The Hero’s Journey | Entering the Cave

1. Man in the Mirror – Michael Jackson
   The awakening. This is the spark of self-awareness — the hero realizes the problem isn’t out there, it’s within. The first courageous step into the cave is deciding to look in the mirror and face uncomfortable truths.
2. Which One I Feed – Cody Jinks
   The inner battle begins. As soon as reflection starts, the hero confronts their duality. Which parts of themselves will they nurture, and which will they leave behind? A defining moment in the descent.
3. Coming Down Over Here – Andrew Duhon
   Isolation and weariness. The hero feels the weight of loneliness and detachment. The world feels distant, the light dimming. It’s a quiet, soul-weary moment when the cave’s darkness begins to settle in.
4. Black Hole Sun – Soundgarden
   Disorientation. The deeper the hero ventures, the more reality distorts. Familiar things feel foreign. The surreal quality of this track mirrors the hero’s sense of being unmoored, unsure of what’s real anymore.
5. Teardrop – Massive Attack
   Emotional drift. The cave isn’t always violent — sometimes it’s a numb, floating descent. This track captures the hero’s suspended state of reflection, ambiguity, and unspoken grief.
6. Way Down We Go – Kaleo
   Surrender to the fall. The hero stops fighting gravity and accepts the descent. There’s a recognition here: you can’t heal what you refuse to feel. This is the embrace of darkness, the necessary fall before rising.
7. Down in a Hole – Alice in Chains
   Rock bottom. This is despair in its purest form. The hero faces utter hopelessness and emotional ruin. It’s the moment when they stop pretending, when pain is acknowledged without disguise.
8. Hurt – Johnny Cash
   Existential reckoning. The rawest, most unfiltered moment of the descent. Cash’s voice turns this into a confession of regret, pain, and isolation — a heartbreaking recognition of everything lost and broken. This is when the hero confronts the full weight of their darkness and mortality.
9. Needle in the Hay – Elliott Smith
   Numb collapse. Beyond even despair, there’s numbness. A quiet, resigned kind of devastation. This song is the soundtrack for that hollow, empty space where the hero feels like a shell of themselves.
10. Slippin’ – DMX
    Vulnerability voiced. The hero finally speaks their truth. DMX’s raw honesty mirrors the moment when pain turns into narrative, and suffering finds a voice. The beginning of meaning-making through confession.
11. I Will Not Break – Disturbed
    Defiant resolve. The hero isn’t out yet, but they’ve found their fight. This track signals the end of the cave’s stranglehold. It’s the hard-won decision to endure, to survive, and to rise — a moment that bridges the Cave to the Ordeal ahead.

The Entering the Cave stage is about descent, reckoning, and unflinching self-confrontation. This playlist opens with awareness and choice, spirals through isolation, disorientation, and despair, then lands in raw confession and fragile clarity. It mirrors the inner war you experience after trauma — where pain threatens to define you, but ultimately reveals truths worth fighting