Myth, Meaning, and Why Ancient Stories Still Matter
An introduction to The Inward Sea, and why old stories speak to us in a way modern ones rarely can.
🎧 This post is a companion to Episode 1 of The Inward Sea:
Introduction
This is a podcast where we explore the intersection of mythology, folklore and modern life. I'm Dimitri and I'll be your companion on this journey of discovery. Each episode we'll follow routes charted in the old stories and let them lead us into forgotten currents and toward new shores. Welcome to the Inward Sea.
All the music you hear in this podcast (though, sadly not on Substack) is my own work. I particularly enjoyed writing and orchestrating the “Inward Sea Theme Music” but I don’t really know what I’m doing with mixing and mastering so if any of you lovely folks have any suggestions or feedback, please feel free to drop me a message!
Anyway, Hello!
And thanks for joining me in this, the introductory instalment of the Inward Sea. This piece is a bit different from what you'll see here in the future.
It's a chance for me to tell you a bit about myself and share some background information with you about this podcast and why it’s called The Inward Sea. A bit later, I’ll get into what you can expect from future episodes, as well as why and how these old stories, the myths and folktales I’ll be sharing with you, still matter in a world like ours.
A Bit About Me
Since we're just setting out, it's probably best to begin with some introductions. My name is Dimitri. I'm a composer, an artist, and an educator. But more importantly for the purposes of this podcast, I’m a collector of stories.
I am going to be the voice that you hear on this podcast, but I don’t want to set myself up as the captain of your voyage. The Inward Sea is an image I came across in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s also a poem written by Howard Thurman - although, I only discovered that after I began jotting down my thoughts for the episodes.
You see, although I will be offering you insights I have gained as well as a way for you to explore stories for yourself, I don’t ever want you to ever believe that an interpretation or idea I share here is The Truth. It’s very difficult to say capital letters so I hope the idea is coming across here. When I say that I don’t want you to get the idea that what I share here is The Truth (did you hear those capital letters?) I mean that I don’t want you to believe that my interpretation of these stories is the only one or that any insight I share here is somehow dogma in a mythological, philosophical, or psychological gospel.
What I share here is a truth - one of many possible interpretations that I have discovered - things that resonated deeply with me and others with whom I have shared them with in various courses and workshops. I hope that you will feel empowered and courageous enough to embark on your own voyage of exploration and, when you return, share what you find with me, too.
So, although I’m going to the one doing most of the talking in this show, think of me more like someone who's collected a sea chest full of old maps. Maps, I would like to share with you in the hope that they inspire you to venture out into the deep to discover great things for, and within, yourself.
Over the course of many years now, I've done a lot of wandering and quite a bit of mapmaking, and what I've learned over and over again is that each discovery, each nugget meaning or insight that I've gleaned from these stories, opens into deeper mystery.
This podcast will be, in many ways, a journal of those explorations.
A Bit About Stories
As an educator, I've often found myself asking how we ended up surrounded by so much information and yet so cut off from a sense of meaning. I used to think that we were story-starved, that we had somehow wandered too far from the campfire circle of our ancestral storytellers.
But that's not quite right, is it?
Today, we're not short on stories. We're drowning in them, caught in a great flood of biblical or Babylonian proportions. Narratives and stories swirl around us constantly, competing for our attention, our emotional investment, and demanding our allegiance. They pour from the screens we carry around in our pockets. They arrive dressed as news or as entertainment, even as self-help manuals.
Many of the stories we are fed today aren’t about truth or genuine connection or personal growth—they’re about power. They’re crafted to capture our attention, to sell us something, and dictate who we should be in order to fit in and feel validated by others. In the process, they distract us from what truly matters, encouraging us to trade authentic self-expression and meaningful personal pursuits for superficial behaviours aimed at winning external approval.
But that is not what mythology and folklore do: each teller and listener glimpses something different in the same story, a unique reflection shaped by their own inner landscape. And yet, these stories remain shared, communal. The images in them have crossed language and cultural barriers precisely because they speak to the deeper parts of our humanity—the parts we all share.
Today, we may find these old stories written on the pages of books or on websites. Perhaps we find them being retold over and over in exactly the same way each time in videos or podcasts like this one. But here’s the secret. These stories were never made to written down or trapped in a single form of telling. They come alive when we tell them.
In the opening passages of his book Comparative Mythology1 professor Jaan Puhvel does a wonderful job of outlining how we ended up with the words “myth” and “mythology” for these old stories. The word is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root ‘muh-’ from which we get such other modern words as matter and mother. Professor Puhvel points out that originally the Greek concept of Mythos was simply speaking (as is communicating between people).
