HECATE'S DAUGHTER: LISTENING FOR THE CRIES OF THE WORLD

This is from an old 2018 blog post, never more relevant than today.

Hecate, goddess of thresholds, mystery, magic, and the moon, via Jean Bakula, www.jeanbakula@exemplore.com

Silence. 

Beautiful, deep, alive silence.

Outside, rattle and roar of wind against windows. Inside, the quiet of a hundred people sitting in meditation, inhaling, exhaling the peace of this space. Dozens of small story fires radiate through candle flames. A carved wooden statue of Avalokitashvara, the Buddhist goddess of compassion, stands on the altar, as loose and graceful as an unfurling wave. 

It's New Year's Eve. Twenty blocks north is Times Square, with its screaming millions. Here, a different plane, one that I've been craving. I have chosen to welcome my new year at the annual New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care sit with other like-minded, softhearted New Yorkers trying to get through these noisy and scary times with equanimity. 

Why here? I am attracted to ZenCare's mission of offering solace and companionship to suffering people, including those at the end of their lives. During their dharma talks this evening, the two guiding teachers, Robert Chodo Cambell and Koshin Paley Ellison, invite us to lay aside resolutions, which we'd be sure to fall away from by mid-January. Instead, they ask us to consider a quality we want to embody and nourish in our world in 2018. They suggest that embodying is an expression of giving birth, bringing a gift from within ourselves, is a Divine Feminine way of stepping into the new year rather than the conventional patriarchal notion of reaching out or making something happen in the material world.

I exhale. This is an easy one for me. 

Listening. It is what I do, have always done, since I was a pesky little girl tugging on my father’s pants leg: “Tell me a story, Daddy.” I have been saying virtually the same thing – tell me a story – ever since, as a comparative literature student, a reporter, and since 1994, a healing story counselor. “Tell me your story.”  

Given this luscious time to remember and visualize listening, I know with certainty that in 2018,  I want to be able to listen more deeply to the stories life is telling through clients, the places I walk through, environments in which I live, friends, family memories, new adventures, and through through my pen on the page. To listen more deeply to whatever is calling to be born in that moment. 

What quality are you embodying this year? Can you give it a visual metaphor?

Mine is Hecate, goddess of thresholds, magic, mystery, and the moon, the one who lives at a crossroads outside of town, listening for the cries of lost souls.

When I first started my Living Story practice in the world's most lost and forgotten places,, I read a lot about myth and fairy tale, because ordinary language was inadequate to contain and express that experience. Two goddesses especially resonated with me, both of them transformational: Aphrodite and Hecate. Transformation through love, and transformation through deep listening and intuition. Lighthearted listening through delight, love, and playfulness, and deep listening to the call of the world's suffering.

Through the years, as I have listened to more stories, and especially in the last year, as I have faced personal challenges and my country has slid into a sorrowful place, Hecate is the spirit and the energy that most guides my practice. A mature female goddess whose wisdom comes from lived experience, Hecate is the goddess who hears the cries of lost souls and guides them home. 

I found the image at the top of this post on google and followed it to the website that houses writer-astrologer Jean Bakula’s blog, jeanbakula@exemplore.com. Briefly, Bakula notes that Hecate’s three-headed dog represents her ability to see past, present, and future. In my practice, Hecate’s way of knowing comes through story, which creates coherence between the present moment, the past that has led us to this place, and the future possibilities latent in any situation. From my own reading, The serpent head at the top of her staff represents higher consciousness, and broomsticks represent the sweeping away of threshold hindrances. 

Most important to me about the energy of Hecate is that she brings the quality of listening to the world. It was Hecate who could not see but who heard Persephone’s cries from the underworld to which she had been abducted by Hades. It was Hecate who called upon an army of other gods to rescue the buried child, and it was Hecate who remained Persephone’s companion throughout her life, even when she returned every six months to take up her role as Queen of the Underworld, guiding those who had fallen there back to the light. 

I want to manifest Hecate's energy ever more fully this year. 

The evening concludes with the ringing of a bell 108 times for the 108 gates of liberation and the 108 hindrances, which in Buddhist tradition are the same. Reverberating with the deep clear tones of the bell and my personal intention, I walk out into the night both grounded and lifted. Struggling against the frigid winds to the subway, past other stragglers going to their midnight destinations, filled with new energy, knowing that my path this year is about bringing forth more deeply the quality of listening – for the story beneath the story, the story that wants to emerge – in my life, yours, my world, yours, ours. 

Are you listening to the story your life is telling you?

