Boston: Welcome.

And thanks for listening.

My guest today is Dr.

Jody Bower.

Dr.

Bower is a cultural mythologist and the author of Jane Eyre's Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine's Story.

And The Princess Powers Up: Watching the Sleeping Beauties Become a Warrior goddesses.

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

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

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

In this episode, Jody and I discuss heroes and heroines in movies and look at how the Hero's Journey is distinct from that of the Heroine.

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

And a note.

When I was editing this episode, I realized we'd made references to other mythologist Christine Downing, Maureen Murdock, and Kim Hudson without really offering any context.

Rather than disrupt the flow with clunky editing and editorializing, I've just added links to the show notes.

So you can learn more about them there.

So now.

Here we go, Dr.

Jody Bower.

Will you share your mythic origin story?

Jody Bower: I was very fortunate I think in a way.

I was not raised in a religion, but I was raised by parents who were very curious and they had moved out to the Seattle area from Boston and one of the things they were curious about were the local Native traditions.

So we would spend weekends going out to reservations and going to the dances, learning about the art.

We had a book of kind of native origin stories and We camped as our family vacations and we would bring this book with us and read about, okay, this mountain, to the natives is called Wye East and this is how it became.

So I grew up with this and I also grew up very curious about my friends and what they did on Saturday or Sunday.

So I used to go with them.

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

I had a fascination with origin stories with people's ideas of how things came to be without any bias as to which was the right one.

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

that belief is people believe, and I accepted that they believe even when I didn't believe it.

but I had an understanding from an early age that different people had different explanations for, why the world, how it came to be and why it is.

And I loved mythology, the little bit of Greek and Roman mythology that we got in, elementary school.

and I also was a voracious reader.

And I was handed both Dune and the Lord of the Rings by my ninth grade English teacher, when I was 15.

And that just sparked a whole other love.

but I was also, I was in a family the idea was that your life was to be of service to other people.

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

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

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

You have to do something helpful.

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

And at some point during my undergrad, I discovered Jung and I discovered dream work and I've been a dream worker since I was 20, basically, I can lucid dream James Hillman says that whatever your daimon is, it's going to manifest.

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

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

And I was working as a medical assistant at a major medical hospital, and the doctors somehow or another discovered that I could write, and they started hiring me to write patient education and to help them with their papers, and that resulted in about a 30 year career as a medical and scientific writer and editor, a good career, lucrative career, and then at midlife, and, I decided, I have a lot of years left and I do not want to keep writing about what can go wrong with the body.

And I'd heard about Pacifica.

And the other thing is that I had been reading, voracious reader all my life, was in a women's book club, reading a lot of novels by women.

And I had seen this pattern that nobody seem to be writing about or noticing and then this bit of serendipity happened.

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

At one point I said to him what people say to published writers, which I've since learned, which is I have a book idea, but he was very gracious.

And he said, tell me about it.

And I did.

And he brings out his card and he says, I'm the acquisitions editor for Quest Books.

And we would be very interested in publishing that book.

And I thought that is a sign, but I knew that I didn't have the background because I didn't have that English degree to, to write the book, and I actually made an attempt at it for about a year and then It just became the excuse or the reason why I could go to Pacifica and enroll in the myth program, which has, one third of it is about literature.

so I did, and I wrote my dissertation on what I called recurrent narratives in women's fiction.

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

can we see this?

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

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

Jody Bower: Yeah, so I had seen this pattern and really, I went back into the 14th century.

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

I found it in biographies, autobiographies, famous women.

so I That's what that's about.

and so then, since then, I have been doing a lot of lecturing, a lot of teaching, and just working with, hero and heroine stories, and, but also, I'm aware that this is one interpretation, and that, in fact, there are many ways to interpret These stories, they're not monomyths, they're not monolithic, and so you've, you heard me talk about how I see, the hero story being told differently these days in, our superhero movies mostly, and I'm also I wrote another book and published it

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

Yeah.

It's a fabulous title.

Jody Bower: Tracing about 80 years from Snow White and Sleeping Beauty to, the, Captain Marvel and, Elsa of Frozen who are goddesses.

basically, they're.

They're all powerful goddesses.

So we've seen this evolution through time.

And, I'm just interested in this.

I call myself a cultural mythologist and I'm just interested in how myths are playing out in the current culture and how they're evolving.

