Of such stuff as legends.

For millenia, myths have mapped this deep idea that the hero’s journey involves venturing into the dark cave – the abyss – to rescue something of value. Sometimes, like in the Hobbit, it is confronting the dragon that guards the gold. Other times, like the Egyptian lore of Horus marching into the underworld to restore Osiris or Pinocchio going into the belly of the beast to rescue Geppetto.

In either case, the moral remained the same: to be who one could be required a trip into the abyss and a confrontation of the unknown. In the case of rescuing the father, this venture appears to by symbolic of the idea that what awaits when we push past our comfort, we revive pieces of our ancestral potential (i.e., we rescue our father). To awaken our potential, the hero must confront the stress, fear, and uncertainty that lurks on the edge of comfort if they want to annex their potential to their being and rouse the hero that rests within.

Now, it isn’t simply that the writers of these myths were spinning fantastic tales to entertain us. I believe, at their core, they were struggling to describe what they felt was required for the individual to become fully integrated but didn’t yet have the science or words to describe.

Science has since described what happens in our minds when we push past our comforts and venture into the unknown and it maps remarkably well onto the story of the myth. Neurologically, brains scans reveal that when we push past the domain of our known experience – whether that’s exposure to an ice bath, extreme heat, a workout we didn’t think we had in us, or an encounter with a wounding idea that challenges everything we think we know – our brains code for new proteins and previously dormant parts of our brain light up.

It is as if, as Franz Kafka would describe when describing a wounding book, uncomfortable experiences are “like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s castle.”

So I submit that, if we hope to be what we can be, we, must play the role of hero, and diligently patrol the borders of our lived experience and strive to press our perimeter outward. And we can do this through voluntary exposure to discomfort and (acute) stress. For me, this often involves finding the edge of comfort during an ice bath, sauna session, or workout. The point where your mind starts assaulting you with calls to surrender and back up.

In those situations, just past the point of comfort, we challenge our potential to show. We grow through discomfort. And we become more. One might even say that, like the legends of myth, we rescue our father as our genetic potential springs to life. Exposure by exposure, we write ourselves into the hero’s journey and liberate, like Horus and Pinocchio, the captive souls of our forefathers through the revival of darkened brain matter.

Done enough, you just may find you are of the same stuff as legends.