The Syncreate Podcast: Empowering Creativity
Welcome to Syncreate, where we explore the intersections between creativity, psychology, and spirituality. Our goal is to demystify the creative process and expand the boundaries of what it means to be creative.
Creativity. It’s a word we throw around all the time, but what does it really mean? On the Syncreate Podcast, we share stories of the creative journey. We talk to changemakers, visionaries and everyday creatives working in a wide array of fields and disciplines. Our goal is to explore creativity in all its facets, and to gain a better understanding of the creative process – from imagination to innovation and everything in between.
The Syncreate Podcast is hosted by Melinda Rothouse, PhD. She helps individuals and organizations bring their creative dreams and visions to life through coaching, consulting, workshops, retreats, and now, this podcast. She's written two books on creativity, including Syncreate: A Guide to Navigating the Creative Process for Individuals, Teams, and Communities (winner of a Silver Nautilus Award for Creativity and Innovation), with Charlotte Gullick. She's also a musician (singer-songwriter and bass player) and photographer based in Austin, Texas.
The Syncreate Podcast: Empowering Creativity
Episode 42: Creativity and Depth Psychology - The Underworld Journey with Jennifer Leigh Selig
Our guest today is Jennifer Leigh Selig, author of the new book Deep Memoir, and founder of Mandorla Books, an award-winning boutique publisher. Our conversation explores creativity and depth psychology, which examines the deeper questions of life, meaning, and purpose. We discuss the proverbial underworld journey, or dark night of the soul, and how we can make meaning of pain and suffering for the sake of our own growth and development, as well as to benefit others.
For our Creativity Pro-Tip, pay attention to what stories, myths, and archetypes resonate most for you at this time. Reflect on the wisdom you’ve gained from your life experiences, and to consider how you might share that wisdom with others.
Credits: The Syncreate podcast is created and hosted by Melinda Rothouse, and produced at Record ATX studios with in collaboration Michael Osborne and 14th Street Studios in Austin, Texas. Syncreate logo design by Dreux Carpenter.
If you enjoy this episode and want to learn more about the creative process, you might also like our conversations in Episode 10: Imagination and Creativity with Dr. Diana Rivera, Episode 23: The Corporate Mystic with Stephanie Crain, and Episode 34: Creativity and Transpersonal Psychology Part 1 with Marina Smirnova, PhD.
At Syncreate, we're here to support your creative endeavors. If you have an idea for a project and you’re not sure how to get it off the ground, reach out to us! Our book, also called Syncreate, walks you through the stages of the creative process so you can take action on your creative goals. We also offer resources, creative process tools, and coaching to help you bring your work to the world. You can find more information on our website, syncreate.org, where you can also find all of our podcast episodes. Find and connect with us on social media and YouTube under Syncreate, and we’re on Patreon as well. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave us a review!
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Melinda: Welcome to Syncreate, a show where we explore the intersections between creativity, psychology, and spirituality. We believe everyone has the capacity to create. And our goal is to demystify the creative process and expand the boundaries of what it means to be creative. I'm Melinda Rothouse, and I help individuals and organizations bring their dreams and visions to life.
At Syncreate, we're here to support your creative endeavors. So, if you have an idea for a project or a new venture, please reach out to us for one-on-one coaching.
So today I am so very excited to have my friend, colleague, and collaborator, Jennifer Leigh Selig with us today. And Jennifer is the founder of Mandorla Books, which is actually the publisher of our Syncreate book. It's an award-winning press, including our book, which won a Silver Nautilus Award for Creativity and Innovation.
She's the author and/or editor of a dozen books, and she was the founding chair of the depth psychology and creativity master's degree at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California. She now teaches and presents extensively, both online and across the country, focusing on memoir writing. So she has a new book out which we'll be talking about today called Deep Memoir.
