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The Hero's Journey: The Ordinary Life · Unlocking The Paradigm Portal

• 0:00
  Hello everybody, welcome back to unlocking the Paradigm portal.
• 0:03
  My name is Sarah. So last episode I laid out the
• 0:06
  map, all 12 stages of the hero's journey and what they mean.
• 0:09
  So this week we're going to begin walking it with stage 1,
• 0:12
  The Ordinary World. And I want to start with
• 0:15
  something super important. So this is the stage most people
• 0:18
  skip or they rush through it. And it's exactly why so many
• 0:22
  journeys stall before they've really begun.
• 0:25
  So in every great story, the hero's ordinary life is shown to
• 0:28
  us first, right? We see Frodo in the Shire, we
• 0:31
  see Dorothy in Kansas, and we see Luke Skywalker bored on a
• 0:35
  farm at the edge of nowhere, being kind of whiny, to be
• 0:38
  totally honest. And here's what most people
• 0:41
  miss. The ordinary world is not a bad
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  life. It's often a genuinely good one
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  with like, real relationships, real love, real meaning, a life
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  that if you described it to someone, people would probably
• 0:54
  say it's pretty great. Or at least it's pretty good.
• 0:58
  Or at bare minimum it's OK. But something has happened, and
• 1:02
  the world didn't shrink, but you grew, and the life that once fit
• 1:07
  you perfectly has started to feel kind of like wearing
• 1:10
  someone else's clothes. So it looks right, it functions,
• 1:14
  and something in you keeps pulling at the collar.
• 1:17
  That's the ordinary world. Not a mistake, not a failure.
• 1:20
  It's the baseline, and most people jump right into the rest
• 1:24
  of the journey without pausing to just recognize their
• 1:27
  baseline. So here's another thing about
• 1:30
  the ordinary world. You cannot usually see it from
• 1:33
  inside of it because from the inside it doesn't feel ordinary,
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  right? If you look around your life, it
• 1:39
  feels like life. It feels like reality because it
• 1:41
  is. But it's walls have been there
• 1:44
  so long that they become invisible, so you don't even see
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  them. But what you can feel if you
• 1:49
  slow down enough to notice is the signal.
• 1:53
  It's like a low grade restlessness that you can't
• 1:56
  really identify but you can feel it, or a recurring thought you
• 1:59
  keep pushing away, or a longing that you've learned to manage
• 2:04
  rather than honor. Maybe you've got a lot of
• 2:07
  tiredness that sleep does not fix, just straight up exhaustion
• 2:12
  or the feeling of going through the motions, not knowing what
• 2:17
  you're going through them for. You kind of lost track of it at
• 2:20
  some point. And maybe your life looks right
• 2:22
  from the outside, but it feels a little bit hollow from the
• 2:25
  inside. And maybe you're doing all the
• 2:28
  things and you're checking all the boxes and you've got all the
• 2:31
  lists and you're making progress on them, but there's still a
• 2:35
  quiet voice underneath that keeps whispering.
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  Is this it? And that voice is not a problem.
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  I want to say that very blatantly.
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  That voice is not ingratitude. It is not anxiety, It is not
• 2:49
  something you need to fix or medicate or push through.
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  It's a signal. So in the next episode, we're
• 2:56
  going to talk about what it's signaling toward, but first you
• 2:59
  have to be willing to hear it. So when I was explaining the
• 3:04
  hero's journey last episode, I was talking about Joseph
• 3:06
  Campbell. So he mapped this journey and he
• 3:09
  understood something crucial that you cannot truly leave,
• 3:12
  something that you have not fully seen.
• 3:15
  So if you skip the ordinary world, and if you rush straight
• 3:18
  to the transformation or the breakthrough or the new chapter,
• 3:22
  you will carry the old one with you, unnamed, unexamined, still
• 3:27
  running in the background. Think like if you've ever had,
• 3:31
  if you have a relationship pattern and you keep saying to
• 3:34
  yourself, why do I keep getting into the same relationships?