You see, when we allow these myths and folktales to live in our mouths rather than on the pages of a book, they begin to breathe and shift. When we lend them our own breath and give them form with our movement and our energy, our life, they begin to change. Each retelling is coloured and shaped by the swell and ebb of unconscious tides in the teller, and as we listen, the images conjured up in our minds spring directly from deep and unrehearsed places within us, places we don't often get to explore.
In this podcast, we are going to examine those images through the lens of Jungian thought and cultural symbolism. Not to master them or to pin them to boards like butterflies - because, once you pin a butterfly, it may still look like a butterfly but it does not behave like one. We are going to examine them, hold them lightly, turn them this way and that and get a sense of them, and then let them go again.
And one day, when we happen upon them again, we can take the moment to reexamine them to see how they may have grown or changed - or, perhaps, how we have.
Over the years, I've shared many tales with my students in classes and workshops. And now and then, someone asks me where I find stories. The truth is, I rarely go looking for them. And even when I do, the ones that speak the loudest are usually the ones I happen upon when I’m looking for something else entirely. Most of the time, stories arrive on their own.
I think it was Michael Mead2, one of the great storytellers of our time, who said that the story is not something that you choose. The story chooses you. And that really resonates with me.
Like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings movies, stories are never late. They arrive precisely when they mean to - and in my experience, they often arrive a little early. Just early enough to make you wonder what they're all about. To carry them around in your pocket like a stone. Until life happens. And then, quite suddenly, the story seems to spring into action. And it delivers an offering of strange, unexpected wisdom that you didn't know you needed.
In the rational paradigm we're so accustomed to, it's easy to dismiss these moments as mere coincidence. But others, like psychologist Carl Jung, called this synchronicity3. A meaningful coincidence. An a-causal connecting principle that appears when two distinct signifiers of meaning come into proximity in the crucible of conscious experience.
The Japanese philosopher, and I hope I'm saying his name correctly, Yasuo Yuasa (湯浅 泰雄)4, once suggested that when body and mind are aligned, the world itself begins to speak. I believe that sometimes, stories are the shape that voice takes.
Caught by a Story
Before we dive into the bigger myths and folktales, I want to begin with a moment. A personal one. This is not a moment in which I found a story - but one in which a story caught me, and something in me began to shift, which ultimately led to the creation of this podcast.
Long ago, I had just left my home country and flown halfway around the world to teach English. I had cast off from everything familiar and stepped into the unknown. This was long before smartphones, before Google Maps conveniently lived in your pocket. A new friend, another English teacher living in the small Korean town where I had just arrived, lent me a CD audiobook of Moby Dick, and it became a kind of lifeline: one of the only English voices I heard each day.
I still remember the night I first heard this passage. I had just gotten home after getting completely lost on a walk through my new neighborhood, a place with no familiar landmarks and no natural compass to guide me. Back home, Table Mountain towered over the city where I'd lived my whole life. It anchored everything. You always knew where you were in relation to its shape. But here, there was no such anchor.
The sun had set while I was out walking, and I found myself in a snarl of narrow streets. The street lamps perched like fat, luminous birds amid an aerial jungle of tangled electric and telephone wires.
The wires… the streets… It was as if the old maxim, As above, so below, had taken on a literal, physical form. I passed the same doorway at least three times - later, I'd learn it was a Buddhist temple. Shop signs blinked at me in a language I couldn't yet pronounce, and every oddly-shaped city block of strangely mismatched architecture felt like a question I didn't know how to answer yet.
When I finally made it back to my tiny fourth-floor apartment, I took off my shoes and slid the CD into the laptop my employer had loaned me. (They were still called laptops back then, right? Not notebooks.) After popping the CD in, I collapsed onto the bed and let the narrator's voice wash over me like salt water.
It didn't feel like a recording. Despite the awful speakers and the incredibly enthusiastic fan of that old machine, it felt like someone was in the room with me, trying to tell me something.
And then, the narrator spoke these words.
“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”
Moby Dick: Chapter 58, “Brit”5
For some reason, that passage felt like electricity running through me as the narrator spoke. And it has travelled with me for years.
The image of that peaceful little island, Tahiti, surrounded by hidden monsters, speaks to something I think most of us have felt, that strange analogy to something within us, whether or not we've ever read Moby Dick.