Boston: Something I want to grab hold of because I got to hear you talk about this, you talked about the role of love in this evolution of the hero's journey, that there was a time where the love object, like the love was the prize.

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

Jody Bower: Yes.

When you think about.

Joseph Campbell, you've got the princess who just waits at home and, he, he has to earn her, he has to prove that he's basically an adult male.

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

but she just, she's just at home.

And this is, Maureen Murdoch and other people ask Campbell about, what about the woman?

And he was like, she doesn't have to go on a journey because she's the point of the journey.

And this was not satisfying to, Maureen or anybody else, So love was something that got put off.

He had to prove his, really his masculine self, his courage and his intelligence and his ability to persist and all this.

And then he got to have love.

But in the new hero stories, and this is the last 20 years or so, if you look at any of the Marvel superhero origin stories.

What it really comes down to is that the difference between the hero and the villain and the difference between a hero and a villain is two sides of a coin.

It is so easy for a hero to become a villain, especially if actually they win because then they often end up a tyrant.

Kim Hudson in, The Virgin's Promise talks about this, the problem with the hero winning is that then he has to.

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

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

There's another character with similar powers, maybe even more powerful than the hero, but The difference between them is that the hero can love, and the hero calls, it's love that keeps them from turning into a villain, and it's like the Final Fist, and it, it's more in the books than in the movies, but the real difference between Voldemort and Harry Potter is that Harry Potter has this family of friends, and, and supporters and people.

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

And that's what pulls him through it.

And when he goes into the forest to face Voldemort at the end, he brings the spirits of his parents and his two strongest mentors with him because he's not a, he's not doing this alone.

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

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

There's always a character who's a.

It doesn't have to be a love character, it can be a friend, it can be, what we're seeing lately is a lot of the hero is a father figure to a child that needs help.

So we're seeing, Pedro Pascal is playing this repeatedly, he's this loving father figure who protects the child in the Mandalorian, or The Last of the Best, what's it called?

The Last of Us.

The Last of Us.

The Last of Us, yeah.

And it can, it can be a group of people, like in Stranger Things or Harry Potter, it's this group of people who come together and the hero is just supported by it, but they have to have.

This love.

Boston: One of the things that I'm that's occurring to me right now is this evolution in story from the hero as that individual, as the one who's raised above everybody else.

what I'm actually thinking of is I don't remember which Spider Man movie, what the title was, but it had the three generations of

Jody Bower: Spider Men.

Into the multiverse and or the latest one.

no way home.

I

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

Jody Bower: generations the three Yeah

Boston: And the youngest what set him apart was he had been part of a team The youngest one this millennial generation is so interconnected and that's showing up in the children's stories and the children's myths, He Man and the Masters of the Universe has been reimagined recently.

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

And there's this movement from I to we, and I hadn't thought about that until, I was thinking of romantic love in the beginning of this, but no, the love of friends, the mutual support, which is the only way I think we can get through some of what we're facing right now is together.

Jody Bower: Yeah, and I, I don't want to spoil this too much for him, but I know that John Bucher of the Joseph Campbell Foundation is working on the idea that we are moving from an individual to a collective.

As hero.

Boston: I want to get him on the podcast.

Yeah,

Jody Bower: you get him on , he's working on it.

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

Deal.

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

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

the older hero idea was he had a lover.

You know, um, Captain America has Peggy and, Thor has Jane Foster and yes, they have a human lover who keeps them.

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

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

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

It's not his lover, his, Whoever she was, it was his wife through the ages, but it's the human friend who redeems him but it is, I do see an evolution, in moving from the hero as a solo practitioner to a collective or a fellowship, and even Tolkien had, Tolkien He had his finger on some things, I think, and even he, realized that one hero probably would fail, and Frodo does fail in the end, and if it weren't for Sam, being the backup hero, and actually, rescuing him from that whole situation.

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

Boston: I want to turn the corner here, Barbie has been a massive cultural phenomenon, and it is truly a movie of mythic proportions with mythic dimensions and is functioning on all kinds of levels.

what do you think is going on there?

Jody Bower: This is one of the instances of where somebody asked me a question and it just, blah.

I was at my dissertation defense and The pattern that I saw in women's literature, it is not a dissent story.

It is rather a leaving and going away story.

it's a woman who says, I can't live in this situation, but usually she is somebody who's kind of oppressed anyway.

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

She doesn't even dare speak.

And yet eventually she does this journey where she leaves the situation and finds a place where she can be her creative self.

