coming up.

Jody Bower: 00:39:41

and Chris Downing is one of the people who talked about this.

Jody Bower: 00:39:44

I individuate not by integrating that which is my shadow side,

Jody Bower: 00:39:50

but by envisioning my ideal self.

Jody Bower: 00:39:57

So it's a double, it's not an other double, it's a sort of a perfected self

Jody Bower: 00:40:05

that is what my goal is to work towards.

Jody Bower: 00:40:08

and everything that I might have been trying to put on the other.

Jody Bower: 00:40:15

is in that image.

Jody Bower: 00:40:17

And I can, I can imagine that.

Jody Bower: 00:40:19

So it's a wonderful as if exercise.

Jody Bower: 00:40:22

I've always loved this with the counselors I've gone to when I've

Jody Bower: 00:40:27

been struggling in it with an issue.

Jody Bower: 00:40:29

And they have said, what if you were that that you're trying to be?

Jody Bower: 00:40:37

Can you imagine yourself as if all of that were true?

Jody Bower: 00:40:42

And you sit and you imagine you are the person you want to be.

Jody Bower: 00:40:47

And I think that holds a lot of value instead of looking for somebody else to

Jody Bower: 00:40:51

complete you or a hero to do the work that you don't feel that you're capable

Jody Bower: 00:40:57

of, just sit and do some as if what if I were that person, who would I be?

Jody Bower: 00:41:05

How would I feel?

Jody Bower: 00:41:06

How would I behave?

Jody Bower: 00:41:08

How would I act in the

Boston: 00:41:09

world?

Boston: 00:41:10

What an excellent exercise that feels, if that feels like a, there's one thing I

Boston: 00:41:15

would like for listeners to get from this.

Boston: 00:41:17

It's that, and actually put that in action.

Boston: 00:41:20

I do this in my coaching, right?

Boston: 00:41:21

This is. One of the things we do is really sit in your idealized self.

Boston: 00:41:26

What does it feel like, sound smell taste what's around you.

Boston: 00:41:30

It is such a powerful activity.

Jody Bower: 00:41:32

it's huge.

Jody Bower: 00:41:33

It's huge.

Jody Bower: 00:41:36

It's life changing.

Jody Bower: 00:41:38

I've had it be life changing.

Boston: 00:41:46

What were your favorite stories growing up?

Boston: 00:41:48

Nursery rhymes, children's books, movies, cartoons, comics, anything?

Jody Bower: 00:41:52

My mother gave me, Kurti, no, The Princess and the Goblin by

Jody Bower: 00:41:57

George MacDonald when I was pretty young.

Jody Bower: 00:41:59

She read it to me.

Jody Bower: 00:42:00

It was her favorite story.

Jody Bower: 00:42:02

And that got me started on fantasy novels.

Jody Bower: 00:42:04

And then Tolkien fell on very fertile ground, I think, but I really

Jody Bower: 00:42:11

loved that story There's a hero in it, but the princess is pretty

Jody Bower: 00:42:14

active and it's a descent story.

Jody Bower: 00:42:17

They go down into the mountains, but, I really loved that.

Jody Bower: 00:42:21

I loved The Wind in the Willows.

Jody Bower: 00:42:23

I didn't care for Mr.

Jody Bower: 00:42:24

Toad, but I loved, I think the friendship between, Ratty and, Mole

Jody Bower: 00:42:31

and the messing about in boats.

Jody Bower: 00:42:34

I grew up in boats.

Jody Bower: 00:42:35

We sailed and everything and I loved messing about in boats.

Jody Bower: 00:42:39

And then, of course, when I was a teenager, like I said, I discovered Lord

Jody Bower: 00:42:41

of the Rings and Dune and that was, boy.

Jody Bower: 00:42:44

Oh, and, I think in junior high, Pride and Prejudice.

Jody Bower: 00:42:48

Which was just, I've done a lot of blogging on Jane Austen.

Jody Bower: 00:42:53

I think she's an amazing psychologist.

Boston: 00:42:55

thank you.

