Leo season, Surya, and why the Hero archetype keeps finding you whether you signed up for it or not
After July — which asked more of me than I anticipated when I named the Wild Man archetype at the start of it — I arrive at August genuinely excited.
Not because everything is resolved. It isn’t.
But because new territory is energizing. And the Hero archetype is territory most people think they already know — from movies, from mythology, from the language of popular culture — and almost no one has explored with any real depth.
They don’t know the Hero has a shadow.
They don’t know how to find the Hero in themselves rather than projecting it onto someone else.
And most don’t know that the Hero’s journey is not about becoming extraordinary. It is about returning — changed, humbled, and more fully yourself — to the ordinary world you came from.
This week’s piece opens August with Leo season, Surya — the Sun in Vedic astrology — and the Fifth House of creative self-expression. The solar Hero is not defined by what he defeats. He is defined by what he expresses. The courage to show up fully. To be seen completely. To bring the full weight of who he is into contact with whatever he is facing.
And the Hero’s journey, it turns out, is not reserved for the extraordinary. It is already active in your life — in every moment you chose the honest thing over the comfortable one, kept going when stopping would have been easier, or allowed yourself to be changed by something painful rather than hardening against it.
I also want to tell you something honest about why I write — which is in the piece. It matters for understanding what this work actually is and why it keeps going every week.
Not trying to be the Hero — just showing up anyway,
Shiva J