Melville's warning, "Push not off from that isle. Thou canst never return." struck me deeply. I think I cried myself to sleep that night. Because I felt that fear so deeply. I’ve always struggled with separation anxiety and homesickness ever since I was child. That was one of the reasons I decided to try move half way around the world. Previously, I had also decided to try doing the highest bungee jump in the world to confront my fear of heights - but, in the words of Michael Ende, “that is another story for another time.”
Lying there in strange tiny bedroom in a strange small town, in a foreign country so far from my normal world, I felt what it means to physically have pushed off that known shore. I had left everything behind.
From my vantage point now, having been away from my “normal life” for the better part of adult life, I can tell you that, having pushed off, it's not that we can't go back.
Melville’s warning is far more subtle than that. Once we turn to face the unknown and step into it, the you who returns afterwards is never quite the same you as the one who left. The unknown transforms us if we're brave enough to face it.
That sea - the half-known life - as Melville refers to it, is an almost prophetic image of what the psychologist Carl Jung would later call the unconscious6. Although we are not aware of it, it is the deep from where all the energy of our psychic life springs. The images of dreams, imagination, creativity in all its forms, sudden surges of emotion - all these things spring from that deep well within us.
All the stories we tell - whether about seemingly fantastic creatures or everyday occurrences, even the stories we tell about ourselves and our experiences - spring from that source.
In it, there is amazing beauty and strength, but it is also where we hide our monsters.
Exploring those uncharted depths through the vehicle of stories is what exploring The Inward Sea is all about. Because stories, more than simply giving us a means to survive an encounter with the unknown both within and outside ourselves, give us the tools and opportunities to navigate and plumb the depths of the great Inward Sea.
So, this podcast is a kind of charting, a personal and shared exploration of those inner waters. The stories we explore here, myths, folktales, and fragments of cultural memory, have passed through countless mouths and minds before reaching us. With each telling, they've been shaped, not only by tradition, but by the soul of each storyteller. Over time, much has been worn away. But what remains? The images and patterns that stick. Those that resonate so deeply with so many people across the ages that they feel timeless, even sacred—universal.
There are many characters, arcs, and symbols that keep showing up in stories and in each of us, even though we can't explain why. We catch ourselves opening pandora’s jar, or contemplating an act of trickery that would allow us to gain something we desire like Loki or Prometheus. We may even find ourselves staring at our own magic mirrors of social media, enraged that we are not “the fairest in the land”…
And by turning to these images in stories which have been relevant for hundreds of years and exploring them, not just to master what theywhat they mean, but how they still move in us, we can become more aware of unconscious patterns in our own lives.
Bringing awareness to these unconscious parts of ourselves is a great work. One that Carl Jung wrote about extensively. A popular quote from Jung, and one that bears repeating here is, “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”7
And these old stories are very good at helping us accomplish just that.
A Disclaimer
Now, before we wade in any deeper, I should say something very important. While this podcast may at times feel therapeutic, it isn't therapy. It's not a substitute for professional support, and I am not a licensed therapist.
What I offer here is companionship, not clinical guidance. A space for reflection, not diagnosis. You are the one steering your ship. I'm just here with a few stories and symbols, maybe even some insights, or maps, that might help you navigate and make some new discoveries.
I believe that storytelling is a healing practice. Not because stories magically fix everything, but because they give us a language for what we carry. They help us name things that have previously been unnamed, and they let us feel the shape of things that swim beneath the surface of our awareness. They offer us a vessel, an alchemical container, for parts of our experience that rational culture doesn't know how to hold.
Much of what I share here comes from years spent reading and wrestling with the works of writers like Jaan Puhvel, Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hillman, Marion Woodman, Robert Johnson8, Lewis Hyde, and Dr. Richard Katz, to name but a few.
And like them, I don't see mythology as something belonging to the past. It's not a museum of dead stories. It's a symbolic language, one that helps us understand where we are. And like any language, it's one we learn by listening. Not just with our ears, but with the deeper parts of ourselves.
Of course, after listening, the best way to master a language is through imitation. And maybe you'll find yourself telling one of these stories. Not from a page, but in your own voice with your own breath. Maybe even just to yourself. That's really when these stories come alive for you.
Our Journey
So, what can you expect from future episodes and instalment here on The Inward Sea?
Each piece will revolve around a myth or folktale, or sometimes just a part of one. As I share the story with you, pay attention to what you experience as you listen - not in an analytical way, but simply in a way that allows you to notice what images or sensations rise to the surface as the story unfolds.