And she's also the co-author of another book called Deep Creativity. And both of these books bring an archetypal and depth-psychological perspective to the creative process. So that kind of brings us to our topic today, which is creativity and depth psychology. Depth psychology being kind of a Jungian approach to psychology, archetypal psychology, really looking into kind of the, the deeper meaning of, of things and all kinds of fun stuff, which we're going to hear more about. So, Jennifer, so glad to have you here today.
Jennifer: Ah, Melinda, it's such a joy to be with you again.
Melinda: Yes, I love it. And so just a little background on how we know each other… So we actually met through the Jung Society of Austin, where I was a board member for several years, and we've collaborated in various different capacities over the years. And you recently were back in Austin. You're based in California, but, back in Austin at the Jung Society for a presentation and workshop on “The Seven Stages of the Underworld Journey.” And unfortunately, I was not able to be there. But it sounded…
Jennifer: I know I was so disappointed.
Melinda: I know, and it sounds so fascinating. So I want to kind of bring this to our listeners and our audience, and I think maybe a good place to start with this… I want to get into the, the, you know, the juicy details, but what is this underworld journey from a depth-psychological and archetypal perspective for those who may not know?
Jennifer: Yeah, that's a good question. So, you know, my background is in Jungian and archetypal studies, as you mentioned, and that's just inherently interested in the underworld journey because, you know, as you know, it's part of our individuation journey as well. Right? So something happens that kind of dropkicks us out of our everyday egoic lives. We descend into the darkness, you know, we confront our shadow.
And if and when we ascend, because it's an ‘if and when’ we ascend, we come back with some creative gold or what Joseph Campbell called the boon for ourselves and our community. So that's basically an underworld experience. You know, they include things like divorce, breakup, illnesses, accidents, diagnoses of all kinds, losing your job. I mean, there's no end to the underworld experiences, including collective underworld experiences like the pandemic, like what we're going through right now within Israel and Gaza. You know, there's so many events we go through together as a culture as well as individually.
Melinda: Yes, yes. So this is kind of the prototypical dark night of the soul, you know?
Jennifer: Yes.
Melinda: You hear about the underworld in different myths and stories across cultures. But really, this is a real-life experience that we each encounter, inevitably, going through life.
Jennifer: Sometimes many times in a life.
Melinda: Yes.
Jennifer: Sometimes we’re born into an underworld experience, but if we live life for any period of time, even if we had the best of childhoods, we're going to be in the underworld.
Melinda: Absolutely. And, you know, according to Jungian and depth psychology, it's actually from these experiences, you know, these kind of crises or this, this kind of suffering, that we actually learn and grow the most, or at least we have the potential to.
Jennifer: The potential to.
Melinda: The potential to.
Jennifer: That's why I say, if and when we ascend. Because some people don't make it out of the underworld. And some people succumb to addiction, to suicide, to, you know, to a life of depression, to, you know, inability to, inability to live life to the fullest. There's all sorts of ways we don't always make it out of the underworld. And I always think it's important to say that.
Melinda: Absolutely, absolutely. And so I'm curious to hear more about these seven stages, both just, you know, if we can… I have found it in my personal experience, if I can kind of understand the nature of these journeys, these experiences, then I feel a little bit better equipped to navigate them when they inevitably occur. Right? And so you've kind of mapped out these seven stages. So I'd love to hear more about those. And also how does this relate to creativity?
Jennifer: Yeah. Good. So, so, what, when I came up with these stages, I was, I've been teaching memoir writing primarily for the last seven years. And so many of my students come in and probably 80, 85% come in to write an underworld story or at least have an underworld component. And many memoirs are memoirs about trauma as well.
So it's a well-worn path. But when I looked at examples of the journey, the structure of the journey, the archetype of the journey, I couldn't find anything that really talked about, what is it like when you're in the underworld? What do you go through in the underworld other than it's a dark night and then you ascend?
There's not much out there about that. So I wanted to help my memoir students kind of with a schema or a map of the underworld, to look at how they could talk about their journeys and how other people have talked about theirs. And I just love what you said right there, because the, this is an archetypal approach which looks at universal patterns. Right?
