Are you the hero in the story of your life?

A study published in the Journal of Personal and Social Psychology in 2023, Seeing Your Life Story as a Hero’s Journey Increases Meaning in Life, shows that whether your answer to the above question was Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Arjuna, Karna, or Draupadi, seeing your life through the lens of hero archetypes can have a significant impact on your well-being by helping you find meaning in life.

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The template of a hero’s journey

Research indicates that by the time we are in our early 20s, most of us have constructed a narrative identity, i.e, an internalised and evolving life story, that explains how we became the person we are, and where our life might go in the future. The stories we tell ourselves about our lives influence how alive and purposeful we feel.

World renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell in his seminal work, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, published in 1949, provides a structure for heroic journeys in mythologies and blockbuster movies, which he describes as a monomyth, i.e., a singular template of transformation. At its most basic form, a hero responds to an inner calling and goes on an adventure, emerges victorious from a defining crisis, and then returns home changed for the better. Campbell is of the view that if a person doesn’t respond to their inner calling and follows a programmatic life instead, they will inevitably fall sick. “I think what we are really seeking is an experience of being alive. Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of human life," he says in the TV series, The Power of Myth.

Multiple studies show that the hero’s journey predicts and can causally increase people’s experience of well-being in life. “Perceiving your life as a ‘hero’s journey’ is associated with psychological benefits such as enhanced well-being, greater life satisfaction, feeling like you are flourishing, and reduced depression," says Benjamin A. Rogers, an assistant professor of management and organisation at Boston College and author of the study mentioned earlier. 

Hero archetypes in Indian epics

Campbell in his books and talks has often acknowledged the richness of Indian mythology and its implications for helping one live life more fully. “All the gods, heavens, hell and worlds are within us. This is the great realisation of the Upanishads of India...," he notes in The Power of Myth.

India has a rich tradition of purānās and itihāsās, which are replete with powerful archetypes that serve as mirror for self-exploration. Serving as a map of our inner psyches, these stories enable us to go on a journey of self-discovery. To tap into this awareness, one needs to learn to look at a myth in its connotative form instead of the denotative form. For instance, Arjuna is a quintessential Indian hero archetype. Arjuna represents the heroic potential that unfolds when one can anchor oneself in a state of dhyāna (meditative silence). This opens up the possibility for an individual to access the inherent intelligence from one’s Unconscious. This is metaphorically represented as the dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna in the Mahābhārata.

“The purānās are meant to be mirrors unto yourself, enabling you to nurture the seeds within," says Raghu Ananthanarayanan in his TedX talk, Mahābhārata as a mirror to the Self. Ananthanarayanan is a behavioural scientist and yoga practitioner who has done pioneering work with archetypes from Mahābhārata in self-exploration and leadership contexts. Chaturvedi Badrinath, author of the Sahitya Akademi award-winning book, The Mahābhārata: An Inquiry in the Human Condition, talks about how the Mahābhārata is a systematic philosophical and political inquiry into the human condition. In his book, he examines the epic in the light of human life and relationships, showing that the epic is, at its core, a meditation on the order underlying human relationships. 

The Mahābhārata in our lives

India has a rich Mahābhārata performance tradition which creates a reflective space that aids individual and collective well-being. Bhāratakoothu is a large-scale, month-long Mahābhārata festival that has been performed in over 200 villages in Tamil Nadu for over 1300 years. The site of the festival is usually the temple of Draupadi Amman (Goddess Draupadi), who is the village deity in many parts of northern Tamil Nadu. The celebrations, according to Indian encyclopaedic resource Sahapedia, include ‘daily morning processions and rituals, narration of the Mahābhārata by professional storytellers, and nightly koothu performances of episodes from the epic’. These performances are participatory and have the audiences involved as citizen characters, the Sahapedia article by M.D. Muthukumaraswamy notes.  

According to Chennai-based cinematographer and independent filmmaker Sashikanth Ananthachari, listening to and participating in the epic at the Dharmaraja/Draupadi Amman temples allows participants to relive the Mahābhārata of their own lives.

“I’ve seen how strained relationships between family members have healed and restored at the end of a 21-day performance because it gave them the opportunity to reflect on their own actions and make course corrections," says Ananthachari, who has done extensive research on the Mahābhārata performance traditions in Tamil Nadu for the past 15 years. He is currently running an online course on the performance traditions of Tamil Nadu for IIT-Madras and NPTEL. 

“People find it easy to reflect upon their actions and life when they start seeing the Duryodhana, Bheema, and Draupadi in themselves. With the participants undergoing this experience annually, each repetition adds more nuances to the understanding of the epic and of their own engagement with the world," Ananthachari explains before adding, “This continuous revisiting of one’s life patterns and action choices through the epic’s characters makes it distinct from the linearity of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, where each step of the journey is followed in a set order, and only once."  

The archetypes inherent in our personal mythologies enable us to make sense of the world and our experiences at a depth that languages often fail to articulate. I got to see a practical application of this theory in one of my recent leadership coaching sessions where a senior corporate leader was feeling challenged by a situation at work. As we engaged with the dilemma at a deeper level through reflective art, the picture that emerged for him was of Krishna on a chariot in the middle of the Kurukshetra battle-field. The picture helped him connect the dots and make sense of the nuances of his dilemma as a leader to take the next step. To riff off on the millennial phrase, ‘main character energy’ that exhorts you to claim your life as if you are the protagonist, here’s a question for you to mull over: What does your choice of the hero in the movie of your life tell you? 

Hariprasad Varma is an executive coach & yoga therapist based in Hyderabad. He posts at @zenseihari.

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