Sometimes we might follow a theme, like descent, betrayal, transformation, or longing. Other times we might center our exploration around a single image, a thread, a labyrinth, or the crew of a single skiff sailing through the underworld. You might want to jot down a note or two about what resonates with you as we go through the story together.
After the story, we will begin exploring associations with the images that appear in the story. In the podcast, I will be sharing common associations I have uncovered through personal experience and research - I’ll do my best to share my sources with you, but for this step to be relevant, it is important that you also allow yourself to remain open to exploring whatever associations come up doe you, personally, as well.
Once we are familiar with an image and its associations — both cultural and personal — we will begin to explore the dynamic relationships between images to see how they interact with one another and how these patterns and processes that take place within ourselves and the world around us.
Finally, I’ll offer you a point or two on which to reflect to help you see how the interpretation offered lands in your own life.
Now, although these steps seem neatly organised on paper when laid out like this, in practice, things will be a little more blurry. We will often flow between discussing the associations with a specific image and exploring its dynamic relationship to other images because here, too, new associations might be brought to light.
To keep us grounded in this exploration, we will always return to the image as it appears in whatever narrative we are dealing with, because it is that image that sprang from the psyche when we first heard the story. It is the unique, waking dream that rose from somewhere within us created by a part of ourselves that we don’t have direct control over. It bears the fingerprints of our soul and makers mark of the unconscious, and by examining it we can come to learn more about what other surprising strengths may be swimming in our depths.
Throughout the process, and no matter the format, the invitation will remain the same: to listen deeply and to wander without needing to solve — to see what stirs beneath the surface of your own life.
Occasionally, and hopefully, you might hear guest voices, not experts necessarily, but fellow travelers with stories of their own. And always we'll be listening for something rising from below. The slow arc of a barnacled fin breaking the surface. Some old truth rising for breath just off the bow. Not loud, not showy, but unmistakable once you've heard it. Because that's what this podcast is: a space for mythic thinking.
Reflections on the Sea
You know, when I think about that Moby Dick quote, I'm struck by how much our perception of the sea has shifted over the years. Today, we stream documentaries full of coral gardens and curious creatures for enjoyment. Our hearts are warmed by narratives of divers and octopuses forming seemingly emotional friendships, and our screensavers are swaying kelp forests.
The sea still holds mystery, but it no longer holds the same terror. And that's not because the sea has changed. It's because we have. We learned to look at it more closely. We explored with curiosity and wonder. We listened. And when we approach even the most terrifying of its regions in this way, we find beauty. Through knowledge, we find relationship.
And I believe the same is true of the psyche. The more we turn inward with curiosity and courage, the more beauty and wonder we uncover in aspects of ourselves that may once have frightened us. And the more we bring the light of awareness to what we find in those inner depths, the more we discover surprising strengths and healing.
But I want to be clear. Our exploration isn't about endless self-analysis. It's not about turning inward just to stay there. The purpose of examining these things is to undertake a kind of alchemical magnum opus - a great work of transformation. And this is not something we can do in isolation.
It was Abraham Maslow that placed Self-Actualization at the top of a pyramid structure, but later in his life9, he broadened his ideas on this topic. Many indigenous peoples see people as being actualised by the community - and this wisdom is something we will return to over and over in this podcast. We are actualised by one another community, by how we respond to one another, and how we interact even when we do not always agree. The Self - an archetypal image that is part of the story we tell about our own existence - can only exist in relation to “the other” or “others”. And so, to be “self-actualised” we need to learn how to bring these two seemingly opposing poles into harmony. We need to reach outward.
The great work - the truest act of personal transformation - is not when we achieve our fitness or financial goals. It is when we succeed in bringing strength and beauty of which we are unconscious into the light of conscious awareness so that we can choose to utilise it. That is integration.
I believe that tending to the inner world, learning to recognize the patterns of these stories at play within us, makes us more able to return to the outer world with presence, compassion, and clarity. It allows us to rejoin the collective story of the human species, not as experts or heroes, but as people who are whole enough to listen to one another and to respond — and, ultimately, to take our place in the wider human community, as flawed and as luminous as each of us are.
So I want to draw your attention to where you're standing, right now. We're standing at the edge, the very shoreline of this podcast. Before us lies an exciting journey.
When was the last time you felt yourself standing at the edge of something vast? Or felt the horizon pulling at something unnamed, and perhaps untamed, inside you?
What is your Tahiti? Your insular green and gentle island of comfort and safety? And what lives just beyond it, waiting for you?
