STORY MAGIC: SUPPORTING RESILIENCE THROUGH WORDS, SENSORY IMAGES, AND PLOT

In telling or listening to fairy tales and myths passed on through thousands of generations, we step across a threshold, out of ordinary reality into a larger, deeper, truer one. We leave the realm of the left brain, reason, conventional reality, and linear cause and effect, and enter into a metaphorical and imaginal reality of the right brain, creativity, intuition, and higher consciousness.

You could say that we step across the threshold of the corpus callosum, which separates left and right brains, and from the highly evolved pre-frontal cortex, into our ancient and instinctive limbic brain, which is connected to all our physical senses, nervous system, and energy matrix. This is where deep story lives. Everything that has ever happened to us is stored in this crossroad of mind and body. We enter into the ancestral realm of body/mind connectedness, where deep story lives.

I call it the story zone.

Traditional healers understood that words, images, and cadences affect inner organs, tissues, and brain. They diagnosed illness through whatever image, character, landscape or situation resonated with the suffering person and told a story with the appropriate language that supported the flow of life force to that particular area in the patient’s body, mind and spirit where it was needed.

This ancient tradition of healing story can be as effective today as it was through the ages. The metaphorical places and beings in myth and fairy tale call forth the emotional states we need during a period of transition, when our old world is dead and the new world not yet formed. Just as birds in many tales represent the presence of the Divine and higher consciousness, stories with water and earth evoke nourishment, flow, and groundedness. Story protagonists, in struggling to master their circumstances, awaken heroic resilience within ourselves.

People whose lives have been shattered by traumatic loss or who are struggling to survive serious illness may find relief, healing, and wholeness here.

An art therapist in Prague wanted creative help with Parkinson’s disease patient who, embittered by the betrayal of her body, sank into a wheelchair in depression and anxiety about the trembling and stiffening of her limbs. My colleague described entering the sunlit apartment filled with family photographs, finely matched old chairs and sofa and a brown upright piano — a story of a happy, engaged but now lost life that made her client’s situation all the more poignant. My colleague said she felt layers of grief permeating this space as well as the woman’s fear and despair. Her client was exhaling and inhaling her own self-defeating stories.

I suggested she aim to support fluidity and grace with creative exercises, such as inviting the woman to imagine the two of them as silken parachutes gently floating on the winds and to mirror each other’s floating arms. The woman said the parachute made her think of Sedona, Arizona’s hot air balloons that floated serenely over a long-ago American holiday with her late husband.

I shared over the phone -- a disembodied voice coming from the ethers -- a tale about a small stream as protagonist. This story tells both of life’s impermanence and its continuity, while conveying the sensory experience of flow, which the woman had lost. The tension the woman carried in her rigid limbs like the harsh resistant desert and that the therapist felt in her empathy for her, dissolved into relaxing and caressing rain within their own energy systems. The woman did not leave her wheelchair, but she slightly waved her arms as her caregiver slowly danced the story around her living room like the wind, the stream, and the birds that filled the sky. Together they created a new imaginal reality.

Listening over the phone, I wondered if her body remembering when it was young and she was a dancing thing.

This creative healing did not cure the woman’s chronic disease of course; but it softened her fear and opened heart to hope. It also gave the therapist a new treatment path through poetry, myth, and movement.

From A Write of Passage: Timeless Lessons for Your Journey from Shattering Loss to Renewed Life, in progress

Image: blog.hdwalls.source.com

HOW ARE WE EVER GOING TO HEAL OUR FRACTURED LAND?

This is the burning question, the one that people of good will are asking, and the question most people with whom I work and I myself carry with me daily. You probably do as we all. The cable TV images and online articles bearing witness to what our countries are doing in our name, the cruelty driving official policies and practices, the sufferings being visited upon the vulnerable, makes us feel powerless and spiritually sick.

Actually, we are unimaginably powerful -- at least at the grassroots level that is the ground of sustainable change. Our weapon, our trowel, our medicine is story.

You see, we live not only within our own stories; but as well within a greater story: the evolution of human consciousness, unfolding through the epochs we know as history. This evolution swings perpetually through cycles of enlightenment, during which humanity progresses to a higher level, and decline, when it reverts to earlier stages -- much as we personally take two steps forward and one step back in our personal growth. The whole story is the over-riding conflict between old and new realities at play during an epoch. This conflict propels the events of that time and is reflected in our personal stories.

This period in which we find ourselves is a time of regression to the earliest stages of human life, characterized by tribalism, autocracy, and hatred of the feared Other. Just as we personally can experience fragmentation, loss of core values, expressive language, and spiritual orphaning, our collective life is torn by racism, oppression, dislocation, and whole populations crippled by the shame of being the Outsider. Psychically, we have all become refugees.

The impact on the marginalized – as I witnessed among prisoners in maximum security, homeless women, street teens with HIV/AIDS, sick people isolated by their illness, and so many others – is a disconnection from the inner life, soul, home, the hearth where our restorative power is located, and is especially severe.