That's Celie's journey perfectly, and I, that, so I wrote about all the variations, Jane Eyre leaves, I mean she leaves so many situations, she leaves home, she leaves the school, she leaves Thornwood, Thornfield, she just, she has to keep leaving to, cause people keep telling her, no you need to be this for me, and she's not having that.

Chris Downing asked me, why do you like this story, which has no interest to me personally, she said.

Instead of the descent story, which I love and so many women love, so many women love the descent story, and I said to her, the descent to the Cave of the Dark Goddess has no meaning for me because I grew up in that situation.

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

My brother was killed in our backyard, threw the family into disarray for many years, and, I was left to deal with it on my own, basically, which thankfully also found some very good counselors.

so I grew up in a very dark sort of situation with an unhappy, difficult mother.

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

I've been there.

I need something different.

And that's the story that I was finding of women who really their childhoods were not good and they got out and they built a life for themselves.

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

The descent story, I think, appeals to women who maybe were overprotected as children.

And maybe everything was made easy and fine for them, and they got to a certain point in life and they just felt like this is not all there is to life.

I need something more.

Chris felt a very strong need to find what she said, her, to find the dark feminine, to find this whole shadow self that was not part of her upbringing.

It was not acknowledged.

It was not allowed.

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

than Barbie and but she is not whole she and you know that the whole thing when she starts saying do you ever think about death, death in the Barbie world and everyone is just horrified because this doesn't enter in there's no such thing but Barbie, willingly or not, has to go find that.

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

So I think there, this is why I'm not wedded to one particular journey, because I think what you need for individuation can be very different, depending on where you're coming from, what your life experience has been.

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

Boston: Thank you.

Thank you for that.

That exploration and that juxtaposition between the story of leaving the story of that journey and the story of the descent.

that's something that I'm going to ponder some more whether the descent is what is needed or if you are, if you spend childhood in the cave.

it's about ascent.

One of the, one of the topics that you had said you wanted to bring into this conversation was around the hero's journey and social activism.

What do you see there?

Jody Bower: Yeah, this was, this is something I've, done a great deal of lecturing at, mostly in, like liberal churches.

But it just.

One day it occurred to me that the way most people pursue activism, political activism, especially, is very, it's very much what I call heroic thinking.

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

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

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

Much better.

We had a golden age in the past.

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

We must go back to it.

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

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

The other myth is the myth of progress.

The idea that the best is yet to come.

and we have a moral duty to make it happen.

So, getting back is a setback, and we fear the past was worse, the future is going to be better.

I would say neither group is living in the present.

and I think personally that the cultures do evolve and we do progress, and a lot of our politics is about the people who are fearing that versus the people who want that.

and that is, there's the tension.

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

But so I think really, and I've heard this from others that in a way, the conservatives hold us back from changing faster than the society can actually handle and the progressives.

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

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

there's a fear that we.

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

There's a fear that we will not get to what's good because we'll be dragged back into the dark ages.

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

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

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

Heroes fight on behalf of other people.

They fight on behalf of the community.

And they fix the problem through what Sherry Tepper, who was a, a fantasy author, she wrote The Gate to Women's Country, I think was her most favorite book.

She talks about how the hero fixes it to the, what she calls the single wondrous act.

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

He defeats the bad guy and everything becomes perfect.

what she didn't mention, but that I've also noticed is that, and Kim Hudson also says this, that actually we go back to the status quo.

So that's what the hero does.

He actually defends the status quo.

again, it's very emotion based.

There's a righteous anger to heroic thinking.

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

Hey, you must be angry.

I'm going to post all this stuff on the internet to make you angry because this is how, people, this is motivational, not for me, but, it is to a lot of people, heroic thinking is right and wrong thinking.

I'm right.

You're wrong.

My hero is right.

Your hero is wrong.

Therefore, your hero is villain, so we have two hero villains fighting each other and people tend to, because we think it's a single act that's going to make it.

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

My guy versus your guy.

My guy is better than your guy.

And I've seen this on both sides.

people worship their political candidate on both sides, and they really think that if only we could get our guy into position, then everything will turn out okay.

And I saw that a lot, during the Obama administration, there was all this, Oh yeah, we get Obama.

We elected our guy.

Yay.

Everything's good.

And then because there was too much opposition, not much happened, and people blamed Obama.

