Hero's Journey

The Hero's Journey® Foundation is a not-for-profit 501(c)3 organization. It supports individuals and groups in responding to life's universal call: to move beyond current circumstances, confront and transcend personal limitations, and emerge with renewed vitality and purpose. Its guiding phrase is "Opening doorways to awaken vital living."

Its work is built on the pattern the mythologist Joseph Campbell described, with three movements: Separation, Initiation and Return. The Foundation says lasting change comes through experience, participation and a willingness to engage fully, and it invites people to live this pattern rather than only understand it. It uses the Hero's Journey® name under license from the Joseph Campbell Foundation.

The programs take several forms. Some are wilderness journeys, including a weeklong summer intensive for men in the mountains of Spruce Knob, West Virginia. Others are retreats such as the Men's Soul Tavern, immersions for particular communities, and a three-week online winter journey called Ensemble Hero. Some engage the imagination through myth, music and song, while others explore deeper psychological processes. Alongside these, the Foundation offers trainings for practitioners in one-to-one facilitation and in group facilitation, drawing on what Campbell called psycho-mythology.

The Foundation makes its home at Lifebridge Sanctuary in Rosendale, in New York's Hudson Valley, a place of natural beauty and intentional design. It also welcomes groups with shared values to host their own retreats there. Its facilitators bring backgrounds in psychology, healing, wilderness exploration and group dynamics. The Foundation also shares essays, poetry and meditations, including on Insight Timer, as a way of letting myth and the arts open doors "where we didn't know there were doors."