Abstract: If visions and strategies for a post-growth world are to be effective they will have to engage with the ways in which our sense of reality is imagined and produced symbolically, narratively and cognitively. This involves engaging with the way particular worldviews are constituted through a web of metaphors, cultural myths and social conventions, and brings into play the foundational assumptions, images and modes of knowing that together affect our experience of and relation to the world. By examining the guiding metaphors and myths inherent to the language and concepts we use to describe our relations with the surrounding world, we can access alternative ways of seeing reality and thus open up for the possibility of enacting qualitatively different relationships within the lifeworld. This has the potential to renew our relations with our surroundings through an enhanced awareness and ability to navigate and subvert the dominant narratives of growth which characterises many Western cultures.