• 3:37
  You never stop to examine it before jumping into the next
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  one. Guess what?
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  It came along. It's like carrying a whole bunch
• 3:43
  of baggage with you. So the work of this stage is not
• 3:46
  to fix anything, and it's not to change anything.
• 3:50
  It's pretty frustrating, right, 'cause you want to make some
• 3:52
  change. It's just to see clearly, to
• 3:55
  step outside of your own story just long enough to look at it
• 3:58
  honestly. Like zooming out without
• 4:01
  judgement and without immediately reaching for a
• 4:04
  solution. Just to see it from outside of
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  your immediate perspective. And that witnessing of your
• 4:11
  story through a lens of compassion and without any hurry
• 4:16
  is itself the first heroic act. And most people spend their
• 4:20
  whole lives looking just slightly away from the truth of
• 4:23
  their own ordinary world. Because to look directly at it
• 4:27
  without running is courage. And that's not a metaphor.
• 4:31
  That's where the journey actually begins.
• 4:34
  So here's what I want to leave you with today.
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  It's not a homework assignment. It's not a fix.
• 4:39
  It's just a question to carry with you what has become too
• 4:43
  small, Not what should change, not what you should want, not
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  what looks good on paper, just what has become too small, What
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  part of your life feels like it no longer quite fits who you are
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  becoming? And you don't have to answer it
• 5:00
  out loud, and you don't have to even answer it today.
• 5:02
  Just let it sit with you. Let it breathe.
• 5:05
  The body usually knows before the mind catches up.
• 5:08
  So if something tightens when you ask, pay attention.
• 5:12
  And if something softens, pay attention to that too.
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  The response in the body is always information.
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  Because the ordinary world is not the enemy, it's the
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  foundation of everything that is coming.
• 5:25
  But you have to see it first. So tomorrow I'm actually going
• 5:30
  to do something different. I'm going to do a bonus extended
• 5:34
  version of this where I'm going to walk you through some somatic
• 5:37
  breath work with these questions so that you can start
• 5:39
  identifying what the ordinary world feels like in your body.
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  Because that's the first step to connecting with it.
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  Your body is the record of the ordinary world.
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  So if you can't tune into that, or if you haven't learned how
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  to, or if you got so sick of hearing it that you kind of
• 5:57
  distanced yourself from it and became disconnected, this is
• 6:01
  going to help you come back to it.
• 6:03
  And every week I'm going to do an episode like this and then
• 6:05
  I'll do the extended with some of the breath work and some
• 6:09
  somatic practices. So stay tuned for that tomorrow.
• 6:12
  And next episode after the somatic one, we're going to move
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  into stage 2. And that is the call to
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  adventure. And I'll tell you this now, the
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  call does not arrive as Thunder. It does not arrive as some, you
• 6:26
  know, crazy lightning bolt. The clouds open and the sun
• 6:29
  suddenly shines through kind of a moment and almost never looks
• 6:32
  the way you expect it to. So keep kicking ass and taking
• 6:37
  names. Watch for what I release
• 6:40
  tomorrow. I'm going to put this one up
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  later tonight. And if you're interested, check
• 6:44
  out my live Hero's Journey Zoom. It's free that I'm doing on
• 6:48
  Sunday nights. I actually have an episode
• 6:50
  tonight, but by the time this loads, it'll already have
• 6:53
  happened. So next Sunday on the 5th, we've
• 6:55
  got the fifth stage and if you want to sign on, my camera's
• 7:01
  going to be on. You can come and join all of us
• 7:03
  and be a part of it. That would be awesome.
• 7:05
  So do all the things like share, subscribe, hype, I don't know
• 7:08
  all the stuff, I don't really care.
• 7:10
  Just keep coming back, keep growing, keep expanding.
• 7:13
  I will be back tomorrow.