On 3rd November, the Nurturing the Fields of Change group gathered beneath the question: “Mythopoesis: Stories for a New Age?” We spoke about the power of myth, language, and story, and the ways they shape our sense of self and our world. Stories and myths are not just narratives we encounter; they are mirrors that contour our identities, casting light and shadow in equal measure. What stories are being told about our world? What myths have we inherited, and which are we unconsciously carrying? What myths shape us from the inside out?
Dan McTiernan guided us through an exercise in creating personal myths through creativity and art. Yet, as I put pen to paper, tracing the edges of my own emerging narrative, I felt a familiar stirring in my body, it wanted to be involved. The story longed to be heard in the echoing chambers of my lungs, to be bathed in the rich waters of my marrow, and to be whispered across the aliveness of my skin. I felt the call of my body, to let its wisdom shape, distort, uproot, and reforge the story I was telling.
In the early part of my life, I was obsessed with books. On Sunday afternoons, you could often find me lost in one story after another, losing hours in worlds that felt both distant and intimate. That obsession remains, though these days it leans more toward academic reading. I still steal moments from journals to wander into fantasy, to lose myself in Tolkien’s landscapes and characters (and if you haven’t yet listened to my podcast, For the Shire, I invite you to step into that world with me, where tarot, depth psychology, and The Lord of the Rings mingle in conversation).
But in the last few years, something has shifted. Through my work with embodiment, I’ve realised that myth and psyche do not live in the mind alone. Story is not just metaphor, it is matter, a living, breathing presence that moves through the body, waiting for permission to be felt, enacted, and integrated. Myth, when confined to the abstract, risks becoming ornamental: interesting, evocative, but ultimately disembodied. Yet, when we let myth emerge from the body, the story begins to carve itself into the terrain of our lived experience. Engaging with myth this way becomes an invitation for the wisdom of the body and the intelligence of psyche and archetypes to meet, intertwine, and shape one another.
Let me give an example.
During an Embodied Myth workshop, hosted by my wonderful friend Libby, I felt this shift viscerally. Libby was retelling and reclaiming the story of Medusa, and as she spoke, my body began to respond before my mind did. A tightness gathered in my belly. My first instinct, as always, was to brace, to shut down, to abandon the body before it betrayed me with its truth.
Instead, I let the sensation lead. I swayed, fell, rose again, each gesture a conversation with something older than me. In Medusa’s rage, I felt the echo of my own, my anger at the years I had swallowed my voice, softened myself, learned to be palatable. In the story of a woman turned monster for her defiance, I found not just mythology, but memory.
Afterward, I wrote:
They called her a monster, but I saw a mirror.
The storm rose in my belly, and I moved with it.
Not away from power, but toward it.
In her gaze, I did not turn to stone.
I remembered my fire.
I remembered my voice.
I remembered my power.
What struck me was not the elegance of my poetry but their source. Reading this poem back, it felt that the words had not come from me; they came from my body. They were a form of knowing that emerged from muscle, breath, movement, something closer to revelation than analysis.
Embodied mythopoesis reveals the stories that have shaped us without consent, narratives carved into our posture, our breath, our boundaries, and invites us to rewrite them, not through willpower, but through presence. If myth is the symbolic language of the collective unconscious, then embodied myth is the dialect of the soul speaking through flesh: story meant not to be read alone, but danced, tremored, gasped, and breathed.
It calls us to step into the mythic terrain of our own becoming, to listen for the stories stored in muscle and marrow, and to let movement write what language cannot yet hold. In doing so, the myths we create become more than new stories for a new age, they become new ways of being, rooted in the body, shaped by the imaginal, and anchored in the possibility of transformation.
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