FACILITATOR INTERVIEW: JOSEPH JASTRAB

"A vital person vitalizes the world."

Name: Joseph Jastrab

Hometown: Rifton, NY

Occupations: Teacher , writer, musician, wilderness guide and private practice counseling servicing people in transition. Essentially a "Facilitator of the Inevitable".

Passions: I love to hike and camp in deep wilderness. And in the winter, travel by cross country ski or snow shoe. Playing and sharing music and poetry with others, particularly world chanting, kirtan, and some good ole rock ‘n roll.

Number of Journeys: 12

HJF: How has your life led you to the Hero’s Journey programs?

JJ: What brought me to the Hero’s Journey is the loneliness that I felt when I reached adolescence. I felt that I was following all the rules and the laws of the culture and society and was still very empty and unfulfilled inside. That brought me into a period of deep questioning about the meaning and purpose of my life, questioning where fulfillment is really found. At a very early age, I began to reflect and question my life very deeply. That led to me doing a number of solitary wilderness journeys where I would go out into nature and spend one to two weeks alone in the mountains and forests.

HJF: How old were you at this point?

JJ: It started in high school, around age 16 and then the activity blossomed during my college years, when I had a bit more time and freedom to do this. Once that questing started, it continued for my entire life. I began to look for other people who were looking in the same direction I was. This brought me to Joseph Campbell’s work on the Hero’s Journey and also the Hero’s Journey Program work.

HJF: What in particular do you like about working with people on the Hero’s Journey?

JJ: Well, I love the community and the collaboration that’s central to this work. Many people from many different backgrounds come together with a shared interest in creating a life that’s true to who they are. And beyond that, working with people who are keen on creating a life that is true to themselves personally, but which also is a benefit to the world at large. The community of seekers is very, very important to me and is quite uplifting.

HJF: To someone who may be considering the Hero’s Journey, how would you describe that community?

JJ: It’s a community of people who are looking to live an authentic life and who want some support in that, and are willing to give support to others in that pursuit.

HJF: And how do they become allies for you?

JJ: We share a common experience together in WV, during the Hero’s Journey summer program. When the going gets rough when we return home, there is opportunity to dialogue either by phone or email, to stay in touch with people, to gain support, to give support. We support one another in integrating the work we did on the Journey at home, in living the Hero’s Journey at home.

HJF: How does doing the Hero’s Journey work reinvigorate your life?

JJ: By helping others I’m also re-inspiring myself. I’m remembering what’s really important on a regular basis. It’s a ritual of remembrance every summer for me, remembering what’s really important in life. Although I participate in a leadership capacity, there’s always a part of me that is engaged in the experience as a student. I feel I am an eternal student of this way. So I learn something from each person’s experience and I also learn something from listening to my self teach as well, because I find that each year I present the teachings in a different way. My yearly participation is a high point of vital living that, in many ways, informs my growth process over the following year.

HJF: Have there been any stories of participants that have been particularly inspirational to you that stand out?

JJ: I can think of so many moments but it would take me so much time to discuss the background of what someone was going through to provide enough context. My honest response is nothing in particular stands out, that each journey is filled with countless moments of revelation and importance and I would hesitate to isolate one of them as being any more important than another. Part of what we stress in our Journey work is learning how to find inspiration in the common ways that the evolutionary impulse works its way through our lives—the "common enlightenment”, if you will. We take the spotlight off of obtaining big breakthroughs, as the quest for these often obscures the vital, small steps that are more common to real growth.

HJF: What messages of the hero’s journey most speak to you? What messages to you implement in your everyday life?

JJ: I would say that in every day, I try to remember to open up to uncertainty, and to leave the familiar ground of my habits and my routines behind. And it takes courage to do this. It takes wakefulness to do this, which are "heroic” qualities-- courage and presence. I want to do my best to invigorate each day of my life with a spiritual vitality that uplifts me and then has the capacity to uplift anybody I come in contact with. I find that one of the difficulties in life is that it’s so easy to fall into a routine or follow someone else’s path – the path that society and culture has laid out for us. I use the Hero’s Journey metaphor and myth to remind me to make each day a day of adventure and discovery.

HJF: Can you think of any examples of when you’ve done that?