In every moment we’re at a crossroads: past and future are right here with us in the present. We’re always being asked to let go of the past by telling its story, and to choose a direction forward. The fact is that we’re given difficult situations to help us grow — not to overcome  problems, but to ripen and blossom through them; to look and listen more deeply into ourselves and our experience; to discover strengths, gifts, and a degree of commitment to life that demands more than we knew we possessed. 

Your personal world and its mood. The environments in which we find ourselves or choose to live often mirror our internal landscape. What does your world look and feel like? What features stand out for you? In my own recent life, I’ve lived in a series of rooms that aren’t my home. They reflect the major life transition I’ve been traveling through since my mother’s death five years ago. When I understand my experience this way, I feel not homeless and anxious, but calm and focused on listening for what is trying to come forth and what is being asked of me now.

Your supporting cast. Who's with you and who matters? I’m sure you’ve heard it said that everyone we meet is a teacher. This is true. The characters who populate our lives affirm and lift us, or denigrate and deplete us. Remembering that all the world’s a stage, and that the people whom we meet outside are often reflections of characters in ourselves, who uplifts and energizes you? Who sabotages you? Understand that we are all made up of light and shadow energy; your hero and your "villain" can be the same person. I have met both companions and adversaries during my life, and I am careful now, as I grow older and want my time to be spent more meaningfully, to identify and travel with the light-bearers who energize and inspire me.

What perplexing situations or yearnings are calling for your attention now? 
What are they asking of you?   
What do you need?

------

NEXT FREE ONLINE STORY FACILITATION TRAINING FOR CHANGE-MAKERS:
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 9
8-9:30 PM EASTERN
(FEATURING A TRUE HOLIDAY-THEMED TALE
REGISTER AT julietbrucephd@gmail.com

All rights reserved, 2019, Juliet Bruce, PhD 

FACILITATING HEALING STORY SANCTUARIES IN AWFUL TIMES

One of the most effective things we can do as healers, activists, teachers, and individuals who want to make a positive difference is to create sanctuaries for others to gain a fresh perspective on their life, and to find and share their own experience in these times of wild change. We are not afraid to responsibly express our own truth.

Please join me on Tuesday, October 29, at 8-9:30 pm eastern for a brief and easy introduction to facilitating healing story sanctuaries. It's free and online. Write to me at julietbrucephd@gmail.com for the link and to inquire about my availability to help you or your organization become creative facilitators.

Please note: my approach is arts-based and experiential rather than clinical or academic It is based on my 27 years work within the oral and literary traditions and is guided by the approaches of artist/therapist Shaun McNiff, author of "Art as Medicine: Creating a Therapy of the Imagination," mythologist Joseph Campbell, and Jungian analyst/storyteller Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

Best wishes,

Juliet Bruce, PhD

Preferences

GETTING TO ITHACA: HOW TO TELL A NEW WORLD INTO BEING, ONE STORY AT A TIME

Grandfather Stone, Seneca Creation Tale

Some years ago the conflicts in our nation and world had flamed into war at every level. I see now they were but a foretaste of the calamities taking place in our country at this writing. Then, in the last weeks of the 2004 presidential campaign, I facilitated a workshop for trauma counselors who had come to Washington, D.C., from all parts of the country for a national conference. In the news that day was a fraudulent attack on one of the candidates that doomed any chance he might have to win, The nine participants in this workshop reflected the cultures and biases of their separate regions. They entered as hostile strangers, speaking emotionally incompatible languages, isolated within their own political ideologies, fears and prejudices.  

            One participant, a young man from New York, had come early to sit quietly by the sunny window and gaze out at the Washington Monument rising like a lonely mast from the Federal Mall across the street. The sun was dazzling and warmed the corner of the large conference room where I had set up a small circle of chairs. He confided to me that he was overwhelmed with the two traumatic realities affecting his clients (and himself): AIDS and 9/11. He had hoped to find some comfort by coming to the conference, but so far he had felt only increased isolation. He did not have much hope for this session, he said, but since the blurb had mentioned the healing power of story, and it was the last day, he had figured, what the hell.

            The tension was palpable as, one by one, participants introduced themselves, their faces registering distrust, even distaste, as faith-based counselor from the South met gay psychotherapist from New York.

             I introduced myself and gave an overview of healing story plot—crisis; the struggle to resolve it; and the transformation both in circumstances and the heart of the protagonist. The boredom of my listeners was obvious as they rifled through the handouts I had so lovingly prepared.

