Why Stories Matter: How Myths Guide Us Home
Why do some stories survive for thousands of years while countless others disappear?
Why are we still telling the stories of Adam and Eve, King Arthur, Cinderella, the Buddha, or Jesus thousands of years after they were first told?
Perhaps they have survived because they are more than entertainment.
Perhaps they are maps.
In this episode of Know Thy Soul, we explore why stories continue speaking to us across cultures and generations, how symbols communicate truths that words alone often cannot, and why myths, fairy tales, and sacred texts may reveal far more about our own lives than we realize.
We’ll explore the wisdom traditions that shaped my own journey, why Jesus so often taught in parables, the symbolic language of stories, and why the tales that continue to find us may be pointing us toward something we’ve forgotten.
Because maybe the stories have been trying to lead us home all along.
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Until next time, my friends…
May you know thy soul. It already knows the way.
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The full episode transcript is below.
Hi Friends,
Welcome to Know Thy Soul, where we explore the stories, symbols, and truths that lead us back to the wisdom within.
Today we’re going to talk about archetypes, symbolism, and why stories matter..
Why do some stories survive for thousands of years?
Why are we still talking about Adam and Eve?
Or Jesus?
Or Cinderella?
Or King Arthur?
Or the Buddha?
Or the Bhagavad Gita?
Why do these stories refuse to die?
And what if they have survived because they are trying to tell us something about ourselves?
Because stories are everywhere.
They’re in the movies we watch.
The books we read.
The songs we sing.
The scriptures we study.
The myths, legends, and fairy tales that have survived for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years.
And the fascinating thing is that while cultures change, technology changes, and entire civilizations rise and fall, many of the same stories keep showing up over and over again.
A hero leaves home.
A kingdom falls into disorder.
A king is wounded.
A princess is trapped.
Something precious is lost.
And someone must find their way home again.
Why?
Why do these stories endure?
Why have human beings been telling some of the same stories for thousands of years?
And what if they’re more than entertainment?
What if they’re maps?
What if they’re pointing to something happening inside each of us?
Perhaps that’s why Jesus repeatedly said, “Those who have ears, let them hear.”
Or why he taught almost exclusively through stories and parables.
Not because the stories were the point.
But because the stories pointed beyond themselves.
That’s what we’re going to explore today.
Over the last decade, I found myself drawn into the stories and scriptures of many different wisdom traditions.
I studied shamanism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Taoism, and Judaism, to name a few.
And what surprised me wasn’t how different they were.
It was how often they seemed to be pointing toward the very same mystery.
But the real shift came when I stopped seeing these stories as being about other people and began asking what they might be revealing about my own life.
Once I began seeing that…
I couldn’t stop seeing it.
Every fairy tale.
Every myth.
Every scripture.
Every wisdom tradition became another window into the human experience.
The same patterns I encountered in psychology and in my own inner life kept appearing again and again, woven through stories from cultures separated by centuries and continents.
And while those traditions spoke different languages and used different symbols, I slowly began to realize they weren’t competing with one another.
They were weaving the same tapestry.
Each seemed to illuminate a different aspect of the human journey.
Shamanism helped me reconnect with a living and breathing invisible world.
Jesus helped me understand compassion, forgiveness, and the transformative power of love.
Buddhism helped me understand suffering, attachment, and the role my thoughts play in shaping my experience.
The Bhagavad Gita helped me understand the inner battle I would have to endure and the importance of learning to follow a deeper guidance within.
The Tao Te Ching helped me stop trying to force life and instead learn to live in harmony with it.
The Torah planted questions that would eventually change the way I understood both the divine… and our relationship to it.
Individually, each piece was powerful.
Together, they began revealing a much larger picture, one that this podcast is dedicated to exploring.
And though the symbols, stories, and language differed, they all seemed to be pointing toward the same mystery:
The journey of remembering who we are beneath the conditioning, the armor, and the noise of the world.
The journey of remembering what is deepest, truest, and most alive within us.
The journey of remembering a connection many traditions suggest has never truly been lost.
And that woven throughout these ancient stories are the blueprints for returning home. Not to a place, but to a relationship. A way of living in connection with the divine, the soul, and the deeper wisdom that speaks within us.
A path that may have been hidden in plain sight all along.
What I now think of as returning the soul to its proper place within our psyche, where it guides the kingdom rather than being buried beneath fear, conditioning, and survival.