So I think there are patterned experiences in the underworld. And once you know you're living inside of a pattern that many people before you have lived through, people are living through now and people will live through forever, it makes you feel less alone in your own particular journey. So that's kind of the impetus to come up with these particular stages is to say, these, I call them actually, sometimes I call them the seven stations of the cross of our own underworld journey. Right?
Melinda: Yeah.
Jennifer: So they go all the way back to Jesus and they're all throughout mythology. So, you know, in my, in my book on deep memoir, I connect each one of these stages with particular myths, cross-cultural myths of the underworld journey.
Melinda: Yeah. And I just want to say that, you know, again, that, because these are sort of universal experiences, we see them in, you know, different myths and different stories across cultures. And that's precisely why these stories, these myths have such resonance, right? Because they can actually be viewed as a map of some sort to our own experiences.
Jennifer: Exactly, exactly. And it really connects to what you're talking about with Syncreate, which is that, you know, the intersection between creativity, spirituality and psychology.
Melinda: Yeah.
Jennifer: Because this is, you know, maps like these are transpersonal, meaning they cross cultures and times, right?
Melinda: Yeah.
Jennifer: You can find them in the earliest myths and you can find them in the most contemporary memoirs. So yeah. So that's really what I, what I've been looking at.
Melinda: Great. So take us through kind of what are these seven stages about.
Jennifer: Yeah, I will. I'll take you through. I'm going to take you through them without talking about the myth, because the myth would take too much time to talk about.
Melinda: Yeah.
Jennifer: But I just want to say for, for anyone who's interested in connecting it with the myth, you can, I mean, you can get my book Deep Memoir, but you can also, I assume in the show notes, you can put my website. You guys can, you know -
Melinda: Absolutely.
Jennifer: - your listeners can connect with me on the website.
Melinda: Oh, for sure.
Jennifer: And I'm happy to send you guys, you know, anyone who wants, the chapter in the book that talks about these so you can see why they're connected. Because some of the titles I'm going to say about the stages may not make a lot of sense unless you understand the myth that it's connected to. So.
Melinda: Got it.
Jennifer: But let me move. Let me move through them and then we can talk about them.
Melinda: Yes, please.
Jennifer: Okay. So the first one I call “Love's Failure Against Death”, which is about, it kind of begins with our inability to stop our descent into the underworld. And by love, I mean, you know, our will, our capacity, our hearts, our souls. We cannot stop our descent.
Something's out of our control. Circumstances are happening to us. As I said, it might be an unexpected diagnosis, a sudden car accident. You know, a spouse or a partner wanting to divorce or separate, a depression that swallows us up. And then also, you know, as we saw, a global pandemic that falls upon us and we, we're in failure to stop this thing from happening as much as we want to.
And in this stage, we really experience this almost complete sense of futility. There's nothing I can do, and human beings don't, we don't like to be out of control.
Melinda: No, we do not enjoy that experience.
Jennifer: Not when it's negative. Maybe if it was positive.
Melinda: Right!
Jennifer: Yeah. So after we're kind of, that's the plunge into the underworld, and after we're plunged into the underworld, the second stage I call “The Backwards Glance”, which is when we can't stop looking back at what we lost or what life used to be, or what life could have been had this experience not happened.
And it's a place of not being able to really accept what has what has been done or what has been done to us or what we've done to ourselves. Because sometimes, you know, through our own faults and failures, we plunge ourselves into the underworld. It's also a stage where we're really feeling grief for what's lost. And this is the stage where we do a lot of, you know, ‘what if, what if, what if, what if.’
Melinda: Yeah.
Jennifer: What if I had eaten healthier? What if, you know, what if I, you know, all those things. And sometimes it's a stage where if we've been betrayed, we're unable to forgive and forget. So we're just stuck looking backwards, which means we can't move forward.
