#1 - DEMYSTIFYING MYTHS

There’s a kind of courage nobody applauds, not even the one who takes the leap… at least not at the start.

The jump into the unknown with nothing but guts and a strong feeling that it’s about time to tear it open and look at what’s inside.

It isn’t the courage to climb, to win, to leave, to start over somewhere new. It’s a will much quieter than that, harder to see, and yet louder to the one who wakes up to it. The audacity to stop looking outside for answers and turn toward the one place we’ve been avoiding… our true self.

We are no longer children. We are adults now, with the reins of life wrapped around our hands. Good or bad, empty or fulfilling, our families did what they did for us, and the past cannot be changed. Our first challenge is to shed the narratives we were dressed in, so we can find ourselves and take charge of where we want our lives to go.

Jung had a name for this movement, and we’ll come back to it at the end. For now, know that it begins with making space for our shadow. Without acknowledging the darkness that lives in every human being, it’s impossible to live a true life. There are no parents left to blame. No sides left to take.

The Greeks told a story about this. Mythology is a powerful way to understand life’s complexity through stories that don’t even sound real. Their power lives in their symbols.

I. The endless spring

Let me introduce you to Persephone. But first, you must know that she was once someone else: Kore. Someone else’s daughter, with a flowering, bright future ahead of her, as long as she followed the narrative written for her.

Kore lived in an endless spring. Flowers in her hands, sunlight on her skin, and her mother, Demeter, goddess of the harvest, always close by. Nothing was missing. Nothing hurt.

It was a sweet life. But like every life spent filling a space made for someone, it was a small life too.

How many times have you believed that the right way to live is to find the comfortable place, the predictable rhythm, the people who already know who you are, and stay there, filling spaces created for you? There’s a particular kind of smallness that comes from never being asked to meet yourself. You can live a whole life in the endless spring and never find out what grows in you when the light goes out.

II. The strange flower

One day, a particular flower caught Kore’s eye. It was stranger than all the others, and more beautiful. It didn’t belong to the meadow she knew.

She reached for it, uncertain, but curious to know what else life had to offer. Something in her was hungry for what she didn’t yet have words for.

Kore reached. And the earth opened beneath her feet.

III. The descent

Total darkness was all she could see, and the pitch black stared back at her.

Beneath the flowering world she knew, what could possibly live without light?

She was taken from that place down to the underworld, where the shadow lives. There she fell in love with the darkness, with Hades, and ate the fruit of the underworld: the seeds of a pomegranate.

It takes audacity to look at the parts of yourself you’ve spent years not looking at. The anger you were told was ugly. The grief you never finished. The desire you were ashamed of. The talent you buried because it would have made you too visible, too much, too free. The old wounds that still decide, quietly, who you trust, who you love, and how small you allow yourself to be.

Kore’s descent is the act of asking the questions you’ve been too polite to ask yourself, and looking at the parts of you that you’ve been too ashamed to let breathe.

No one can make this descent for you. Not a partner, not a parent, not a guru, not an oracle. Some can hold the lantern at the entrance. But only you can walk in.

IV. The world above goes cold

Up above, her mother searched for Kore and wept, and the fields fell silent with her. Her grief was so deep that nothing grew anymore. People went hungry and cold.

First came the autumn, then the first winter the world had ever known. The earth began to die as Demeter grieved her daughter.

Notice this: when you go inward, the outside world reacts. Things that used to bloom stop blooming. Relationships built on the old version of you feel the change. The people who loved Kore don’t always know what to do with who she becomes.

And that includes ourselves… There’s a part of every one of us that mourns the endless spring, even after we’ve chosen to leave it.

V. The pomegranate

Down below, in the dark, she ate what the dark had to offer: the seeds of a pomegranate.

To taste the underworld is to carry it with you from then on.

The pomegranate. A symbol of an ending and a beginning, held inside the same fruit. Seeds red as blood, and blood… the river that runs within us.

No one steps into the same river twice. Some knowledge, once tasted, can’t be erased.

This is the part people are afraid of. Not the darkness itself, but the irreversibility. Once you know why you keep choosing the same kind of love, you can’t un-know it. Once you see the pattern, you can’t pretend it’s fate anymore. Once you taste the truth about yourself, the old excuses lose their flavour.

And yet. Each seed is also a light.

The underworld is a symbol of the unconscious: everything set aside, feared, left unnamed. But it’s also where your strength has been waiting. Only by bringing light to the shadow can you take charge of your choices and stop calling what happens to you fate.

VI. The ascent

And so Kore becomes Persephone. Her true self, free from the cages built for her.

She went down as Kore, someone’s daughter.
She came back as Persephone, her own queen, at home in both the light and the dark. She spends half the year on the surface, through spring and summer, and the other half, through autumn and winter, beside Hades, ruling the underworld.

She doesn’t stay in the underworld forever, and she never fully leaves it either. She moves between worlds, and she carries her authority in both. The dark doesn’t erase her spring. It gives it roots.

This is what wholeness actually looks like. Not endless light. Not a life without shadow. A true self that can walk into its own depths and come back integrated.

And that, in a nutshell, is what Jung called individuation. Becoming a whole being, shadow and all.

A true life asks us to bring light into the shadow, so the shadow stops steering our steps whilst we call it destiny.

In practice, think about how much we hand over to fate. “That’s just my luck.” “It always happens to me.” “I’m just not that kind of person.” How often is it fate, and how often is it a part of us we’ve never met, making our choices from the dark?

Individuation isn’t about becoming someone else. It’s about finally becoming the one you were before you learned to be small.

So here’s the question this myth leaves at your feet:

What strange flower is calling you right now?

Do you have the audacity to reach for it, knowing the ground might open, knowing you can’t come back as the same person, knowing the world above might go quiet for a while?

You don’t have to answer today. But the flower is still there. It has been there for a long time.

And Demeter, the mother who stayed above? Her grief, and the seasons born from it, are a story for another day.

When you feel it’s time, the door is open.