And we're disappointed in their hero, but the other side of that is that you get your hero working for you and you can go.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yay.

I don't have to do anything like

Boston: the election is the big event.

That's the polling that's pulling the sword

Jody Bower: or that's right.

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

There's actually, I think, a little bit of, reinforcement of low self esteem that I can't personally deal with these problems.

And, the problems are really overwhelming, but my guy can't, if I get the right guy and if I vote for the right person, but this, then you can imagine the burden that it puts on the hero.

And I take this back to just, to scale it down, if you've ever been the person in a organization that everybody asks to do everything.

could you run this?

Could you do this?

After a while, people just get burnt out, but everybody else is going, Oh, they're so capable.

They're so good at this.

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

So I've seen it in almost every organization I've been a part of, is that you have these heroic few take on everything and then burn out.

and burnout is a.

A scary thing, because I think the people who are shouldering most of the load, the problems are not solved by one act.

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

They ask for help.

They try to enlist help.

If they don't get help.

And the problems can seem so overwhelming that you can.

You can become obsessed.

I had a friend who was so obsessed about an issue in my town that every time I saw her, she'd talk at me for two hours about, trying to enlist me to the cause because the problem was too big for her and she needed to get everybody else in line and she couldn't do that.

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

And I actually think that, sometimes you lose your really good people because they're burning out.

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

I think, because people have been trying maybe who knows for decades to say, there's a problem here.

Listen to us.

We need, nobody's listening.

Nobody's helping.

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

That they feel like I've got to get people's attention somehow, I've got to call attention to this problem that nobody's, that's not being fixed.

And I do think that this is where some of the terrorism comes from is just sheer frustration with the inability to get other people to pay attention and fix the problem.

So where I see heroic thinking, how that plays out in our politics and what I usually challenge the audiences in these liberal churches.

I say how much of this is in keeping with progressive values, you know, seeing people as the enemy, all of this,

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

There's, The thread, when we were talking about the hero earlier and you said the hero, if he keeps winning, he becomes a tyrant, so that's one destiny, or the heroic personality becomes so overwhelmed, he becomes a terrorist, or, which then constellates a villain, either way, this is that sort of old parable that says you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain, but there's this, but the hero, The hero is, seems to be a stage or a step along the way.

that it's destined to become, I don't dunno if destined, this is one way, it can go two different ways.

It can become a villain.

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

In a inability to win to

Jody Bower: win permanently to win permanently.

That's and this is part of heroic thinking this idea that it's possible to win permanently, it's possible to do one thing and have everything be okay.

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

this is fundamentalism.

Yes, it is.

It's the best.

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

but yeah, the hero.

Part of it is the hero worship.

Everybody's putting them on a pedestal and that can, of course, what does that do to your ego?

And I think I'm not going to mention any names of any political candidates right now, we can see the ego, getting over and, or the burden and because you, your side can win.

But that doesn't mean the other side goes, Oh, okay, we're all in line now, the other side, as we see, is going to keep fighting.

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

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

The wonderful king who you know, fixes everything, fixes the roads and fixes the, the infrastructure and everybody lives happily ever after.

But instead, the king's energy has to go into quelling all of the people who do not want to live in that.

And so what happened?

Nothing much happens.

that's.

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

And, we do this tug of war and worst case, we get into, I think, a situation like the Middle East where people are now in this thing of, we just have to wipe the other side out.

That's never going to happen.

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

And people try to wipe out gay people.

That's not working.

it's it does.

They just keep coming back.

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

Besides, but this is hard when you're dealing with fundamentals thinking, which says that only evil people do evil acts.

So it's okay to wipe them out.

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

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

So how do we break the cycle of abuse?

in families, how do we break the cycle of abuse in a political arena, because it is abusive.

I think a lot of it is abusive.

Do

Boston: you have an idea for an alternative archetype or an alternative type of thinking?

I'm so glad you asked that question.

Jody Bower: Well, I do because I started thinking about the heroine journey that I had written about and how she approaches life and i'm going to just say at the outset that Ireland they got past a lot of this because the mothers stood up and said we are done And this happened in my lifetime.

I'm a boomer.

I remember in the 70s when the women of Ireland just rose up and said, no more of this, Protestant versus Catholic, Northern, you know, all of this, we're just, you're killing our babies.

Stop it.

And they stopped it for the most part.

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

Enough.

and I, I pray with all of my non denominational, non defined energy that this happens.

elsewhere, but in the heroin journey, what happens is that she is, she's in a situation where people are telling her who to be.

