It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.

Campbell frames psychological and spiritual growth as a descent rather than an ascent: the “abyss” evokes the mythic underworld journey and, in modern terms, confrontation with fear, grief, shame, or the unconscious. The “treasures of life” are the capacities and insights recovered by facing what one most avoids—strength, compassion, vocation, or a renewed sense of meaning. “Where you stumble” suggests that recurring obstacles and points of failure are diagnostic: they mark the threshold of transformation. In Campbell’s hero-myth framework, the place of breakdown becomes the site of breakthrough, because the resisted experience contains the very material needed for integration and renewal.