There's a story we assume about change. It goes something like this: something difficult happens, we struggle, we grow, we overcome - and then we arrive. Transformed. The hero(ine) returns home, wiser and more powerful. You probably know this shape by heart; it's the spine of almost every film, novel, self-help book, and therapy brochure you've ever encountered.

It's a compelling way of telling a human story and responsible for a great deal of unnecessary suffering, I think.

We live in an age that is deeply in love with the linear. Progress graphs trending upward. Treatment protocols with defined end-points. Wellness plans with clear goals. Even the language of mental health has absorbed this shape. The arrow always points forward, and the destination is a place where the struggle is finished. 

And then something happens - anxiety returns, grief resurfaces, an old pattern reappears — and we find ourselves blindsided. By the annoying difficulty itself, but also by a story that lands on top of it: I should be past this. I've already done this work. Why am I back here again?

But what if we simply have an inadequate map?

Western narratives

It's worth pausing to notice how much work this arc does in the service of Western capitalism, and increasingly, techno-capitalism. The hero's journey isn't just a storytelling convention - it's a technology of persuasion, deployed constantly and largely unexamined to justify a very particular set of values: that progress is linear, that obstacles exist to be overcome, that the future is always better than the past, and that those who don't arrive are simply not trying hard enough.

Think of how this plays out at scale. (I have just read Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me, and she describes this brilliantly.)  A corporation proposes building a dam - for progress, for development, for the greater good. The narrative is already cast: visionary leaders facing down bureaucratic obstacles, engineering triumphs against the odds, a community lifted forward into modernity. It's a hero's story, and within that story there is genuinely no room for another kind of knowing. The indigenous communities who have lived in relationship with that river valley for generations - whose understanding of place is not linear but spiral, woven through with story, ceremony, seasonal rhythm, reciprocal obligation - don’t get to share their narrative. They are offered financial compensation. A meagre payout and an invitation to become heroes of their own smaller journey: to start a business, to relocate, to adapt, to get on with it. Their deep, spiralling, relational knowledge of that land is simply not legible within the hero's arc. It has no place in the story being told. And so it is erased  through the ignorance and self-interest of a single narrative shape that cannot accommodate any other.

This is not only a political and economic tragedy. It's an epistemological one. Whole ways of knowing - ones that honour cycles, return, and the intelligence of interdependence- are dismissed as obstacles to progress rather than recognised as wisdom traditions that understand something the arc fundamentally cannot: that we are not separate from the systems we move through, and that "arriving" somewhere always means leaving something else behind.

The Buddha’s story

The story of the Buddha is almost always told as a hero's journey. A prince renounces his palace, undertakes extraordinary trials, sits beneath the Bodhi tree, and achieves enlightenment. He is liberated, fully and finally, from suffering. The arc is clean and complete.

But this telling can do us and the experience of liberation, a disservice.  It suggests that the goal of practice is to reach a place from which anxiety, grief, longing and difficulty no longer move through us. A permanent installation of an idealised, personal peace, outside the reality of an ordinary human life. Many of us have absorbed this as our hidden expectation when we come to meditation. (And some Buddhist stories really don’t help if we take them too literally.) We want to fix the system, once and for all.

But what if the deepest teaching is about how we meet the endlessly returning waves of perception of experience - with precision, care and insight – which involves a deep relinquishing of taking ourselves so personally.  

Other ways of seeing

The writer Jane Alison, in her book Meander, Spiral, Explode has studied narrative structure - the shapes that stories can take - and she observed that the arc, the dramatic rise and fall, is only one of many patterns available. Nature has a rich repertoire of shapes we might open to.

There's the spiral: a fiddlehead fern unfurling, a radiating nautilus, a hurricane's circle, a ram's horn. There's the meander: a river kinking and curving across a plain, a snail's silver trail, the wandering path of an animal grazing the most tender greens. There's the fractal: the branching of trees, the coastline that reveals more intricacy the closer you look, the pattern that repeats itself at every scale. There's the radial: a splash of water, petals opening from a flower's heart, light radiating outward from its source. (A good metaphor for the delight of a moment of insight and freedom!)

These patterns aren't just around us. They are embodied in the shapes and activities of our bodies too. The branching of our lungs, the spiral of our cochlea, the cellular repeating of our tissues. We are built from these shapes.

I reckon these patterns describe something closer to how psychological and spiritual life actually moves, far better than the arc does.

Think about how inquiry genuinely unfolds in meditation or in therapy. You encounter something - a familiar powerlessness, a recurring fear or anger, a familiar contraction. You meet it. You learn something. You find some ease. And then, weeks or months or years later, you meet what feels like the same territory again. But you're not the same person who first encountered it. You're at the same angle, looking at similar material, but from a different elevation. You see more. You're meeting it with greater steadiness, finer discrimination, a slightly bigger space in the heart.

This is how depth actually accumulates - with increasing subtlety and intimacy with the same essential human ground.

The meander is another useful image. A river doesn't move toward the sea in a straight line. It curves, doubles back, cuts new channels, abandons old ones, spreads into wetlands before narrowing again. From the air, its path looks almost aimless. But the river is unfolding something — moving, finding its way, working with the actual terrain rather than the idealised one. There's intelligence in the wandering.

Meditation practice has this quality. Some days are clear and still. Others are muddy, obscure. Some sits feel like returning to exactly the place you thought you'd moved beyond. This is the practice reflecting the actual texture of a human life, which is not so linear.

What might open up?

What becomes possible when we swap the hero's arc for the spiral?

For one thing, we stop measuring ourselves against a destination that doesn't exist. The question becomes "How am I meeting this, right now?" That's a question that our awareness can actually answer and it’s one that keeps us oriented toward the present moment rather than perpetually checking our position against an imagined endpoint with all the criticism that entails.

We can also develop a different relationship with recurrence. When anxiety arises again - as it will, as it always will, as it will for all of us so long as we are alive and caring about anything - it becomes less like a sign of failure and more like an invitation. Here it is again. What do I notice this time? What's the same, and what's different? What have I learned that changes how I can meet this?

And perhaps most importantly, we stop waiting to begin living until we've sorted ourselves out. You're already in it - this life.  

This is what I am interested in my practice, and what Libba and I value in the teaching radiating out from our OpenGround mob (and many other marvellous wisdom traditions accessible to us if we look.) Mindfulness practice can be a spiral. The same human difficulties, met with ever-increasing love, clarity and openness.

Deepening not arriving.

(Image credit: The stairway at Hartzer Park, NSW, photo by Chris Shain)

—Timothea Goddard