And she says no.

And so her resistance is part of her being.

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

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

she actually, the very first thing she usually does in the stories is she goes exactly where they tell her never to go.

So she goes into the forest where the witch is, or she goes to the big city, or she goes to where, she goes to where the enemy is, and she learns.

She, so she embraces, she goes to the witch, and the witch to the hero is a villain who must be killed.

But she goes there, and she humbles herself before the witch, and she says, teach me.

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

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

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

Boston: learn.

I was thinking of the Little Mermaid, but,

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

it's, she's learning, it's very experiential how she learns and she gets handed, impossible tasks.

And there's a magic element that comes in, usually it's a mother energy that she's got with her somehow, who advises her.

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

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

This is a test in discernment.

How do you know what is good?

how do you know what is of value?

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

So her focus is not, she's picking out the black seeds, but she's not spending a lot of time going, Oh, these horrible black seeds must be burnt.

They must be destroyed.

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

And this is what we need.

This is what we're taking.

This is what we're planting.

So her whole learning is about how to focus on what is a value and how to have more of it.

It's, it's everything that the manifesters talking about, what are you putting your energy into?

Because whatever you put your energy in to, there will be more of it will come back at you.

And so She's also learning how to see things as they really are, not to be fooled by the seeds that are masquerading, maybe,

Boston: And I'm just thinking about that distinction between you're not sorting things into good and evil, you're sorting things in discerning value.

So you and you can do either one is a way you can approach a situation, but this is blameless discernment.

Jody Bower: Blameless discernment.

What do you want to foster in life?

So focus on that.

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

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

What's working?

I follow all of these Goodable and all these other sites on Instagram, which are just people giving you news about good.

There are people who have cleaned up that enormous patch of plastic crap in the ocean.

They've cleaned it up.

There are kids inventing amazing things that are helping people.

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

Honestly, I believe it's the kids of today who, where we really have to look because they are, they're doing, but there's a lot of people who are doing amazing stuff out there.

Yeah, it's so hopeful.

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

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

There was a lecture at the Mythologium about, or there was a whole panel on mushrooms.

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

I mean, you, you mix a fungi into concrete and the concrete doesn't fall apart in 20 years, like our, our bridges are falling apart because the mycelium heals it.

and what it's doing for our health.

I mean, there's so much good news.

and then I think the amazing thing too, is that Once you get somebody who's doing this good work.

what happens in all the heroine stories is that she Starts creating this wonderful life for herself based on her own values and other people look at her and go wow I like that.

I want to try that.

Celie, you know who came out of just the worst kind of life just so oppressed and so beaten up and so abused and she comes to the sense of self and then she starts She actually creates community and she attracts all these people to her She even attracts her abusive ex husband who looks at what she's doing in life.

she's making pants.

She's making pants for women because she, for her pants represented a stepping out of her role as a subservient, basically slave to other people.

And she makes these beautiful, wild, crazy pants.

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

And they have this wonderful conversation at the end where he talks about how once he stopped trying to control other people and get them to do what he wanted to do, he was so much happier.

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

So there's this, in all of the stories that I read, there is usually a man who looks at what she's doing and goes, that is a better way of being.

And I'm gonna.

I'm going to go with you rather than go, with what my parents, my parents want me to be all this.

They want to say, in Sense and Sensibility, Edward Ferrars, the family wants him to be a politician and they want him to make a name for himself and, further the family's thing.

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

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

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

So, this is what I think that we do a lot better with a role model that we choose to follow rather than a tyrant who tells us how to be.

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

Boston: It's a chosen path.

Jody Bower: It's a chosen path, which is chosen not because out of belief, but rather out of experience.

And looking at, seeing that it works.

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

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

Yes.

Boston: Yes, I love that question.

Yeah, yeah.

Jody Bower: What I'm also excited about, There's a lot of work being done, by non binary people, and non binary people, by definition, don't do well with black and white either or thinking.

And I've been venturing out and reading, some really exciting work by people who are talking about how a non binary person individuates.

It is not by incorporating the other because there's not that, I'm male, that person's female, I don't have any real, I don't understand female energy.

There's not that.

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

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

I individuate not by integrating that which is my shadow side, but by envisioning my ideal self.

So it's a double, it's not an other double, it's a sort of a perfected self that is what my goal is to work towards.