Boston: 00:42:56

What's something that you believe to be true that you cannot prove?

Jody Bower: 00:43:00

That we have an eternal soul.

Jody Bower: 00:43:02

I've had experiences, I've actually had a near death experience.

Jody Bower: 00:43:06

Oh, a year ago, year and a half ago.

Jody Bower: 00:43:09

are

Boston: 00:43:09

you willing to share a little bit about what that was

Jody Bower: 00:43:11

like?

Jody Bower: 00:43:11

yeah, I had, I'd had a lot, I've had a rebuilt shoulder and before

Jody Bower: 00:43:16

it was rebuilt, I was taking a lot of anti inflammatories, much

Jody Bower: 00:43:20

more than the recommended dose and I had a catastrophic GI bleed.

Jody Bower: 00:43:24

I lost half my blood volume.

Jody Bower: 00:43:26

and, passed out at home, and I was not unconscious.

Jody Bower: 00:43:34

I was unconscious because I had no awareness of my body at

Jody Bower: 00:43:37

all, and everything was black.

Jody Bower: 00:43:39

But I was there.

Jody Bower: 00:43:40

it wasn't like, being asleep.

Jody Bower: 00:43:41

It wasn't like being, anesthetized.

Jody Bower: 00:43:44

I was present in nothingness.

Jody Bower: 00:43:47

And I was given the choice to go or stay.

Jody Bower: 00:43:53

I didn't see anybody.

Jody Bower: 00:43:54

I didn't talk to anybody.

Jody Bower: 00:43:55

It was just but I also was completely at peace.

Jody Bower: 00:43:59

just completely at peace.

Jody Bower: 00:44:01

Everything was fine.

Jody Bower: 00:44:03

It was just you could take this out now.

Jody Bower: 00:44:07

You can go.

Jody Bower: 00:44:08

This is an option for you to leave if you want to leave or

Jody Bower: 00:44:13

if you don't feel complete.

Jody Bower: 00:44:14

With this life you can go back and I thought about it.

Jody Bower: 00:44:21

Wow, this is a pretty easy way to go.

Jody Bower: 00:44:23

There's no pain I'm really calm, but on the other hand, there's

Jody Bower: 00:44:26

so many people who would be upset and do I feel like I'm done.

Jody Bower: 00:44:29

No, I don't feel like I'm done so then I woke up on the floor of my,

Jody Bower: 00:44:33

hallway and managed to reach up and open the doorway and call for help.

Jody Bower: 00:44:38

And I was in intensive care for a week.

Jody Bower: 00:44:41

I almost died one other time while I was there because I kept bleeding.

Jody Bower: 00:44:46

But, but that whole week was so blissful.

Jody Bower: 00:44:52

I can't tell you every connection that I had with every person in that hospital.

Jody Bower: 00:44:58

It was like I saw their loving, angelic Self.

Jody Bower: 00:45:03

Those nurses were amazing.

Jody Bower: 00:45:05

And I think they felt me seeing them that way because the way they treated

Jody Bower: 00:45:10

me and saw me was just amazing.

Jody Bower: 00:45:13

I mean, it was it's bizarre to say, I'm lying in intensive care with three

Jody Bower: 00:45:18

different IVs going in me because they're trying to keep me, you know, from dying.

Jody Bower: 00:45:23

And I'm blissed out.

Jody Bower: 00:45:26

Wow.

Boston: 00:45:27

Yeah.

Boston: 00:45:28

I'm so glad you decided to stay.

Jody Bower: 00:45:30

Thank you.

Jody Bower: 00:45:30

I am, too.

Jody Bower: 00:45:31

I am, too.

Jody Bower: 00:45:33

It's, doesn't, hasn't meant the end of challenges in my

Jody Bower: 00:45:35

life, but, I wouldn't imagine.

Boston: 00:45:37

No.

Boston: 00:45:38

But you chose them.

Jody Bower: 00:45:39

But I chose them, yeah, and I'm not worried, I don't

Jody Bower: 00:45:42

fear death, I'll tell you that.

Jody Bower: 00:45:43

I do not fear death.