One of my favorite images of this comes from the ancient Egyptian story of Isis and Osiris.
After Osiris’s body is dismembered and his pieces are scattered across the land, Isis journeys far and wide gathering the pieces back together.
She re-members him.
Did you catch the play on words?
She re-members him physically, bringing his scattered body back together.
But she also remembers him.
She restores what had been forgotten.
Piece by piece, she restores and makes whole what had been torn apart.
This is exactly what my spiritual path has looked like.
Gathering scattered fragments of wisdom from different traditions.
A piece from Torah.
A piece from Jesus.
A piece from the Buddha.
A piece from the Gita.
A piece from the Tao.
A piece from indigenous wisdom.
Not to create something new.
But to remember something ancient that was always there.
And in many ways, that is what this journey is about for all of us.
Gathering back the lost pieces of ourselves.
The pieces hidden beneath fear, conditioning, wounds, and survival.
And remembering who we truly are.
But it begs the question… why stories?
Why does this wisdom need to come through myths, fairy tales, parables, and scripture?
Why can’t we simply explain it intellectually?
I believe one reason these stories have been misunderstood for so long is because very few people recognize the journey of the soul they are pointing toward.
Do you remember the story I shared in the first episode about our spirituality being hidden within us?
It was hidden because most people aren’t looking there for it.
They’re looking outside themselves.
We spend so much of our lives searching for the right career, the right relationship, the right teacher, the right set of beliefs, or even the perfect formula that promises to make everything okay.
We search for someone to tell us what to do.
We search for certainty.
We search for rules.
And all the while, the stories have been quietly inviting us to turn around.
To look within.
And when we begin doing that work, we start remembering what was never lost…
Only forgotten.
Even Jesus knew this. When his disciples asked why he taught in parables, he replied, “Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand.”
I don’t think he was insulting them.
I think he was describing something profoundly human.
We can hear the same story a hundred times…
and then one day, something shifts.
Suddenly we see what was there all along.
And throughout this podcast, we’re going to return to familiar stories, not to learn something entirely new, but to discover what may have been there all along, waiting to be seen.
Later, after Jesus explained that it isn’t what goes into a person’s mouth that defiles them, but what comes out of their heart, Peter asked him to explain the parable. Jesus responded, “Are you still so dull?”
The disciples thought he was speaking about food.
But Jesus was pointing to something much deeper.
He was pointing to the emotional and spiritual condition of the human heart, something profoundly internal.
In other words, what truly shapes our lives doesn’t begin on the outside.
It begins within.
Our words, our actions, our relationships—they all flow from the condition of our inner world.
And even the people who spent every day with him struggled to see beyond the literal meaning of his words.
Later, Jesus tells them something else that I find fascinating:
“I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear.”
Think about that.
He’s saying there is more to understand, but you aren’t ready to see it yet.
If Jesus were simply teaching a list of external rules, he could have given us those rules in a single sermon and been done. Instead, he taught almost entirely through stories. Stories that invited people to wrestle, question, return, and discover deeper layers of meaning over time.
I think that’s an important invitation for us as well.
We can stop at the literal meaning of these stories, or we can begin asking what they’re pointing to beyond themselves.
What is so brilliant about the way Jesus taught is that he expected these stories wouldn’t be understood immediately. They weren’t meant to be consumed once and discarded. They were invitations. Seeds planted in the soul that would continue unfolding as we ourselves grew.
When his disciples asked why he spoke in parables, Jesus answered:
“The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables, so that, ‘they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding.'”
Do you hear that?
Ever seeing, but never perceiving. Ever hearing, but never understanding.
Jesus isn’t describing a lack of intelligence.
He’s describing a different way of seeing.
Perhaps that’s the invitation these stories have always held.
Not simply to read them…
but to allow them to change the way we see.
Because when we do, we begin to discover that the kingdom of God wasn’t something Jesus invented two thousand years ago.
It has been whispering through these stories from the very beginning.
Perhaps that’s why these stories have survived for thousands of years. Not because they’re merely entertaining or historically important, but because they continue revealing new layers as we ourselves grow, as we ourselves gain the eyes to see and ears to hear.
Because these stories aren’t simply telling us about other people. They’re inviting us into our own transformation.
Very few people understand the inner work that must be done to become who they were created to be.
Yet what fascinates me is that nearly every wisdom tradition seems to recognize this.