Melinda: Yes. That is so important because often it's so much easier to see, you know, what we're losing. And then it's like, I went through this because I, I had a surgery recently, which I talked about in a previous episode where it's like, there's this event horizon and you, you can't see beyond it. You can only see, you know, what are you losing or what are you afraid of or whatever. And you can't see beyond into the potential of the future at that point.
Jennifer: Yes, exactly. And then you, I don't know if you did this with your diagnosis, but then sometimes people will just be like, what could I have done to have stopped this from happening?
Melinda: Right, right.
Jennifer: You're just so stuck in the past. Yeah, yeah. It’s a really difficult phase there. So the third stage I call “Stripping of the Self” and that, if you know the myth of Inanna, you'll understand this. But Inanna goes through these seven gates of hell and gets stripped in every single gate. So this has to do with everything we lose when we're in the underworld.
Melinda: Yeah.
Jennifer: Which could be, just to name a few things… Like, we could lose our money, we can lose our careers. We could lose our homes or possessions. You know, we can lose our reputation. We can lose our dreams for the future. We can lose family, loved ones. We can lose our physical or mental health. So it's about what's being taken from us.
Melinda: Yeah.
Jennifer: And those are physical things. But also in this stage we might suffer from psychological losses as well.
Melinda: Yeah.
Jennifer: The loss of innocence, the loss of a feeling of being in control, the loss of self-esteem, the loss of, our pride and dignity. And during this stage, as it was in the myth of Inanna, our losses may compound. So it's like one thing after another after another as we're in the underworld.
Melinda: Yes, and they often do seem to stack up in strange ways. Right?
Jennifer: Yes, yes. Particularly… you know, I always talk about how there are smaller underworld dips, you know, where you just go in for a while and come back out. But in the deep ones there tends to be a compounding of losses.
Melinda: Yes. Yeah. And that can be so disorienting. Right? And just kind of paralyzing also.
Jennifer: Yeah. And there are things we can anticipate and things we cannot. As, as we're in those losses. Right?
Melinda: Yeah.
Jennifer: So the fourth stage I call “Lost and Wandering” and that's really out of, out of, you know when I looked at the myths, there's oftentimes a sense of timelessness in the underworld, that you, time stands still and what we do is we just wander around sort of dazed and confused.
Melinda: Yeah. [Laughter]
Jennifer: Like what's happening, right? And we wonder, are we going to recover? Are we going to get out of this? Is life ever going to change? And certainly during the pandemic, we all felt this lost and wandering, right? Like, how much longer is this going to go on? And then these moments of hope that were then, that were, you know, that were then rescinded by back in lockdown again?
Melinda: Yep.
Jennifer: So during this stage, you know, we, you know, sometimes for people it's a very suicidal place where we wonder if we even want to live or we want to die. Are we just, can, can we get back to a state of normalcy at all? And, and also we may really withdraw from the world.
Melinda: Yeah.
Jennifer: And again, using the pandemic, I saw that happen. But I also know with personal underworld experiences, a lot of times we withdraw. We kind of curl up inside of our mourning, and kind of sometimes disappear into a shell of ourselves as we're just trying to protect ourselves from everything that we've lost.
Melinda: Yes, yes. And sometimes I mean, that, you know, can be, just, as you say, a type of protection. It's just like a necessary survival mechanism. Right? As long as we don't stay there.
Jennifer: Yeah. Well it's such a state of disorientation because we're like, what just happened? Particularly if it's a sudden loss. That's an underworld experience. Or like what happened and how do I, how do I move past this or move out of this. Certainly I love to look at memoirs because I teach memoirs. And those of you who know Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild…
Melinda: Yes.
Jennifer: The lost and wandering that she did while she was doing the hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail, even though she's, she's literally lost some time. She's also like, how do I survive the death of my mother? How do I survive my addiction? All of this. So we can see these patterns, you know, inside of memoir as well as myth.
Melinda: Yes. For sure. For sure.
Jennifer: Yeah. And I should just say here that these stages are not necessarily sequential. I put them in a sequence that makes the most sense for how I see people living them. But, you know, if anyone's working with these stages, you might find that you went in and out of different ones. You might find you were in 2 or 3 in any given day.