Boston: 00:45:44

That is powerful.

Boston: 00:45:48

Thank you.

Boston: 00:45:51

Oh boy.

Boston: 00:45:52

After, after, after that, the next question is going backwards in,

Boston: 00:45:57

in what ways are you the same now as you were when you were a child?

Jody Bower: 00:46:01

I was a very serious child.

Jody Bower: 00:46:03

I've loosened up a bit, but I was all I was a very questioning child.

Jody Bower: 00:46:09

Wayne Mueller, who's a mentor of mine, he wrote Legacy of the Heart.

Jody Bower: 00:46:15

And he talks about people who have had a different difficult childhood tend to

Jody Bower: 00:46:21

ask the big questions early on in life.

Jody Bower: 00:46:23

They're more thoughtful.

Jody Bower: 00:46:25

They're more empathetic.

Jody Bower: 00:46:26

they're more questioning, they become seekers.

Jody Bower: 00:46:30

And I think my childhood did make me that way.

Jody Bower: 00:46:33

And I've never stopped.

Jody Bower: 00:46:35

And sometimes I know, especially my family finds me a bit, you

Jody Bower: 00:46:39

know, could you listen up already?

Jody Bower: 00:46:41

We don't have to have an intense discussion about the

Jody Bower: 00:46:44

deeper meaning of everything.

Jody Bower: 00:46:46

But yeah, I do.

Jody Bower: 00:46:49

I do.

Jody Bower: 00:46:51

When I need to, I go and watch, a Ben Stiller movie or

Jody Bower: 00:46:55

something to lighten me up.

Boston: 00:46:59

Your seriousness and depth has transcended the years.

Jody Bower: 00:47:03

Yeah, I think I just was conditioned.

Jody Bower: 00:47:07

my father was a scientist.

Jody Bower: 00:47:08

He raised me to be a critical thinker.

Jody Bower: 00:47:10

I had a very influential teacher in high school, who taught us, Plato, the

Jody Bower: 00:47:16

unexamined life is not worth living.

Jody Bower: 00:47:18

And I'm just a questioner.

Jody Bower: 00:47:19

gets me in trouble sometimes because my friends sometimes put stuff up on

Jody Bower: 00:47:23

the internet that they saw somewhere and believed and I will go on

Jody Bower: 00:47:27

Snopes and say, no, that's not true.

Jody Bower: 00:47:32

I've decided to stop doing that.

Jody Bower: 00:47:33

I've decided that I am not here to police, that whole cartoon about the guy typing

Jody Bower: 00:47:38

away badly and going, I can't come to bed.

Jody Bower: 00:47:40

Someone is wrong on the internet.

Jody Bower: 00:47:45

I trying to like, let people there's a woman, I forget her name, but she

Jody Bower: 00:47:49

has this whole philosophy of let them, just let them, whatever they want

Jody Bower: 00:47:53

to believe, whatever they want to say, however they want to treat you,

Jody Bower: 00:47:56

just let them, don't worry about it.

Jody Bower: 00:47:58

I'm trying to adopt that.

Jody Bower: 00:47:59

They're on their journey.

Jody Bower: 00:48:01

Maybe I'm not.

Jody Bower: 00:48:02

I told my nephew when he started driving, and he's a very serious character too.

Jody Bower: 00:48:08

And I said to him, you are going to encounter people

Jody Bower: 00:48:12

on freeways who are jerks.

Jody Bower: 00:48:16

I didn't use that word.

Jody Bower: 00:48:17

I said, they are looking for a fight.

Jody Bower: 00:48:19

You do not have to give it back to them and he listened to that.

Jody Bower: 00:48:24

He told me later that was actually very useful advice.

Jody Bower: 00:48:28

And they do cut you off or flip you off or honk or something and you

Jody Bower: 00:48:32

go, yeah, you'll find somebody to.

Jody Bower: 00:48:35

You'll find the person you want to have a fight, who wants to give you a fight.

Jody Bower: 00:48:38

I'm not going to be that today.

Boston: 00:48:40

That is great life advice in general.

