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What is your Personal Myth and why you Need to Explore it
- Alice
- Mar 21
- 9 min read
Descend into your unconscious by knowing the personal myth that will transform your life
Exploring your personal myth can be a very enriching process, especially if you're in the midst of a transition and need clarity to know your next steps.
When I closed my language school, I thought the online option would be a walk in the park. I signed up for several courses, tried various things, but nothing seemed to move the needle. The main problem? I had lost my bearings and my hopes. I had entered a dark night of the soul; an existential crisis that affected two of the three basic pillars of any person's life: finances and health.
It was through Gothic literature and later Jungian psychology that I began to descend into the depths of my psyche. There, I began to confront my shadows. This helped me reframe my story through symbols, archetypes, and stories that resonated with my life experience. Through this journey, I not only began to better understand the fears that were blocking me but also the desires.
Bringing the hidden elements of the unconscious into consciousness allows us to integrate them and thus create a new transformative energy more aligned with our new self.
This alchemical process, certainly not easy, in which I had to destroy everything I knew until then, was what led me to hit rock bottom and be reborn little by little with new energy and hopes. To this day, I still have a long way to go.
If this resonates with you, I invite you to continue reading to discover the importance of unearthing your story and restoring your concept not only of life, but also of death.
This process will not only help you free yourself from external deceptions and manipulations, but it will also help you value your inner potential because when we remain trapped in stories we have not chosen, we are deeply conditioned. The mental hijacking to which we are subtly subjected daily can come in the form of a television documentary or false beliefs that come from our environment. The result is that we end up weaving a "non-life," or an existence in which we feel invisible. Becoming aware of this invisibility is the first step in developing a powerful tool that helps you discover your true myth and thus break free from what constrains you.
Exploring your personal myth is a transformation that will allow you to recover the deeper meaning of your existence and give your life its own direction, immersing yourself in your narrative and deciphering the threads that have shaped your identity.
Here, I invite you to explore some strategies that can help you work on your personal myth.
Art as a mirror of the unconscious
Since ancient times, art has been a means of access to the deepest part of human beings. Painting, sculpture, and music have served as channels to express the inexpressible in words. More than the materialization or representation of an idea, art is a mirror that reveals all the symbols and archetypes of our unconscious. In all its forms, it helps us make the invisible visible and makes us ask questions about our journey through life.
Carl Jung spoke of the process of "active imagination," where art becomes that dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious. In his work, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, he said that "everything in the unconscious seeks to manifest itself, and the personality also wants to evolve from its unconscious conditions and experience in consciousness what was previously only obscured."
One of the activities you can begin to explore your myth is to keep a dream journal. For me, this has been a turning point, especially if I then expand the meaning of the symbols and archetypes that appear in my dreams with the help of The Book of Symbols. Reflections on archetypal images.
If, instead of buying a journal, you create it yourself from scratch, choosing the cover, the material it will be made of, etc., this process will lead you to a deeper connection with yourself.
2. Gothic literature as a communication tool
Gothic literature isn't just a literary genre; it's a mode of expression and analysis, and a place where writers express their shadows and repressed desires. It's the language of those trapped in imposed stories.
In novels such as Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley or Beloved by Toni Morrison, we find characters struggling with identity, trauma, and redemption. But these aren't the only themes they touch on. The intertwining emotions and themes these works cover form an amalgam of social problems and concerns that remain relevant today.
When I was young, although I loved reading, I found it very difficult to concentrate on what I read, especially if it didn't engage me. However, works like Nada by Carmen Laforet, Tristana de Benito Pérez Galdós, La Voz by Mercè Company and later gothic classics like Dracula by Bram Stoker or Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë gradually became indispensable in my life. In this way, the doors were opened to something that, from a psychological perspective, allowed me to recognize certain archetypes that appeared in these works and had been operating in my life.
As an exercise, I invite you to list the books that have most attracted you throughout your life and analyse what they have in common. You'll surely discover some of the messages your unconscious has been sending you for as long as you can remember.
3. The Shadow
Jung defined the shadow as that part of ourselves that we deny or repress. It can manifest itself through emotions, repetitive patterns, or projections onto others.
Integrating the shadow is essential to understanding your personal myth.
The invisibility and "non-life" we discussed at the beginning of this post are often signs of a shadow that has not yet been integrated; that is, it has not become conscious and therefore has not been worked through.
From a neuroscientific point of view, we are told that “Progressive exposure to one's own fears aids in neural restructuring and the reduction of anxiety."(Phelps et al., 2004).
And of course, in complex cases, it's best to do this work with a mental health professional.
A practical exercise you can do to begin working on your shadow is to keep a journal where you write about daily situations in which you feel emotions such as fear, envy, or anger. Being aware of these feelings is the first step to integrating them.
Another exercise is to pay attention to the characters who appear in your dreams. Those who are of the same sex as you can often be indicators of your shadow, and therefore it's important to listen to what they're trying to tell us.
4. Death as transformation
Exploring death doesn't mean focusing on the macabre, but rather understanding it as a natural transition. The problem we have in many cultures is that death bothers us to such an extent that we try to eradicate it as much as possible from our daily lives. A clear symptom of this discomfort is the way we dispose of the bodies of our relatives once they have died. It is cold, and dehumanizing, and doesn't allow either the dying person or their family members to transition generously and gradually from one state to the other. Fortunately, in some traditions, death continues to symbolize rebirth.