So they're not necessarily sequential. And you might not have gone through all of them, but I've done this with about 80, 90 students and workshop participants, and it's kind of amazingly accurate about how people move through these things once you slow down and dive in. So.
Melinda: Yes.
Jennifer: So I call the next step “The Remembering” and that's where we try to gather what it is that we lost. We try to get back to something. So we remember our beloved. We remember our relationship. We remember our job. We might… This is a stage where we might create a memorial or memorialize what it is that we've lost.
We might turn to a creative act, like writing, obviously for you, songwriting as well. Photography, I know you do. We might scrapbook… What we're trying to do in this stage is say, yes, this thing is lost, but let me remember it before it's completely gone. It sometimes comes with a state of nostalgia. You know, this idea of nostalgia, memorializing what's been lost.
So I can give an example of, just recently I lost my, my beloved grandmother. She was 102, and I had her my entire life. And after she died, I knew I needed to memorialize her in some way for myself, you know, beyond, you know, a memorial service. And so I took three days away by a beautiful body of water. And I brought all of her photographs, all of her, you know, everything that she had saved for herself.
And I went through document by document, piece by piece and read about her, read about her life, looked at her life, to really memorialize her in that way. And it was a very important stage for me and my own, you know, grief cycle.
Melinda: Yeah. Beautiful. And that you mentioned that, you know, it strikes me as I'm listening, the parallels to both kind of, the Hero's Journey, right. But also the stages of grief.
Jennifer: Yes. The stages, I actually, the stages of grief are the only, you know, when I was looking at all these journey structures and none of them really talked about what this is like. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief were the closest thing that I could find to that. But she, but she doesn't talk about necessarily the…
I mean, she talks about acceptance, but it's sort of a loose map onto the stages of grief, for sure. But there are, there are definitely parallels inside of that.
Melinda: Yeah, yeah.
Jennifer: So then two more, the, the sixth one I call “Following the Thread”, which if you know the myth of Ariadne and Theseus, it comes from that, which is that, we find a thread that leads us out of the underworld. The thread could be a person. It could be a therapist. It could be, you know, a 12-step sponsor. It could be an animal. It could be moving someplace beautiful in nature. It could be a trip we take, some travel we do.
I'm thinking of another popular memoir of, Elizabeth Gilbert and Eat, Pray, Love… The thread that takes her out of her grief around her marriage dissolving is traveling, you know, to the three countries she travels to. And this is the stage where we really begin, you know, we begin to see the light. Like we're kind of at the bottom, and we can look up and we can see the light.
Melinda: Yes.
Jennifer: And, you know, our grief, our anger, our futility kind of loses its hold on us. And usually, you know, where you talk about where creativity plays a part, creativity plays a big part in this particular stage.
Melinda: Yes.
Jennifer: But sometimes when we're in the underworld, we're not creative. And so our creativity is muted or dampened. And sometimes the only thing that is the thread to get us out is just time.
Melinda: Yes.
Jennifer: The idea of time heals all wounds, you know, just time passing and life carrying on. We sort of shrug off this underworld experience we've had, but certainly, you know, for your audience and for us, creativity is one really great thread out of the darkness.
Melinda: For sure. Yes.
Jennifer: And then I'll just do the last one and then we can talk about them more. But the last one is very similar to Joseph Campbell's last stage in the Hero's Journey, which is “The Gifts of the Underworld.”
Melinda: Yes.
Jennifer: And this idea that we return from our underworld experiences, you know, if we make it out, we can return with any number of psychological gifts. Like we can become more mature, wiser, less egoic, less innocent, more soulful, humbler. There's all sorts of gifts that we can get psychologically, but also sometimes physically. We might bring things out from the underworld, like, you know, better health, better habits.
