There are a wide range of techniques and methods to discover, uncover, and write a personal myth, but all of them require us to activate the imagination from a creative playful place. In the end no one can tell us what our personal myth is because the discovery is a personal journey.
David Feinstein and Stanley Krippner study this topic and after 80 years of clinical practice, personal development workshops, and teaching psychological topics they have found that each of us struggles with our own personal mythology when we try to weave the fragments of our experience into coherent story. Their work, Personal Mythology: Using Ritual, Dreams, and Imagination to Discover Your Inner Story, finds that mythologies shape our every thought, perception, and action, helping us to feel safe and secure in our identities. They note that when our personal mythologies do not grow and change along with us, we find ourselves stuck in self-defeating life patterns. They offer self-guided, weekly, suggestions for personal transformation.
Through observation of his dreams, Carl Jung worked to connect to his own mythmaking. Although he shifted away from these highly creative methods and back to an analytical model, he ultimately recognized that he was articulating his own myth and finding ways to make conscious the images that had previously been tucked away in his unconscious mind.
The following four models offer only a few storylines, or scaffolds, for crafting our own personal myths. Some suggest that our myths can inspire our most meaningful human actions as individuals or in collaboration with others. It is our myths that can build and mold civilizations, that in the past lead to the construction pyramids and cathedrals in massive communal efforts that extended over centuries of time.
“Human beings are mythic creatures”.
(“Building the Cathedral” p3)
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The Power of Story 