Death can also be an opportunity to leave behind what no longer serves us. If you think of the tarot cards, for example, death often indicates a change or the end of one situation or moment in life to begin another.
Film and television are good examples where you can see how characters deal with death. For me, a very clear example that has greatly helped me delve into my fears about loss and transformation is the American series Supernatural, which I highly recommend whenever I have the opportunity.
Works like On Grief and Grieving by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross o The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rimpoché can be very helpful.
5. Dreams and synchronicity
Dreams and synchronicities are, in my opinion, some of the most interesting tools for discovering your own myth.
Sleep is inevitable, as are dreams, although not everyone remembers them.
When we sleep, not only does our body regenerate, but our psyche also processes the day's information. From a biological perspective, during sleep the brain eliminates toxins and strengthens neural connections, facilitating learning and memory. On a psychological level, rest allows the unconscious to express itself without the limitations of wakefulness.
We can imagine sleep as an internal laboratory where our unconscious takes fragments of experiences, emotions, and symbols to communicate something to us that would otherwise go unnoticed in everyday life. While we repair tissues and restore energy, the psyche reorganizes internal contents, helping us integrate what we have experienced.
A recurring or particularly vivid dream, for example, can be a sign that something within us requires our attention, just as physical pain can indicate that something in the body needs healing.
To learn more about your dreams, books like Jung's Man and His Symbols will help you delve deeper into this process and view it less through an esoteric lens and more as a reality of our psyche.
Regarding synchronicity, we must start by saying that, unlike a coincidence, synchronicity carries subjective meaning for the person who experiences it, which is what makes it special. It's not just the simultaneity of events, but the impact they have on our internal world.
An example of synchronicity could be dreaming about an old friend you haven't spoken to in years. When you wake up, you feel a particular emotion, as if the dream had a message for you. Hours later, that friend sends you an unexpected message, or you see their name on an ad in the street. In this case, the coincidence becomes synchronicity because it has a subjective meaning: the dream seemed to anticipate the reunion.
Carl Jung described synchronicity as "a meaningful coincidence between an internal psychic state and an external event." The key is that there is a parallel between what happens outside and what happens within us.
To recognize a synchronicity, ask yourself if that event resonates with something that was already on your mind or emotions, if it has an impact on your life or makes you reflect in a way that a simple coincidence wouldn't, or if similar patterns repeat themselves at different times in your life, leading you to the same symbols or themes.
Synchronicities are not signs of "good" or "bad" luck, but rather opportunities to reflect on our path and the dialogue between our psyche and the outside world.
6. Personal discovery and personal development
When Stephen King wrote Misery, he was in the midst of personal struggles with substance abuse, which influenced the creation of the character Annie Wilkes. The story is inspired by a vivid dream the author had during a transatlantic flight to London, where he imagined a writer held captive by a psychotic fan. This was the scenario that became the basis of the novel.
If you think about it, King makes his living by working his subconscious through horror. This is largely because he touches on themes of universal fears that resonate with the collective unconscious.
King, like many creators, often uses his own darkness to shape his work. This same principle can be applied to our own descent into the unconscious.
Like any mythological journey, the stories we tell ourselves and consume involve a descent into the depths, a confrontation with internal chaos before finding the light. This process can be challenging, but it is essential for transformation.
There are different practices to guide this descent. As we've already seen, writing is one of my favorites, but it's not the only one. Meditation, exercises like Chi Kung, writing in your journal, and paying attention to the messages from your unconscious during your daily daydreams also put you in touch with your archetypal world.
Just as dreams and synchronicities reveal fragments of our personal myth, some tools help us interpret these messages more clearly. One of them is the I Ching, or Book of Changes, which Jung himself studied deeply.
The I Ching is not a method of divination in the traditional sense, but rather a way of dialoguing with the unconscious through symbolic language. By asking a question and consulting the book, the answers come not as fixed predictions, but as archetypal patterns that can illuminate aspects of our lives we hadn't consciously considered.
Jung considered it an excellent example of synchronicity in action: the answer we receive doesn't depend on pure chance but on the meaningful relationship between our question and the moment in which we ask it.
Personally, my first approach to the I Ching was through a recommendation from my analyst. Synchronicities led me to an online course where I discovered the value of this practice, and although I am still exploring it, I have already seen how it can serve as a symbolic guide in the process of self-knowledge.
Conclusion
As we've seen, exploring your personal myth is a path of self-discovery that involves working on various areas and ways your unconscious communicates with you to make sense of the experiences your conscious self is going through.
It's a lifelong journey, but one that, little by little, offers small daily rewards. It's precisely this aspect that invites you, like any hero or heroine, to discover your own myth, which can mark a before and after in your life.
If you could choose just one aspect of your personal myth to explore right now, what would it be?
Share your story in the comments, and let's begin this journey together.
If you enjoyed this post and want to continue developing your myth, you can join my mailing list to receive my free monthly newsletter by clicking the following link: https://www.gothicalice.com/
And as a gift for being here, here's my six-day guided journal to uncover your inner goth and take those first steps toward beginning the journey toward your personal myth.
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