Boston: 00:48:42

Yeah.

Boston: 00:48:43

You will encounter people who are looking for a fight.

Boston: 00:48:45

You do not have to give it to them.

Boston: 00:48:46

That's

Jody Bower: 00:48:47

beautiful.

Jody Bower: 00:48:47

They will find somebody else.

Jody Bower: 00:48:49

Someone else will come along.

Jody Bower: 00:48:51

Yeah.

Boston: 00:48:52

this next question, you may have already answered it, but here

Boston: 00:48:55

it is again in a different shape.

Boston: 00:48:56

Have you ever encountered a phenomenon that you just cannot explain?

Jody Bower: 00:49:01

besides the other thing I saw, I've seen a UFO, and, I was camping,

Jody Bower: 00:49:07

I was up in the San Juan Islands, we were camping on the beach, there was

Jody Bower: 00:49:11

a stretch of water across from us, and then another island, and we're

Jody Bower: 00:49:15

sitting there, we've had a campfire, we're thinking about going to bed.

Jody Bower: 00:49:19

And this very bright light comes up over the island by, far from us and comes down

Jody Bower: 00:49:26

and goes along the water in front of us.

Jody Bower: 00:49:29

And it was just a globe of light.

Jody Bower: 00:49:31

There's absolutely no sound, And then it disappears.

Jody Bower: 00:49:36

And we all sat there for a while and finally someone said, did you see that?

Jody Bower: 00:49:41

And we all said, and we didn't talk about it.

Jody Bower: 00:49:45

We didn't talk about it, because it made no sense.

Jody Bower: 00:49:47

It was, it couldn't have been a helicopter, and this is in

Jody Bower: 00:49:50

the 70s, I don't think we had stealth helicopters anyway.

Jody Bower: 00:49:54

No sound, couldn't have been a boat, because it came up over the hill and down.

Jody Bower: 00:49:58

I have no explanation for that.

Boston: 00:50:00

and how do you think, having that kind of experience, what do you think that

Boston: 00:50:03

does to, did or does to your worldview?

Jody Bower: 00:50:07

I did.

Jody Bower: 00:50:08

There's, Shakespeare, "there are more things under heaven and earth than

Jody Bower: 00:50:11

are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Jody Bower: 00:50:13

I don't think anybody has the answers.

Jody Bower: 00:50:17

I don't think science has all the answers.

Jody Bower: 00:50:19

I think that there's just so much more to the fullness of life than

Jody Bower: 00:50:25

any one or set of disciplines can add, and they're just mystery.

Jody Bower: 00:50:31

There's mystery.

Jody Bower: 00:50:32

And, I think a life in which you think there's no mystery or that any mystery

Jody Bower: 00:50:37

could be explained, would be kind of sad.

Jody Bower: 00:50:41

I think I would like to have more experiences where I go.

Jody Bower: 00:50:45

I have no idea what that was.

Jody Bower: 00:50:48

Yes.

Jody Bower: 00:50:50

And I may never know what that was, but whoa.

Boston: 00:50:55

Yes.

Boston: 00:50:56

more mystery.

Boston: 00:50:57

cheers to that.

Boston: 00:50:59

The last question is when in your life have you experienced ecstasy?

Jody Bower: 00:51:05

This is a funny thing.

Jody Bower: 00:51:07

I've had a few moments usually out in the woods where it's just been a perfect

Jody Bower: 00:51:16

moment, where everything, I don't know where you feel a part of everything.

Jody Bower: 00:51:23

And I think that's the biggest part.

Jody Bower: 00:51:24

The other times would be I'm a singer.

Jody Bower: 00:51:27

I'm a singer in a choir.

Jody Bower: 00:51:29

And singing with a good choir and singing an amazing piece of music and everybody's

Jody Bower: 00:51:35

in harmony and it's one of those times when it's really clicked when the choir is

Jody Bower: 00:51:40

your breathing is what you're an organism.

Jody Bower: 00:51:43

I think that's it when you feel intensely alive and intensely connected.

Jody Bower: 00:51:49

That's when I think my most ecstatic moments have been.

