Ensemble Hero: Wilding Our Hearts

Ensemble Hero: Wilding Our Hearts is a three-week online spiritual workshop in the Hero's Journey tradition, offered by the Hero's Journey® Foundation. It is an invitation to loosen what has become rigid, reclaim what is most alive, and meet other people with more courage, tenderness and truth. It is held over the darkest part of the winter, when many of us drift toward isolation and stagnation, and it is open to anyone looking for reflection and community in that season.

The program balances the inner work of being with the outer work of considered action, held inside a community. Its guiding thought is to learn to face the unknown FOR yourself, but not BY yourself.

What to Expect

The Journey runs for three weeks and meets online in two layers. Each week there is a larger community gathering on a Saturday or Sunday morning, hosted by Michael Mervosh. These sessions are recorded, so anyone who cannot attend live can watch later.

Alongside them are smaller, one-hour Journey Groups, which meet on Tuesday afternoons and Wednesday evenings, Eastern Time. Participants use these groups to check in and share how the Journey is unfolding. Hero's Journey® Foundation staff facilitate them, and they are not recorded.

Between sessions, the practice is yours to shape. Provided readings, guided meditations and self-reflection or journaling prompts deepen the experience. There are also invitations to personal initiatives called "reaches," and you are free to immerse yourself in whatever forms speak to you most.

The weeks have a natural arc. The first opens the Journey with readings, a guided meditation and journaling. The second continues the reflection and the reaches. The third includes a check-in on how the program has unfolded for everyone.

Past participants describe the shared sense of connection with people from many places, a deeper contact with themselves and others, and a community with what one of them calls "a huge heart."

About the Hero's Journey® Foundation

The Hero's Journey® Foundation is a not-for-profit 501(c)3 organization that supports individuals and groups in answering 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 draws on the pattern the mythologist Joseph Campbell described, with three movements: Separation, Initiation and Return. The Foundation holds that lasting change comes through experience, participation and a willingness to engage fully, so 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. Its programs take several forms, including wilderness journeys and online gatherings like this one.

Before You Go

The program is held in English, entirely online, so you can join from wherever you are. Meeting times are given in Eastern Time, which is worth checking against your own time zone. No prior experience is described as required.

The weekly community gatherings, their recordings, the Journey Group meetings, the readings, the guided meditations, the journaling prompts and the invitations to reaches are all part of the Journey. Journey Group sessions are not recorded, so those are best attended live.

For questions before the Journey begins, the organizer's contact person is Anna Noack.