Jesus says “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says that “Among thousands of men, one may strive for perfection; and among those who have achieved perfection, hardly one knows Me in truth.”
Buddhism speaks of the rarity of awakening.
Lao Tzu says that the great Way is easy, yet people continually choose the side paths.
Different traditions. Different languages. Different cultures.
Yet somehow they all arrive at the same observation.
There is a deeper way of living available to us, but few of us learn to recognize it, trust it, and follow it.
And that’s because it’s incredibly difficult to describe with words alone. Even if someone could put it into words, those who were “seeing but not perceiving” would likely miss it altogether.
Imagine if the deepest truths about the human soul had been preserved only in philosophical treatises or mystical writings.
They would have been burned, outlawed, forgotten, or dismissed as heresy. History is filled with libraries that burned, books that were lost, and teachings that vanished. Think of the Library of Alexandria where countless spiritual writings disappeared forever.
But stories…
Stories are almost impossible to erase.
Grandmothers tell them.
Children remember them.
Entire cultures carry them forward without ever realizing the wisdom they’re preserving.
Stories don’t require the storyteller to fully understand them in order to carry their wisdom forward.
A person can love a story, tell it to their children, and pass it on for generations without ever realizing the deeper truths hidden within it.
Those who explored these mysteries were often misunderstood. Some were dismissed. Some were condemned. Some were silenced. Many were killed.
But the stories couldn’t be silenced.
They hid the truth in plain sight.
The stories remember…
even when we forget.
Because everybody can tell a story.
Everybody can recount battles won and lost, heroes rescuing fair maidens, kingdoms falling into chaos, and kings and queens finally being reunited in harmony.
Stories stand the test of time, even when their deeper meanings may have been forgotten for thousands of years.
Stories give us a way to understand something that is otherwise difficult to see.
They allow us to witness the journey from the outside before we learn to recognize it within ourselves.
Long before books, podcasts, and social media, stories were how human beings passed wisdom from one generation to the next.
They taught us how to survive, how to love, how to lead, and how to make sense of the world around us.
Stories were our first teachers.
And they still are.
At their core, stories help us grow, learn, and understand ourselves. They invite us to see the world through another’s eyes and experience lives beyond our own. They introduce us to archetypes: the hero, the maiden, the wise elder, the king, the queen, and the shadowy antagonist.
But stories have layers, and their magic lies in those layers.
On the surface, they entertain. They tell us of dragons and treasure, love lost and found, kingdoms won and lost.
But for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, they become something much deeper.
Beneath the surface, they contain symbolic truths, spiritual teachings, and profound wisdom. They speak to the soul in a language beyond words.
Interestingly, modern neuroscience is beginning to suggest something the ancient storytellers seemed to understand intuitively. While both hemispheres of the brain work together constantly, the left hemisphere tends to specialize in language, analysis, categorization, and breaking things into parts. The right hemisphere is more attuned to patterns, metaphor, imagery, relationship, and the larger whole. Stories engage both, but symbols seem to have a unique ability to awaken a kind of perception that explanation alone often cannot.
As we continue this journey together, we’ll discover that many of the recurring characters in these stories seem to embody these different ways of knowing. But for now, let’s simply begin learning to see them.
When we engage these deeper layers, we discover that stories are not simply about the characters within them.
They are about us.
The hero, the villain, the wise guide, and the lost child all live within us.
Each story becomes a mirror, reflecting our fears, our strengths, our wounds, and our untapped potential.
When I listen to a story, I don’t just see the characters.
I see people.
I see relationships.
I see patterns.
And perhaps most importantly, I see myself.
The king is not just a king.
The queen is not just a queen.
The hero is not just a hero.
They are parts of us.
But they are also the people we encounter in our lives.
The wounded king may represent a part of me that has become disconnected from my heart.
Or he may remind me of a parent, a spouse, a leader, or a friend who has lost his way.
The silenced maiden may represent my own intuition that I’ve ignored for years.
Or she may remind me of a woman whose voice has never been fully heard.
The stories work because they operate on many levels at once.
They reveal our inner world.
While also illuminating our outer world.
But they also help us see the larger patterns unfolding all around us.
The same stories play out in marriages, families, workplaces, churches, nations, and throughout history itself.
Once you begin to recognize those patterns, you start seeing them everywhere.
Stories invite us to recognize them not only within ourselves, but in the world around us.
And sometimes they help us understand all of these levels at the very same time.