Jody Bower: 00:51:54

I can think of one in particular.

Jody Bower: 00:51:57

I got to sing, the Verdi Requiem in the opera house in Seattle with my choir with,

Jody Bower: 00:52:04

I was at the University of Washington at the time and, it, the head of the music

Jody Bower: 00:52:10

department was retiring and we put on this one shot show and it was transcending.

Jody Bower: 00:52:17

it was that's an amazing piece of music and I don't know, I was just,

Jody Bower: 00:52:21

I was somewhere else for most of it.

Jody Bower: 00:52:23

Oh, wow.

Boston: 00:52:24

Yeah.

Boston: 00:52:25

Yeah.

Boston: 00:52:26

There's something so beautiful in that, in what you just shared,

Boston: 00:52:29

there's so many components to it.

Boston: 00:52:30

Breathing as one, merging with something bigger than yourself, and then you throw

Boston: 00:52:35

in music, which transforms a soundscape and you put that in such a fabulous

Boston: 00:52:42

cathedral, which is acoustically designed to elevate that.

Boston: 00:52:45

And it itself is something that is built to elevate, like

Boston: 00:52:49

that's just sounds magnificent

Jody Bower: 00:52:52

and you have an audience.

Jody Bower: 00:52:54

who is feeling everything you're, I'm not an actor, but I can understand that

Jody Bower: 00:52:59

it's not about you being up on stage.

Jody Bower: 00:53:01

It's just you and the audience.

Jody Bower: 00:53:04

And also, I think that there's a skill level, there's a skill you've worked

Jody Bower: 00:53:07

at, that you are getting to employ.

Boston: 00:53:10

we've covered a lot of ground.

Boston: 00:53:11

Thank you so much for being willing to just dance in this

Boston: 00:53:15

conversation and share so much.

Boston: 00:53:18

How can people find you?

Jody Bower: 00:53:19

I have a blog.

Jody Bower: 00:53:20

I have a web page it's just jodybower.Com.

Jody Bower: 00:53:24

Also, you can reach me through LinkedIn.

Jody Bower: 00:53:27

and right now, I am available to speak or run workshops.

Jody Bower: 00:53:32

I do a lot of work with, film programs.

Jody Bower: 00:53:35

Because, you know, it's the script writers who really get

Jody Bower: 00:53:39

how myth translates into words.

Jody Bower: 00:53:42

I also do book coaching.

Jody Bower: 00:53:44

I was an editor for years.

Jody Bower: 00:53:46

Now I'm working at a higher level.

Jody Bower: 00:53:48

And one of the things I do is, especially when people are at the

Jody Bower: 00:53:52

early stages of writing a book.

Jody Bower: 00:53:54

I like to do a a two hour sit down where we talk.

Jody Bower: 00:53:58

I have a lot of questions.

Jody Bower: 00:53:59

I have a lot of advice for how to take the vague idea and understand What your

Jody Bower: 00:54:08

structure should be, who your audience is.

Jody Bower: 00:54:10

and you can find my books on Amazon or independent books, sellers, always

Jody Bower: 00:54:14

plug the independent books, sellers.

Boston: 00:54:17

Outstanding.

Boston: 00:54:18

Jody, thank you so much for your time today.

Boston: 00:54:20

You've been really generous

Jody Bower: 00:54:22

This has been fun for me.

Jody Bower: 00:54:23

Thank you.

Boston: 00:54:29

Thanks again to my guest Dr.

Boston: 00:54:31

Jody Bower.

Boston: 00:54:33

And thank you to our listeners.

Boston: 00:54:35

If you enjoyed this episode of Mythic, please consider leaving a review

Boston: 00:54:39

wherever you get your podcasts.

Boston: 00:54:41

That helps people find the show.

Boston: 00:54:42

You can also find more information, including show notes and other

Boston: 00:54:46

resources at mythicpodcast.com.

Boston: 00:54:49

If you want to know more about me and my work, check out bostonblake.com.

Boston: 00:54:55

Until next time.

Boston: 00:54:56

Journey on.