I work within the tradition of Silk Road storytellers, which laid the foundation for a new multicultural order, and I view my story sanctuaries as archetypal guest houses where travelers rest for the night and share their personal journey tales, laying the foundation for a new culture, a new world.

I have witnessed this transformation through many years of welcoming so many people into my guest houses. They include people grieving the loss of a beloved, survivors and responders of terrorism, families in newly multicultural neighborhoods fraught with conflict, and perhaps most profoundly, given the state of our nation in these times, healing professionals reflecting the political and cultural divide. In every one of these workshops, rooted in mythic understanding, personal and collective healing have occurred at the same time. The fact is that political divisions and cultural hatred dissolve in the face of life’s common experiences – love, death, uncertainty, and hope.

My experience in these darkest of places has proven to me that story, discovered in writing and shared in community, can restore the life force of soul to our suffering world.

LIFE THROUGH A STORY LENS

Chauvet Cave, Southwest France. It is thought that thhese drawings represent
a creation taleand were part of a shamanic initiation.

"Once there was..." 

With these words we step into the larger life of the imagination, where what seem to be miracles in ordinary reaity are everyday occurrences in this greater, truer reality. I call it The Story Zone. 

I tend to be claustrophic, and I avoid situations that might trigger feelings of being trapped. So you can imagine how challenging lockdown since the beginning of March has been for me. Like you perhaps, I've been through the gamut of emotions, including waves of fear, followed by focused breathing and free-writing that has induced calm, only to be overtaken by despair, and then again, creative and spiritual practices to center myself.

About two weeks in, I had a panic attack at having no way out, unless I wanted to venture into a dangerous world where the virus circulated freely, invisibly, possibly fatally. No way out and no end date. (Even as I write these words, I can feel rumbles of anxiety!) 

Now that the world is opening up again, that same conflict looms between staying safe in what often feels like a prison and risking my health (I'm in a vulnerable group) out in the world. To get to my usual places of work, I have to take the subway, which has been determined to be the main channel of transmission in my city. I'm not ready to chance it!

When I feel stuck and without words to express the feelings that are paralyzing me, I go to storyboards -- scribbled cartoons that capture my situation in a lighthearted way. 

In early March, the first case of Covid-19 had shown up in New York City. It was a woman who had just returned from Iran. From that one unsuspecting woman, the virus exploded in my city. At the same time, my income and financial security was tanking. To save myself financially, I felt, I had to get "out there." That meant taking the subway. I was frozen. 

In my time of fear, I quickly sketched this storyboard. It contains my several "selves" -- the fearful me as well as my higher intuitive and imaginative self, along with the scary context I was trying to navigate. 

Playfulness was the key to calm! The lightheartedness, and even the laughter I felt on compassionately drawing this bewildered, frightened woman helped me transcend my immediate situation and I was able to come to a place of trust again. Trust not that I had an answer. Trust that there was an All is Well reality embracing all of epochal event, of which I was an infinitesimal part.

Feeling just a bit better, I remembered Story. Specifically, the "five elements" of story: Time, Setting and Mood; Character; Situation; and Plot. I looked around at my small room, which was sometimes sanctuary and at others a prison 

"What does this feel like?" I asked myelf.

A cave.

Traditionally, caves are archetypal places of initiation. I could now view my situation as an initiatory experience. I was about to be transformed, if I would allow the process to unfold naturally. I began to write....

The scribbles on my page held the energy of ancient creation tales drawn on the rock walls of a cave 36,000 years ago by forever unknown artists, as in the photograph of Chauvet Cave above.

As I wrote, I recreated my reality. In a moment of transformative insight, I realized that something unknown yet expansive could happen for me in this physical and emotional space. 

The result? Life opened again. And now I was ready for it. Over and over I have done this simple drawing and writing practice to sustain myself during the time of Covid. 

The lockdown continues. But so do I. And not just continue. As I play with my circumstances on the page, I rise up and out from the ashes of this devastated world and I create a new and healthier world in my imagination, on the page, and soon in outside life as well. 

So can you. 

If you would like to schedule private storymaking sessions with me to transform your reality from the inside out, I'm offering a 3-session online package for $300 total. You can find a description of how to work with me on my trusty old website: julietbruce.com, click on Ways to Work with Me. Times are tough, and if you really want to do this, but can't swing the fee right now, let me know and we'll try to work something out that is mutually beneficial. I too have to generate income to pay my expenses. Contact me here or via my website to set up a complimentary half hour exploratory session. 

HOW TO UPGRADE YOUR LIFE

Stories end. New stories begin. It's fascinating -- the great and small adventures of every day. Honor the place where you're rooted. What stories are falling away? What beckons?

To explore your living story for deeper understanding of your life's unfolding context, and for greater clarity and courage, write me to set up an appointment, in-person or online. Julietbrucephd@gmail,com