They help us recognize healthy relationships.
Unhealthy relationships.
The places where we are blind.
The roles we unconsciously play.
And the patterns we keep repeating.
Let me give you an example.
There’s an old fairy tale called Bluebeard, and I’m only going to tell you the opening.
Three sisters are walking through the forest when they meet a man with a blue beard.
Immediately, all three recoil.
Something about him doesn’t feel right.
His beard is just… too blue.
But the youngest sister wants to be kind. She doesn’t want to judge someone she doesn’t know. She wants to make him feel welcome.
So she gets to know him anyway.
Eventually, he asks her to marry him.
She says yes.
When she returns to tell her sisters, they’re horrified.
“What do you mean?” they ask. “Don’t you remember how blue his beard was?”
And she replies,
“Well… his beard’s not that blue.”
Now, I could spend an hour talking about attachment dynamics and the tendency many of us—especially women—have to ignore red flags.
In fact, I tell this story to almost every woman I know who’s been through a difficult relationship.
And every single one of them understands that line immediately.
“Well… his beard’s not that blue.”
Think back over your own life.
Was there ever a relationship you entered that, looking back now, you knew wasn’t right?
When was the moment you told yourself…
“His beard’s not that blue.”
Now imagine you’re leaving work late one night.
It’s ten o’clock.
You’re alone.
The elevator doors open, and the person standing inside immediately makes you feel unsafe.
Would you get in?
Most of us probably would.
We wouldn’t want to seem rude.
We wouldn’t want to offend them.
We wouldn’t want them to think we’d judged them unfairly.
But let me ask you something.
Would a deer do that?
Would a horse?
Would a wolf?
No.
Every other animal trusts its instincts.
Somehow, we’ve learned not to trust ours.
That’s what the opening of Bluebeard is pointing toward.
Not simply an unhealthy husband.
But the moment we begin talking ourselves out of what we already know.
So sometimes a story helps us understand ourselves.
Sometimes it helps us understand someone we love.
And sometimes it reveals a truth about a relationship that we’ve been unable to see on our own.
If your belief about the world is that you always have to be the nice girl… always have to make everyone feel welcome… you may never realize that your own inner knowing was trying to protect you.
The story reminds us of something we naturally have access to…
our intuition.
And that’s why a story can continue revealing new truths over the course of a lifetime.
Because the story doesn’t change.
We do.
At twenty, you hear one story.
At forty, you hear another.
At sixty, you may discover a layer that was hidden in plain sight all along.
The story hasn’t changed.
You’ve changed.
And because of that, the story is able to teach you something new.
One of my favorite traditions from Jewish Kabbalah is the idea that the Torah has seventy faces.
The image is a beautiful one.
The Torah is so rich and layered that it can be read again and again, each time revealing another facet of truth.
But I don’t think that’s true of the Torah alone.
I think it’s true of all great stories.
They aren’t puzzles to be solved once and for all.
They’re living things.
A story that speaks deeply to me today may reveal something entirely different to me ten years from now.
And the very same story may speak to you in a completely different way.
Someone who was abused by their father may hear the moment the father cuts off his daughter’s hands very differently than someone who wasn’t.
That part of the story may speak directly to their own wounds, while another listener may be drawn to an entirely different part of the journey.
Not because one of them is right…
and the other is wrong.
But because we’re standing in different places on the journey.
And both can be true.
Stories meet us where we are.
Because while each of us has our own unique story, those stories often follow the very same patterns.
Our outer lives may look vastly different from someone who lived two hundred years ago… or even two thousand years ago.
We have different technologies.
Different cultures.
Different problems.
But the human heart hasn’t changed.
We still wrestle with fear.
We still long to belong.
We still seek love.
We still betray ourselves.
We still lose our way.
And we still search for something that feels like home.
That’s why these stories continue speaking to us.
Because they aren’t describing a particular place or time.
They’re describing the landscape of the human soul.
And because we continue to grow and change…
they continue revealing new layers throughout our lives.
Think about the fairy tales you loved as a child.
At six years old, we are captivated by the magic.
The castles.
The dragons.
The princesses and princes.
The adventure.
But then we revisit those same stories as adults and suddenly we see something entirely different.
We see courage.
Sacrifice.
Loss.
Transformation.
The search for belonging.
The longing to become who we were meant to be.
The story hasn’t changed.
We’ve changed.
And that is part of their magic.
