Returning to the United States, Rebillot developed an experimental theater department at San Francisco State College and, in the same period, worked with Mumako, a Japanese mime, developing his understanding of ritual gesture, meditation postures which shape the energies to the attitude expressed by the gesture, which became a key element in his work.
There, he worked with Stan Grof and John C. Lilly, trained in Gestalt Practice with Esalen's co-founder Dick Price and studied group process with Will Schutz.
In 1973, drawing on Campbell's work and integrating Gestalt practice, movement, meditation, ritual, group process, drama, art, and music, he structured The Hero's Journey.
Rebillot had already published "The Hero’s Journey: Ritualizing the Mystery" in Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis (1989), a collective work edited by Stanislav and Christina Grof, to which he had contributed with Ronald Laing, Roberto Assagioli, John Weir Perry, Ram Dass, Lee Sannella, Jack Kornfield, Holger Kalweit, Anne Armstrong and Keith Thompson.
In June 2009, just after his students facilitated In the footsteps of Abraham in Ireland, he fell ill. After struggling for eight months to overcome the effects of respiratory failure, he died at his home in San Francisco on February 11, 2010.
He felt that, without shamans or ritual masters to guide them, modern women and men have to find their own lonely and sometimes traumatic paths from one stage of life to another.
His understanding of the power of myth and ritual helped him design self-discovery processes that he felt would enrich, heal and awaken individuals to their inner quest and the transpersonal dimensions of their lives.
His background in theatre had convinced him of the capacity of bodily gesture and movement to reveal and to transform the point of view of the mind and the attitude of the heart.
Taking place over four years, this training offered practising therapists an opportunity to explore the nature of transformational processes such as the ones he had created, and to learn how to conceive and facilitate their own, according to the standards he had set.
Paul Rebillot in his last years recorded most of his structures as a gift to the world in collaboration with his three students, Mahipal Lunia, Sergey Berezin and Arman Darini of the Radical Change Group.