I know I fell in love during the pandemic, so that was a gift for me to have the underworld experience, was being able to fall in love in the way that I did. And certainly for all of us who are creative, one of the gifts of the underworld is that we come out with our creative gifts. You know, we come out with material, we come out with songs to sing, writing to, you know, I came out of a bad underworld experience with a screenplay. And so we take our experience and we metabolize it. And we alchemize it and, you know, and we turn to our creativity. So.
Melinda: Yeah. Yeah. So this is so interesting because I teach a course for Saybrook University on creativity, individuation and depth psychology. And you mentioned individuation earlier, which essentially, you know, I sort of boil it down to this journey to wholeness that takes place across the span of a lifetime. And to me, how that relates to creativity is that, you know, individuation and this journey to wholeness is, has so much to do with meaning-making.
And I know you talk about that in your book, right? And that creativity, creative work is a beautiful way to make meaning of our experiences in, you know, all the ways that you just said, you know? There's, I know you also talk about expressive writing, right? Which is just this idea of like getting whatever it is out of our head and out of our body and onto the page, and that can be very cathartic.
But I think that holds true for, you know, any type of creativity, any medium, whether it's painting or dance or music or whatever it is, but that we can use these tools of creativity to kind of, you know, make sense, make meaning of our experiences, reflect upon them, grow from them.
Jennifer: Yeah. And make beauty from them.
Melinda: Yes. Yeah.
Jennifer: One of the, one of the stories that my coauthor, Deborah Anne Quibell, tells in Deep Creativity is about a man who was wheelchair bound. I think it was a brain injury. And he painted this mural on the wall of his, as he was, you know, as he was having to get up into his, his, his home, and on the ramp, he created this beautiful artistic mural to remind him of beauty in that sense.
And I think that's so important as well. And I don't, I don't know if we talk about beauty enough when we talk about underworld experiences, and certainly I haven't talked about it in the work I've done, but I know that's really important. And of course, as a, you know, as a songwriter, you understand that, that you, you make something beautiful from your underworld experiences.
Melinda: Yes, yes, exactly. And so I think this kind of, there's also a connection between, you know, kind of these seven stages that you're talking about and the notion of archetypes, which we've touched on in a previous episode, episode 23 with Stephanie Crain. We were talking about corporate personas and sort of archetypes in the corporate world, but more broadly, archetypes are kind of these, these universal structures, right, that we can connect with in different ways, maybe at different times in our lives, in different contexts.
And again, they have this universal quality to them, but we also experience them, in a very unique and specific way. So how, how does this notion of archetype relate to these stages of the underworld journey?
Jennifer: Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. So, so everything I, everything I do, the whole lens through which I see the world is an archetypal lens. So you know this because one of the, one of the experiences we had together was we were looking at the archetype of longing.
Melinda: Yes.
Jennifer: At the Austin, you know, Austin Jung friends, and I would talk about an archetype of longing, and you would sing a song that represented that longing. It was such a good experience.
Melinda: So much fun.
Jennifer: I teach a course on spiritual writing where we look at spiritual archetypes like, what is the way we connect with spirituality that's an archetypal way? There are certain patterned ways that we connect. Some people connect through nature, some people connect through art, some people connect through community. So I'm always wanting to look at the archetypal aspects of it.
And so whenever you go into myth, you're going into archetype because you're looking at patterns that have always existed, that we as human beings are still doing. So, you know, when I call it “The Backward Glance”, that stage there, that's Orpheus and Eurydice.
Melinda: Yes.
Jennifer: That's Orpheus backwards looking at his… He can take his wife out of the underworld if only he doesn't look back at her and he fails. He looks back. Which is also the myth of Lot and his wife from the Old Testament, right?
Melinda: Yeah.
Jennifer: So these have always been happening. So when we spend time obsessing about the past, wanting to look back at the past, we are no different than these people, these stories that have come, you know, far before us and again will go on far after us.
Melinda: Yes.
Jennifer: Right? So there's going to be nothing new under the sun. There's going to be unique stories, but they're all going to fit, in my thinking as an archetypal psychologist, they're all going to fit in certain sorts of patterns. And when we sing a song, when we write a book, when we do a painting that's on an archetypal theme, we increase our resonance with our audience, right?