If, like me, you've noticed a stirring beneath the surface, the call of something truer, quieter, deeper, something that doesn't demand answers, but asks for your attention, and if you've begun to wonder what might happen if you followed that feeling, gently, curiously, and compassionately, without needing to name it too soon, then this is your invitation.
Not to leap, just to listen, and to see what rises from within yourself.
So welcome aboard. This is where we weigh anchor and cast off. This is where we set sail.
And since we're travelling by boat, feel free to lean out over the rails. I'd love to know what you see moving beneath the surface of the swift waters that carry us.
Sometimes it may get deep, even dark. The sea, after all, isn't safe.
We may not have life jackets, but we will have stories. They'll be our maps, our lanterns. And if we ever find ourselves in waters beyond what we know how to navigate, don't worry: help has a way of finding those who stay open to the path.
And besides, as Melville has already told us, that insular island of Tahiti may be lovely. It may feel comfortable, but it's very small, especially compared to the vast undiscovered territory unfolding within us.
Final Thoughts
Next time, we'll dive into the myth of Minos, the king who asked for a sign from the sea, and we'll find out what happened to him when he refused to honour his covenant with the deep.
But for now, thank you. It's been a pleasure to share this space with you, and if this offering stirred something in you, I'd be honoured if you'd subscribe, or share it with someone who might want to travel with us.
You can also find the most comfortable place to listen to the podcast version of these essays here at my Podcast Hub page:
I hope to journey further with you soon. Until next time, I’m Dimitri, and you've been listening to the Inward Sea.
Jaan Puhvel. (1987). Comparative Mythology
https://www.mosaicvoices.org/
For a wonderful explanation and demonstration of what Carl Jung understood by this term, see the forward to Cary Baynes’ English translation of her father’s book, I Ching (Wilhelm, R., Baynes, C. F., Carl Gustav Jung, & Hellmut Wilhelm. (1990). The I Ching or Book of changes. Princeton University Press, , Cop.)
Yuasa, Y. (2008). Overcoming Modernity. SUNY Press.
Melville, H. (2001). Moby-Dick : or, The whale. Penguin Books.
In Moby-Dick, Melville describes the sea as a place of “universal cannibalism,” teeming with “most dreaded creatures… treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure.” He contrasts this with a peaceful inland Tahiti — an island of safety, surrounded by the appalling ocean. When he writes of the “half-known life,” I read it as an image of the unconscious: that part of our inner landscape which lies beneath the surface of awareness.
In psychology, both Freud and Jung sought to chart this inner terrain. Freud’s conception of the unconscious focused on repression, neurosis, and the return of the repressed. It was a diagnostic model rooted in pathology and presented the unconscious as a reservoir of unresolved tensions and unfulfilled drives. There is real value in this perspective, especially in clinical contexts. But it often carries with it a framework of fixing, correcting, or managing the unconscious — much like an illness to be cured.
Jung, on the other hand, expanded the idea. For him, the unconscious wasn’t just a personal underworld, but a source of potential. Yes, it housed our shadows — the parts we disown — but it also held the seeds of imagination, creativity, myth, and transformation. Jung saw the unconscious as a realm to be related to, not subdued. His approach wasn’t about eliminating discomfort, but engaging it and his healing practice sought meaningful connection with unconscious material rather than mastery of it.
That’s the vision I’m more drawn to. Perhaps in part, because I am not a therapist — but also because, as a storyteller and educator, I’m more interested in integration and interpretation than diagnosis. This podcast doesn’t seek to dissect the unconscious with a scalpel, but to listen to it, appreciate it, and engage with its reservoir of strength.
Paraphrased from a passage found in paragraph 126 of VOLUME 9,ii. OF THE COLLECTED WORKS OF C.G. Jung (2015). Aion : researches into the phenomenology of the self. Routledge. (Original work published 1951)
The method I use and describe later in this episode relies heavily on the process for working with dreams and active imagination described by Robert A. Johnson in his book, Inner Work:Using dreams and active imagination for personal growth
Johnson, R. A. (2009). Inner work: Using dreams and active imagination for personal growth. Harperone.
Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–396. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054346
I come from a Vedic (Hindu) background. You may know that what is now called Hinduism includes eighteen Puranas. They are stories that help us absorb what dry philosophical principles cannot always convey. The ancient sages understood this thousands of years ago, long before neuroscience began studying how the human brain works. The human mind is wired for stories. We think in stories all the time.
I am looking forward to listening to or reading your stories. Thank you.
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