A bit back my story was featured on Candid Slice, a very cool, conscientious blog based on the Triangle area, in NC.
The Healing Story – Listen, Share, Inspire, Heal
Years and a lot of intuition later, my fantasy world collided in a series of metaphors more grounded than my waking life.
I became a series of soul stories, a narrative of personal symbols and mythology. These stories were, literally, me. My self.
Is it any surprise that our earliest form of healing is also our first theatre–storytelling via empathy–the ability to feel as others do through reading facial expressions, body language?
Through this neurological weaving, we don’t simply connect with each other and share feelings, we give healing. We write healing stories.
Throughout archaic history, healing stories are mystical tales birthed from personal tribulation and victory, which are then shared. The process of relating the personal chronicle has several effects.
In hearing the yarn, empathy is generated in listeners. They connect with the emotions of the storyteller, which stir memories and feelings of their like experience.
The Listener becomes inspired. They honor and value their personal stories.
The Listener’s personal stories are aroused. The wound is witnessed, thus healing becomes possible, as does a conception of life beyond the wound. Through ownership of the process healing occurs. Listeners tell their stories. Inspiration is shared.
No more animistic mechanism than the healing story exists, no deeper sharing of what makes us vitally human.
In this tradition of one person sharing the narrative, a single story heals a village. Such is the hero’s journey, the evolution of the wounded healer, the shamanic narrative, even today. The visions that cloud, the scenes that replay, distracting from the rest of life, from the self that could be more completely be…
Be them and they will speak. Write them and they will heal. Heal, and we all thrive.
Originally published on Candid Slice.