And if you haven’t revisited a favorite story from your childhood in a while, don’t worry.
You’re in the right place.
Because we’re going to.
As Elie Wiesel wrote, “God made man because He loves stories.”
And Heinrich Zimmer reminds us,
“Symbols hold the mind to truth, but are not themselves truth.”
Stories are not the truth itself.
They point us toward it.
They are fingers pointing at the moon.
Not the moon itself.
It reminds me of the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching:
“The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.”
Some realities are simply too vast to be captured by language alone.
Stories don’t define those realities.
They help us encounter them.
They help us remember them.
The stories we’ll explore throughout this podcast are no different.
They are echoes from the past, yet they pulse with a timeless energy that speaks directly to the human experience.
They help us navigate the labyrinth of our own lives.
They help us uncover hidden wounds, forgotten gifts, and buried treasures.
They remind us that we are not alone.
The path we walk has been traveled by countless people before us, each leaving breadcrumbs of wisdom behind.
May these stories become breadcrumbs for you as well.
So, with that, I invite you to listen with more than just your mind.
Engage your heart.
Engage your imagination.
Engage your soul.
Allow these stories to awaken parts of yourself that may have been quietly sleeping.
Allow them to illuminate truths you’ve been yearning to uncover.
Allow them to become a compass pointing you home.
Because that is what great stories do.
They remind us that home has been within us all along.
Before we go, I’d like to leave you with a few questions to reflect on this week.
What stories have resonated with you most throughout your life?
Not the stories you think you should like.
The ones that keep finding you.
The movie you’ve watched a dozen times.
The fairy tale you loved as a child.
The book that changed something in you.
The myth, scripture, or story that still lingers in your heart years later.
What is it about that story that speaks to you?
Which character do you identify with?
Which struggle feels familiar?
Which part of the story feels like your own life?
Because I don’t believe the stories that stay with us do so by accident.
I think they are often reflecting something back to us.
A longing.
A wound.
A gift.
A truth we are ready to see.
For example, one of my favorite movies as a young teenager was Dead Poets Society.
If you’ve never seen it, it’s the story of a teacher, Mr. Keating, who encourages his students to think for themselves, find their own voice, and pursue a life that feels true.
If you’ve been listening to this podcast, you’re probably not surprised it’s one of my favorite movies.
But at the time, I couldn’t have told you why I loved it so much.
I just knew something about it moved me.
Looking back now, I can see that many of the themes that stirred me then are the very themes I explore today…
Authenticity.
Courage.
Meaning.
Purpose.
Finding your own voice.
Choosing a life that feels true rather than simply following the path laid out before you.
The story was speaking to something in me long before I had the words for it.
And even today, the final scene still brings tears to my eyes.
Not because it’s sentimental…
But because it asks a question every one of us eventually has to answer:
Will I live according to what I know to be true… or according to what everyone else expects of me?
Long before I understood why that scene affected me so deeply…
Something in me already knew.
Stories allow us to see in a few pages what might otherwise take a lifetime to recognize.
They show the same wound, the same mistake, or the same lesson, appearing again and again in different forms.
So this week, pay attention to the stories that have shaped you.
Next time, we’re going to stop looking at a single thread…
and begin seeing the tapestry.
Individually, stories are beautiful.
But when we begin laying them beside one another…
we discover that they aren’t isolated stories at all.
They’re threads woven into something much larger.
We’ll place The Handless Maiden beside Perceval and begin discovering that the deepest wisdom isn’t found in one story…
Before we go, I’d like to leave you with one final thought.
For thousands of years, these stories were shared orally, passed from one generation to the next long before they were ever written down.
That tradition has always depended on ordinary people sharing what they found meaningful with the people they love.
It’s how the teachings of Jesus spread.
It’s how the wisdom of the Buddha endured.
It’s how so many of the stories that continue to shape our lives found their way to us.
In many ways, that’s why this podcast exists.
Long before stories were ever shared with the world, they were first shared with a friend.
If today’s conversation spoke to something within you, I invite you to continue the tradition and pass it along.
Share it with someone who comes to mind.
The best stories have always found their way from one heart to another.
If you’d like to continue the journey, you can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts or visit KnowThySoul.com to explore the episodes, read the transcripts, and join the mailing list.
I’ll meet you here next week as we begin weaving the threads together and discover how these stories start to form a larger tapestry.
Until next time, friends…
May you know thy soul.
It already knows the way.
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