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

is in that image.

And I can, I can imagine that.

So it's a wonderful as if exercise.

I've always loved this with the counselors I've gone to when I've been struggling in it with an issue.

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

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

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

And I think that holds a lot of value instead of looking for somebody else to complete you or a hero to do the work that you don't feel that you're capable of, just sit and do some as if what if I were that person, who would I be?

How would I feel?

How would I behave?

How would I act in the

Boston: world?

What an excellent exercise that feels, if that feels like a, there's one thing I would like for listeners to get from this.

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

I do this in my coaching, right?

This is.

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

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

It is such a powerful activity.

Jody Bower: it's huge.

It's huge.

It's life changing.

I've had it be life changing.

Boston: What were your favorite stories growing up?

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

Jody Bower: My mother gave me, Kurti, no, The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald when I was pretty young.

She read it to me.

It was her favorite story.

And that got me started on fantasy novels.

And then Tolkien fell on very fertile ground, I think, but I really loved that story There's a hero in it, but the princess is pretty active and it's a descent story.

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

I loved The Wind in the Willows.

I didn't care for Mr.

Toad, but I loved, I think the friendship between, Ratty and, Mole and the messing about in boats.

I grew up in boats.

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

And then, of course, when I was a teenager, like I said, I discovered Lord of the Rings and Dune and that was, boy.

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

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

I think she's an amazing psychologist.

Boston: thank you.

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

Jody Bower: That we have an eternal soul.

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

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

are

Boston: you willing to share a little bit about what that was

Jody Bower: like?

yeah, I had, I'd had a lot, I've had a rebuilt shoulder and before it was rebuilt, I was taking a lot of anti inflammatories, much more than the recommended dose and I had a catastrophic GI bleed.

I lost half my blood volume.

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

I was unconscious because I had no awareness of my body at all, and everything was black.

But I was there.

it wasn't like, being asleep.

It wasn't like being, anesthetized.

I was present in nothingness.

And I was given the choice to go or stay.

I didn't see anybody.

I didn't talk to anybody.

It was just but I also was completely at peace.

just completely at peace.

Everything was fine.

It was just you could take this out now.

You can go.

This is an option for you to leave if you want to leave or if you don't feel complete.

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

Wow, this is a pretty easy way to go.

There's no pain I'm really calm, but on the other hand, there's so many people who would be upset and do I feel like I'm done.

No, I don't feel like I'm done so then I woke up on the floor of my, hallway and managed to reach up and open the doorway and call for help.

And I was in intensive care for a week.

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

But, but that whole week was so blissful.

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

It was like I saw their loving, angelic Self.

Those nurses were amazing.

And I think they felt me seeing them that way because the way they treated me and saw me was just amazing.

I mean, it was it's bizarre to say, I'm lying in intensive care with three different IVs going in me because they're trying to keep me, you know, from dying.

And I'm blissed out.

Wow.

Boston: Yeah.

I'm so glad you decided to stay.

Jody Bower: Thank you.

I am, too.

I am, too.

It's, doesn't, hasn't meant the end of challenges in my life, but, I wouldn't imagine.

Boston: No.

But you chose them.

Jody Bower: But I chose them, yeah, and I'm not worried, I don't fear death, I'll tell you that.

I do not fear death.

Boston: That is powerful.

Thank you.

Oh boy.

After, after, after that, the next question is going backwards in, in what ways are you the same now as you were when you were a child?

Jody Bower: I was a very serious child.

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

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

And he talks about people who have had a different difficult childhood tend to ask the big questions early on in life.

They're more thoughtful.

They're more empathetic.

they're more questioning, they become seekers.

And I think my childhood did make me that way.

And I've never stopped.

And sometimes I know, especially my family finds me a bit, you know, could you listen up already?

We don't have to have an intense discussion about the deeper meaning of everything.

But yeah, I do.

I do.

When I need to, I go and watch, a Ben Stiller movie or something to lighten me up.

Boston: Your seriousness and depth has transcended the years.

Jody Bower: Yeah, I think I just was conditioned.

my father was a scientist.

He raised me to be a critical thinker.

I had a very influential teacher in high school, who taught us, Plato, the unexamined life is not worth living.

And I'm just a questioner.

gets me in trouble sometimes because my friends sometimes put stuff up on the internet that they saw somewhere and believed and I will go on Snopes and say, no, that's not true.

I've decided to stop doing that.