So one of the things that I, I have heard is that the Madonna-child painting is the most popular archetypal painting in the world. Well it’s mother and child, right? What else? What else is there?
Melinda: Right? Right.
Jennifer: So as long as we keep telling, you know, mother-child stories, we are always going to have an audience for that. We are always going to have an audience for grief. We are always going to have an audience for lost love. All of those. So I think the more we're aware of the archetypal patterns or buckets we're filling or, you know, you know, choose your own metaphor, the more our work is going to resonate.
Melinda: Yes. Yeah. Beautiful. So I think that's a great segue into your new book, Deep Memoir. And I was actually listening to another podcast that you did recently talking about the book, and so this is a book about craft, about the craft of writing memoir. And, you know, memoir is such a popular genre these days. And so I'm, I'm curious if you can share a little bit more.
I took a, a memoir workshop with you a while back where we worked with different archetypes. And it was so interesting because what I found is that I've, you know, I've always thought about writing a memoir, but I've never actually tried it. But in the class, you know, you gave us different writing prompts and then, you know, just something to start from.
And I found that I was recalling these experiences from my childhood that, as I started to write, I started to remember more and more vivid detail that I wouldn't necessarily have just been able to call up. But somehow that act of writing and like trying to envision all the sensory details and the felt sense of the experience, all of a sudden it just, it came flooding out and it was so rich.
Right? So I think this, this idea of like, working with these archetypes is so potent. So tell us more about how you work with memoir writers specifically.
Jennifer: Yes. Yeah. Thank you. And yeah, and again, it's, the book is for memoir writers because that is where I've been teaching mostly. And I wanted to use a lot of examples of memoir. I actually have 140 plus memoirs I discuss in the book, I reference.
Melinda: Wow. Yeah.
Jennifer: So it's about that, but it's, I would say it's more than that. I think it could be useful for anyone who's storytelling. Because the idea behind the book, I quote a friend and a colleague of mine, Dara Marks, who calls story the ‘Human Instruction Manual.’
Melinda: Yes.
Jennifer: So we've always learned through story. So, and one of the ways we learn through story is learning through patterned stories. We learn about love, death, grief, all of that through story, through music, through art, etc., right? So if you're thinking, I want to make a contribution to the human instruction manual, how do you do it? And one of the ways you do it is you search for the universal, in your own personal story.
Melinda: Yes.
Jennifer: Right? So it's about my own experience, but it's also about our experience. And if you look at my cover for Deep Memoir, you'll see what I mean by that, that there's one circle that's my story and one circle that's your story. And then in the center where they intersect, it's our story, right?
Melinda: Yeah.
Jennifer: What is our collective human story? So why do things touch us so deeply from other artists? They touch us because it speaks to our own particular story as well. So that's what I'm trying to do in the book. It's, you know, it's called Deep Memoir because it's, you know, that is where I'm working right now. But I do think it's also just deep storytelling.
I think it can apply to, you know, a lot of different genres of work. Just like, where can someone find themselves in your work? Where do we intersect? Right?
Melinda: Of course. And, you know, I work with a lot of entrepreneurs and business leaders and, you know, obviously the fields of marketing and branding all focus also on storytelling. It's funny because I was looking online for some images of, you know, archetypes and, and, you know, Hero's Journey and things like that for my class. And it's, it's really interesting how the kind of marketing world has embraced the notion of archetypes and kind of the Hero's Journey as a storytelling mechanism.
So, yeah, there's all kinds of applications beyond, you know, memoir or writing or, you know, we're always telling stories. And that's also how we just, again, make sense of our experiences and our lives.
Jennifer: And I would just go back to something you said in the beginning, which is, is that, understanding that we're not the first person to live the story -
Melinda: Yes.
Jennifer: - is really helpful.
Melinda: Yeah.
