Ben Katt

A guidebook for those at midlife struggling to find themselves, applying Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey to the modern reader’s quest for wholeness.

Those reaching midlife often discover that they have been bombarded with messages from society telling them who they should be and what their life should look like. While chasing the three-headed monster (achievement, perfection, and the approval of others), author Ben Katt realized that he had lost himself along the way. The Way Home is a book for those struggling to find their way back to themselves, especially at midlife.

Katt distills Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey into an accessible, ten-step program to help readers move beyond their limitations, find fulfillment, and make the greatest possible contribution to their community and world. Anyone – ordinary, extraordinary, or somewhere in between – can embark upon the Hero’s Journey, leaving the familiar, falling into the unknown, and ultimately rising to wholeness.

Bringing together personal experience, spiritual wisdom, and well-known mythologies, The Way Home serves as a practical guidebook to inspire and equip people in the second half of life, helping them move from isolation to belonging, from security to surrender, from conformity to wildness. Katt employs a number of tools and rituals to guide readers along the path back to themselves, including solitude, dreamwork, fasting, and meditation.

This book serves as a reminder to those at a transition point in their life that the most important task is to stay connected with their own heart.

Discovering the Hero's Journey to Wholeness at Midlife

The Way Home

Laura Mei

Losing your heart can be loud and obvious, visible and public, but those are not the only ways to lose your heart. Most of the million ways are actually quiet and ordinary; they happen when everything appears to be just fine on the surface. You can lose your heart while accomplishing good things, accumulating respect, and earning promotions in your career, or while faithfully fulfilling your duties in relationships. You can be in the best shape of your life, be a voracious volunteer, or go to church every Sunday while simultaneously forfeiting your soul, forgetting who you are, losing your life. Why is it important to remember that there are also so many quiet ways to lose your heart? Because if you think that losing your heart needs to be dramatic, that it needs to feature a rock-bottom moment or a near-death experience, then you might start to believe that it only happens to other people. It's a dangerous thing to believe that only other people lose their hearts because it means that you might fail to notice the ordinary, everyday ways your heart is slipping away.

In this very moment, so many people are losing their hearts. Right now, whether they realize it or not, beneath the supposedly satisfactory surface conditions of ordinary lives, so many of us aren't okay. Especially in midlife, we are grappling with anxiety and lost in loneliness, distracted, burned out, or bored, with no passion or purpose. The lives we’ve built and the achievements we've pursued have left us disappointed, disillusioned, and depressed, and no partner, promotion, or paycheck seems to be able to fix it for us. We've fallen asleep at the wheel of our own lives, and we're not quite sure how to wake up. We need to find a way.

Soul needs space. It gets scared away when life is stuffed to the brim with commitments and demands. Solitude cultivates that necessary space. The question is: how do you create space for solitude when your life is jam-packed? The first thing that finding solitude often requires is subtraction. If you are overcommitted professionally, socially, or otherwise, then you need to create boundaries. You need to start saying no. I stopped jumping in to do things that were the responsibility of others, stayed out of my e-mail inbox, and spread out my meeting schedule. Sometimes, it can be a hobby that is the culprit consuming all your space. When this is the case, you probably need to start eliminating or at least reducing these activities because they might be distracting you from your inner world. Interrogate yourself: 

Is the activity stirring or squelching the soul

? Or perhaps you need to subtract possessions to find space. Things don't just take up physical space; they take up spiritual space. Wisdom teachers knew that being preoccupied with buying, managing, organizing, and fixing your possessions can end up possessing you, distracting you from the one beautiful and daring life that is yours to live.

Stillness is the superpower that enables us to move back and forth between the realm of love and the realm of the everyday. As my ritual practices expanded and deepened over the years, my capacity to carry stillness forward into the rest of my life increased. Experience taught me another elemental truth about stillness: 

stillness is the center place between striving and squandering

. To strive is to reach anxiously into the future, demanding clarity, grabbing at control, and attaching to outcomes. Striving worships success. It tries to play God. To squander is to slip away into the past. Squandering is stagnant; it refuses to carry out a calling, runs from risk, fears failure, and stays away from sacrifice. Squandering buries treasure, but stillness is the narrow way between these two approaches to life.

Stillness remains in the here and now. The unknown is its playground; change is its friend. It is no stranger to surrender. Stillness is grateful for what has been and welcomes what is to come. It cooperates with the flow of life. It's common to get lost in striving or squandering, to vacillate between them, or to plunge fully into one posture for a long time. Striving was my default mode of operation; it governed my imposter’s pursuit of productivity, perfection, and the approval of others. Even after I left my imposter behind, striving kept me asking for clarity, certainty, and security. It had me chasing after some future happiness as if the next thing would satisfy and complete me—which, of course, it never does. But stillness gave me more than these elusive pursuits ever could. Stillness awakened me again and again to the present moment, and in the present, I found contentment. In the present, I discovered I always have my heart.

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