This section on Community focuses on how we might navigate the final Return cycle of the Heroine/Hero’s Journey. Finding the Treaure, which means completing this round in the process of transformation, may seem like more than enough, but the process calls us to Return to our communities and share what we’ve learned. The Treasure is for us, but it also is for All Our Relations.

Returning with Treasure is when we become Global Citizens, Universal Humans, and Social Artists dedicated to a Bigger Picture – an emerging Planetary Story. Embracing this larger role means we actively identify collective values, find ways to embody dreams and visions, share resources, nurture community, and support collective empowerment in ways that reflect our gifts, abilities, and spheres of influence.

To do all of this, we need time to integrate what’s happened to us. Within Ann Hale’s sociometric cycle, we enter the season of winter – a time of isolation, when we belong only to ourselves, as we prepare for our next emergence into the springtime of belonging both to ourselves and to the world and of feeling more ‘at home’ again, but as a transformed Self.

In Jean Houston’s model, to start the Return is to move back into rooting ourselves in the physical sensory/historical psychological realities of the ‘This is Me’ dimension. However, now we have the opportunity to temporarily savor a more private, rather than collective, aspect of this dimension. Here we first take time to hold the Treasure in our hearts and reflect for a while, before sharing it with the world.

At this point in the planetary Cycle of Life, I think we are being called both individually and collectively to Activate the Anima Mundi, the World Soul, through compassion for our Global Society, which includes our Mother Earth and the Environment that is our Home. What that means and how it happens are for us to discover and co-create in community – with love.

May the resources below support your Return or any other part of the Heroine/Hero’s Journey.

Please use drop-down menus at the top to explore the following topics:

Completing the Heroine/Hero’s Journey Cycle: Becoming Social Artists, Global Citizens, and Universal Humans

Selected Resources – Completing the Heroine/Hero’s Journey Cycle: Becoming Social Artists, Global Citizens, and Universal Humans

Co-Creating Compassionate Communities

Selected Resources – Co-Creating Compassionate Communities

Environmental Stewardship and Sustainability – with Selected Resources