Maureen Murdock
Author.
Educator.
Photographer.
Maureen Murdock is author of the best-selling book, The Heroine’s Journey, whose 30th anniversary edition continues to inspire a new generation of women. Her most recent book, Mythmaking: Self Discovery and the Timeless Art of Memoir, draws upon her experience as a psychotherapist and memoir writing teacher. It explores connections between ancient myths and popular contemporary memoirs to help readers examine their own life patterns and map their personal stories.
Welcome
Welcome to my website, which is devoted to memoir writing and the heroine’s journey. My work explores the mysteries of the psyche, a fascination with mythology and a love of story telling and memoir writing. In 1990 I wrote the best selling book The Heroine’s Journey as a response to Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. It was groundbreaking at the time and continues to inspire a new generation of women. A critical stage of The Heroine’s Journey addresses every woman’s yearning to create, so we will also explore memoir writing as a powerful creative expression of each person’s desire to understand the complexities of their life and the lives of others.
I hope you will also visit my photography gallery, Changing Woman: Contemporary Faces of the Goddess, where I present portraits and interviews of women whose focus is feminine spirituality.
— Maureen Murdock
MORE ABOUT MAUREEN
Every woman has to learn where her true source of validation is.
― From The Heroine's Journey: Woman's Quest for Wholeness
There comes a moment in a woman’s life when the strategies that once brought success, and even her definition of success itself, no longer bring aliveness.
The Heroine’s Journey begins there.
For over forty years, psychotherapist and mythologist Maureen Murdock has helped to fundamentally shape the conversation around women’s psychological development through her groundbreaking work The Heroine’s Journey. Join Maureen in a mythic journey through the feminine psyche. We will take an archetypical journey of repair: returning from masculine over-identification into embodied feminine wisdom, relational wholeness, and an integrated inner authority. A combination of self-study & live gatherings, this course is a comprehensive exploration of reclaiming feminine wholeness in contemporary Western culture.
The course includes:
• Video teachings (with closed-captioning & downloadable transcripts and audio)
• 2 live Q&A calls with Maureen (Dec. 12 & Jan. 9)
• Weekly live writing sessions led by Molly Curtis (Dec. 8–29)
• Readings from Maureen’s books
• Writing prompts
• Unlimited access
• Special retreat bonuses
Save 25% with early bird code HEROINE25 (ends Nov. 3)
Books
Maureen Murdock’s books have enriched the lives of thousands of people and been translated into 24 languages.
“Maureen Murdock's important book on the heroine's journey contains a wealth of insight that is of great value to contemporary Western women. It explores a rich territory of the feminine psyche and opens an understanding of female development that relates not only to personal transformation but cultural transformation as well.”
—Joan Halifax,
author of Standing at the Edge
The Heroine's Journey:
Woman's Quest for Wholeness
In celebration of the 30th anniversary of its original publication, Shambhala Publications has reissued Maureen’s groundbreaking book, The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness, as well as The Heroine's Journey Workbook: A Map for Every Woman's Quest. The new edition of the book includes an updated preface from Maureen reflecting on the last 30 years of women’s experiences and a new foreword by Christine Downing, PhD.
The Heroine’s Journey explores the rich territory of the feminine psyche and delineates the psycho-spiritual journey for women. Maureen wrote the book in response to Joseph Campbell’s A Hero with a Thousand Faces when he said to her, “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological tradition the woman is there.”
Drawing upon cultural myths and fairy tales, ancient symbols and goddesses, and the dreams of contemporary women, Murdock illustrates the need for—and the reality of—feminine values in Western culture today.
The Heroine's Journey Workbook:
A Map for Every Woman's Quest
This workbook, part of the 30th anniversary release of the original Heroine's Journey, is designed to guide the reader consciously through the different stages of the Heroine's Journey, and look at the myths and fairytales that shed light on these archetypal experiences. Based on workshops conducted by Maureen with women of all ages, it can be used individually or in a group.
Mythmaking:
Self Discovery and the Timeless Art of Memoir
Like myth, memoir reveals a profound unity to the human condition—that we all share similar hopes, dreams, and desires as well as fears, losses, and heartbreaks. Psychotherapist and writing teacher Maureen Murdock explores connections between ancient myths and popular contemporary memoirs to help readers examine their own life patterns and map their personal stories.
Unreliable Truth:
On Memoir and Memory
A captivating treatise on the corruptibility of memory that also provides tools for exploration of the self and soul through personal narrative. It started as an essay about the similarities between myth and memoir but took on a more personal meaning as Maureen’s mother struggled with Alzheimer’s disease.
Fathers' Daughters:
Breaking the Ties That Bind
One of the most profound relationships in a woman’s life is with her father. Through myth, fairy tale, case studies, and Jungian psychology, Maureen explores the unique relationship between a "father's daughter" and her father, its rewards and pitfalls, and how this idealized relationship affects the mother daughter bond.
Spinning Inward:
Using Guided Imagery with Children for Learning, Creativity and Relaxation
If you have ever wished you could show children and teenagers how to enrich their lives with meditation and visualization, this book will delight you. Drawn from Maureen's personal meditation practices, these guided imagery techniques offer adults as well as children a unique way to tap the wealth of creativity and wisdom within.
Monday Morning Memoirs:
Women in the Second Half of Life
This dazzling collection of intimate stories was written by ten remarkable women who first met in a creative writing class at UCLA in the mid-nineties. This wildly different, yet amazingly similar group of women, aged forty-five to eighty, have provided a unique view of the second half of life across several generations.
Podcasts, Interviews & Presentations
Maureen Discusses Her New Book Mythmaking at Chaucer's Books
After a nice introduction by her friend Carolyn Butcher, Maureen talks about her book Mythmaking: Self-Discovery and the Timeless Art of Memoir at Chaucer's Books in Santa Barbara.
Why Women Need Their Own Myth: A Podcast on The Heroine's Journey
Independent podcast host Amy McPhie Allebest discusses how Maureen Murdock rewrote the myth of the hero for women, and what The Heroine's Journey reveals about our culture.
Writing the Deeper Story:
The Intersection of Myth & Memoir
This conversation with Maureen Murdock and Karin Gutman, the host of Writing the Deeper Story, explores the intersection between myth and memoir, and the idea that our lives are shaped by patterns that have echoed through human stories for thousands of years.
Changing Woman:
Contemporary Faces of the Goddess
Photography Gallery
View Maureen's extraordinary portraits and interviews with women artists, dancers, activists, and writers whose focus is feminine spirituality. This photographic essay grew out of Maureen's interest in the rise in consciousness about the goddess in the 1980s and how she figured in the lives of contemporary women. Maureen wanted to know how the women she interviewed and photographed understood the idea of a sacred feminine and how they integrated her into their lives. The images shown here are from Maureen's gallery exhibit at The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles in 1987.
VISIT THE GALLERY
Colleen Kelly, Ritualist and Artist
Workshops & Speaking Engagements
Join Maureen for her new six-week online course on The Heroine's Journey and join her mailing list to receive updates on her work.
Maureen combines her interest in the mysterious workings of the psyche with a study of mythology and a love of storytelling and memoir writing. To that end she helps people explore meaning in their lives through the excavation of their memories in lectures and workshops throughout the United States.
She has taught memoir writing in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s memoir certificate program, “Writing Down the Soul”, and at the San Francisco Writing Salon, UCLA Writer’s Program, and the International Womens’ Writing Guild.
As each one of us heals our own feminine and masculine nature, we change the consciousness on the planet from one of suffering, conflict, and domination to a consciousness that recognizes the need for affiliation, healing, balance, and inter-being.
― From The Heroine's Journey