JJ: Yes, like when I’m having a conversation with a friend and I find myself just, perhaps talking over the same old things and feeling like the conversation is really not going anywhere new. I’ll take a moment and remind myself that this may be the last conversation I have on this planet with another person. I don’t know. None of us know, which will be our last act. That might inspire me to take a risk in saying something that is a little bit vulnerable, that the person might not agree with, but, nonetheless, is real for me.

HJF: How has your life been a hero’s journey?

JJ: My life is a hero’s journey in that I’ve continually chosen to follow my own path, to choose a profession that was true to me rather than the one that people said I’d be good at.

HJF: What did people say you’d be good at?

JJ: It was suggested that I become a college science teacher or a naturalist, which is something that is dear to me because I’ve been a student of nature since I was a kid. Or even to become a priest, because people recognized that from an early age I was very interested in spiritual matters.

When I was in grade school, we all had to go before a guidance counselor who was supposed to help us determine what our profession was going to be in life. I went into the office and said I wanted to be a priest and a naturalist as both these callings were close to my heart. And the person said to me, "Well, that’s nice but you can only choose one, you can’t be both.” And that didn’t make any sense to me because I thought that anyone truly interested in spiritual matters would be very interested in nature, and vice versa, because I felt so much spirit living unencumbered in nature.

And so I refused to go down either one of those individual tracks because I knew that was not true for me. And in a sense, I’ve created my own occupation where when I teach I bring forth both my deep interest in spirituality and my deep interest in the workings of nature, in the same moment.

HJF: What do you think your guidance counselor would have said to that?

JJ: Probably, back in those days, "Good luck, but that’s never going to happen. That’s not possible in this world.” Yet the hero’s responsibility is to go to the edge of possibility and take one more step, and discover the possible that lives in the very heart of impossibility. To trust your heart’s desire, that leads you to something, to some possibility that perhaps no one else in the world can see. Such acts of courage and faith in what is most deeply felt in the heart -- this exemplifies the way of the hero -- the courage and faith to follow one’s own path and the understanding that the best contribution I can make to the life of the world is to be fully myself in whatever form that might take.

HJF: That reminds me of a Joseph Campbell quote – "Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.”

JJ: Right, that’s been very true for me. As soon as you make a commitment to walk in that direction, all sort of opportunities open up for you. People began to invite me to teach or to write about what I cared most about. Doors began to open for me. Doors that the guidance counsel believed didn’t exist, let alone could be opened.

HJF: And how does the hero respond to societal pressures that will accompany the path for individuality?

JJ: The hero accepts that society will be uncomfortable with something that’s new, so the heroic response to society’s confusion or rejection is one of compassion and understanding, but nonetheless, the hero keeps going. The hero is confident that, given enough time, what is initially received as threatening or unusual or unrecognizable eventually becomes an accepted way of life.

HJF: Have you faced this in your life?

JJ: Yeah I would say it’s not easy walking a path like this. It does require finding other people who have the same sense of adventure as I do and there are relatively few of those people -- ones who are interested in going to the edge and jumping into the unknown. But they’re out there. And they’re growing exponentially in number. The truer I am to my own life, the more I run into people with that spirit.

HJF: Is there anything else you would like to share that we may not have covered?

JJ: I would just say, another underreported aspect of the hero’s journey has to do with the emphasis on living life in such a way that it benefits all of life and all people. That the "hero” is one that dedicates him or herself to living in such a way that their life serves all of life. The hero’s journey work has been important to me because of the support that it gives to, not only my own fulfillment, but to that larger goal. And again, the essential service we can give to life, according to the hero’s journey way, is to first of all remember what is truly important to us, what Joseph Campbell would call "discover your bliss”, and secondly, to live that as fully as possible regardless of what people think.

HJF: Some people might say unabashedly that going after what you want might be seen as selfish. But how is that serving a greater purpose?

JJ: It’s the only way to that one can possibly serve, from my experience. When I’m fully myself, when I’ve really claimed my mastery and have developed my potential as fully as I can, then I have something profound to give to life.

Take, for example, a young person who is interested in music. Her parents are wind instrument players. But, she is really drawn to play the violin. Let’s say she follows her own path, plays the violin, dedicates herself fully to that and allows her mastery to come through the instrument best suited for that mastery. If she had been "unselfish,” she would have sacrificed not only her own enjoyment, but also the greatest gift she could have given to the world. I would say it’s absolutely essential to be totally "selfish”, in this regard, to develop a gift that’s worth giving.