I've decided that I am not here to police, that whole cartoon about the guy typing away badly and going, I can't come to bed.

Someone is wrong on the internet.

I trying to like, let people there's a woman, I forget her name, but she has this whole philosophy of let them, just let them, whatever they want to believe, whatever they want to say, however they want to treat you, just let them, don't worry about it.

I'm trying to adopt that.

They're on their journey.

Maybe I'm not.

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

And I said to him, you are going to encounter people on freeways who are jerks.

I didn't use that word.

I said, they are looking for a fight.

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

He told me later that was actually very useful advice.

And they do cut you off or flip you off or honk or something and you go, yeah, you'll find somebody to.

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

I'm not going to be that today.

Boston: That is great life advice in general.

Yeah.

You will encounter people who are looking for a fight.

You do not have to give it to them.

That's

Jody Bower: beautiful.

They will find somebody else.

Someone else will come along.

Yeah.

Boston: this next question, you may have already answered it, but here it is again in a different shape.

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

Jody Bower: besides the other thing I saw, I've seen a UFO, and, I was camping, I was up in the San Juan Islands, we were camping on the beach, there was a stretch of water across from us, and then another island, and we're sitting there, we've had a campfire, we're thinking about going to bed.

And this very bright light comes up over the island by, far from us and comes down and goes along the water in front of us.

And it was just a globe of light.

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

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

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

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

It was, it couldn't have been a helicopter, and this is in the 70s, I don't think we had stealth helicopters anyway.

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

I have no explanation for that.

Boston: and how do you think, having that kind of experience, what do you think that does to, did or does to your worldview?

Jody Bower: I did.

There's, Shakespeare, "there are more things under heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." I don't think anybody has the answers.

I don't think science has all the answers.

I think that there's just so much more to the fullness of life than any one or set of disciplines can add, and they're just mystery.

There's mystery.

And, I think a life in which you think there's no mystery or that any mystery could be explained, would be kind of sad.

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

I have no idea what that was.

Yes.

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

Boston: Yes.

more mystery.

cheers to that.

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

Jody Bower: This is a funny thing.

I've had a few moments usually out in the woods where it's just been a perfect moment, where everything, I don't know where you feel a part of everything.

And I think that's the biggest part.

The other times would be I'm a singer.

I'm a singer in a choir.

And singing with a good choir and singing an amazing piece of music and everybody's in harmony and it's one of those times when it's really clicked when the choir is your breathing is what you're an organism.

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

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

I can think of one in particular.

I got to sing, the Verdi Requiem in the opera house in Seattle with my choir with, I was at the University of Washington at the time and, it, the head of the music department was retiring and we put on this one shot show and it was transcending.

it was that's an amazing piece of music and I don't know, I was just, I was somewhere else for most of it.

Oh, wow.

Boston: Yeah.

Yeah.

There's something so beautiful in that, in what you just shared, there's so many components to it.

Breathing as one, merging with something bigger than yourself, and then you throw in music, which transforms a soundscape and you put that in such a fabulous cathedral, which is acoustically designed to elevate that.

And it itself is something that is built to elevate, like that's just sounds magnificent

Jody Bower: and you have an audience.

who is feeling everything you're, I'm not an actor, but I can understand that it's not about you being up on stage.

It's just you and the audience.

And also, I think that there's a skill level, there's a skill you've worked at, that you are getting to employ.

Boston: we've covered a lot of ground.

Thank you so much for being willing to just dance in this conversation and share so much.

How can people find you?

Jody Bower: I have a blog.

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

Also, you can reach me through LinkedIn.

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

I do a lot of work with, film programs.

Because, you know, it's the script writers who really get how myth translates into words.

I also do book coaching.

I was an editor for years.

Now I'm working at a higher level.

And one of the things I do is, especially when people are at the early stages of writing a book.

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

I have a lot of questions.

I have a lot of advice for how to take the vague idea and understand What your structure should be, who your audience is.

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

Boston: Outstanding.

Jody, thank you so much for your time today.

You've been really generous

Jody Bower: This has been fun for me.

Thank you.

Boston: Thanks again to my guest Dr.

Jody Bower.

And thank you to our listeners.

If you enjoyed this episode of Mythic, please consider leaving a review wherever you get your podcasts.

That helps people find the show.

You can also find more information, including show notes and other resources at mythicpodcast.com.

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

Until next time.

Journey on.