Jennifer: Of course it's incredibly, all, everything is unique about our story, and everything is universal about our story. And when we feel like, part of the collective, part of the human experience, part of, I am just one person undergoing this sort of transformation that has happened before, happens now, will always happen. I think it makes us, I do think it makes us feel less alone, you know, more part of the human experience.
Melinda: Absolutely. Yeah. Beautiful. So I actually, this is a great kind of segue, because I like to end each episode with a Creativity Pro-Tip, I call them, and you know, something that people can go out and try and do on their own. So I think a great pro-tip here is to really consider, you know, are there certain archetypes or stories or myths that feel particularly resonant and, you know, think about your favorite songs or your favorite books or films or whatever.
They all have this archetypal quality and then see if you are, you know, working on a creative work, how could you intentionally, more intentionally incorporate that in order to, you know, bridge the personal to the universal in this? You know, be able to reach people and touch people’s hearts.
Jennifer: Yes. I love that. And can I add one more angle?
Melinda: Of course. Yeah.
Jennifer: Okay. So, in my chapter on the archetype of meaning, I talk about the fact that, okay, if story, and everything is story creatively, right? Music, art, everything is a story. So if story is the human instruction manual, the way that we learn how to human, then we all have wisdom to add to that human instruction manual. We all have a page.
Melinda: Yes.
Jennifer: And so one of the things I find my memoir students reluctant to do is actually own their wisdom.
Melinda: Yes.
Jennifer: And so there's a Mary Oliver poem that I have. It's a very brief. It's a section of a poem that I have in the book which she says, instructions for living a life.
Melinda: Yes.
Jennifer: And it's just three little lines, but it's about being amazed and telling about it. And so I asked my students, like, what have you learned about life that you want to tell about it? So in your creative work, what is your wisdom that you want to add to the human instruction manual that you have learned as a result of living your life?
So it's another thing to do, is just to write down, what do I know about life? What have I learned about life? And how I incorporate that in the creative work that I do? How can I convey that? Not like a hard hitting, you know, self-help to-do necessarily, but you can do that too. But how, you know, how can I, you know, how can I bring out what I have learned in the hard ways from the underworld experience or, you know, in the upper world experience?
Melinda: Yeah.
Jennifer: How can I bring that forward? So.
Melinda: Yeah. No, that's so important. I'm so glad you said that. Because actually in the episode that came out last week, which was episode 37, Charlotte and I were talking about this very thing, about, you know, we may not realize that we have something to share. It might, because it might just seem second nature or obvious or whatever to us, but maybe it's not obvious to everybody else, and maybe it could help someone. Maybe we could be a mentor or a guide to someone else simply by sharing our story.
Jennifer: Exactly. Exactly. With always an eye toward the universal. Always the eye toward, how is this going to resonate with other people? What do I have to offer to other people? What have, what's my hard-earned wisdom? And that's the underworld experience, right? What's my hard-earned wisdom.
Melinda: Exactly. And we all, we all have it.
Jennifer: We do, we do.
Melinda: Beautiful. Well, thank you so much, Jennifer. I love this conversation.
Jennifer: Yeah. Thank you.
Melinda: Yeah, so if people want to find out more about you, about Mandorla Books, about your classes, workshops, presentations, how can they find you?
Jennifer: Yep, they can find me at my website, it’s jenniferleighselig.com. You will put it in your show notes so I won’t have to spell that all out for you.
Melinda: Yes, for sure.
Jennifer: Come on over to our website. Sign up for my mailing list. Again, if you want the chapter on the underworld experience with the myths, just email me and I'll send it right out to you. So. Yeah. Thank you, Melinda. It’s been wonderful.
Melinda: Find and connect with us at syncreate.org. We're also on YouTube, social media and Patreon. If you are enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave us a review. And we're recording today at Record ATX Studios in Austin with Jennifer Selig in California. The podcast is produced in collaboration with Mike Osborne at 14th Street Studios. Thanks so much for being with us, and see you next time.