            Bored, that is, until I uttered the password to the realm of magic: 

        

“Once upon a time...” Doorway to the Path of Creation

            I launched into a brief retelling of a verse toward the end of the Odyssey, when Odysseus is found naked and shipwrecked on a lonely beach at the end of an island belonging to an ancient seafaring people.

“Once upon a time there was a great warrior named Odysseus,” I began.

As it always did, this epic tale of a lost soul transfixed all of us.

I told them how after a 10-year war, the Greeks declared victory and set out for home. But Odysseus had steered his ship of returning warriors into alien waters and became lost. For 10 more years, they wandered. It wasn’t until he found himself shipwrecked on an island beach and told his story to his rescuers that his fortune changed and a new story began to take shape. So moved was the island king by the sufferings of this brave man that he ordered his sailors to place him on a ship and return him safely home to his kingdom of Ithaca. 

The Odyssey is a timeless tale and is applicable to all our lives, even today, I said to the trauma therapists. Especially to our lives today, when so many of us feel adrift and traumatized, yearning for our own Ithaca.

            The trauma therapists listened quietly as the narrative unfolded.

At the end, I asked my usual question: “What stands out for you?” There were a few questions about how this related to helping kids who had been sexually abused and how to separate one trauma from another in a person's life. I explained that story was not a clinical process aimed at treating symptoms. Rather, it regenerated the healing life force that no medically based treatment modality could reach. But the elephant in this room was the toxic distrust that permeated the group and the country.

Finally, the woman from the southern church murmured that she resonated with Odysseus’ long wanderings because she had lost her own daughter to cancer nine years before. Although she was a woman of faith who had attended many grief workshops and healing retreats, and even though she helped many others deal with their sorrows, she herself had remained frozen in the day her daughter died.

In 25 years of facilitating healing story workshops among every possible population, including groups that were in extreme conflict, I have seen what happens when I tell a mythic tale and people respond with their own stories, stepping out of their small, anguished realities into a larger one. I have found that most people are yearning to tell their stories, but they don’t know how. The old tales help to release their words and bind them together in a common story. I have learned how to identify the exact moment when this bonding happens: There is a palpable shift and softening in energy, a deepening quiet, a profound stillness: “I” becomes “We.” It happened here. The group became deeply quiet and attentive.

In the stillness, the man from New York spoke: He described the devastation that surrounded his life as a healer, gay man and New Yorker still struggling many years later to come to grips with the World Trade Center attacks. A few others joined in, sharing their own feelings of exhaustion from vicarious trauma, the caregiver’s occupational hazard.

After a brief writing period, I invited them to share what they had written with the group. The woman read about the moment of her daughter’s death. As she did so, she raised her eyebrows at the words: “A peace came over Lila's face, and I knew at that moment she was in the arms of a love greater than even I her mother could give her.”

“I had forgotten that moment,” she wept softly.

The young man read his piece describing his desolation without a future, surrounded by trauma, yet finding moments of peace in sunlight, water and the trees in Central Park. Held in the embrace of community, their myth-inspired writing released the healing insights so needed by their souls. The tensions in the group dissolved, as several others haltingly read their own writings.

I have no doubt that we are brought together to release life force in the world through the healing images and words we have within. From the Odyssey to grieving woman to frightened man to group, story generated a moment of wholeness and peace.

After a long, releasing cry, the woman said that something had broken and that now she could finally move forward.

No words from me were necessary; I let the silence surround them, each finding what they needed there.

After a while, I brought the group to a less vulnerable state in preparation for the rest of the day. “What do you take from this?” I asked. One by one, almost every person shared how much more relaxed they were, less stressed and feeling that they had truly connected with other people at a level they rarely got to experience, even in their families. Something real had happened. Nothing had actually changed; yet everything had. A larger story, beyond their personal lives, was being woven; life flowed again.

Trauma or loss may have tossed you out of the web of your life. Finding and sharing your deep story is the way back in.

loveyourstorypodcast.com

You enter a larger field of human energy where you can find nourishment, light, restoration and resilience based not on hope but on the community engendered by the merging of our stories into one story: the longing to feel at home in the world and within ourselves. An image, character or situation in a story — be it contemporary, fairy tale or myth — makes a connection with someone that has never been made before or opens a blockage at a level of a listener's psyche that is inaccessible to their rational mind and ordinary language. Previously unimaginable transformations in mood, behavior and life flow from this opening that emerges between you and your listeners. Story reaches beneath the thinking, judging mind to the feeling one, where we are all human beings together standing on the common ground called life.

            Whether in a prison, a homeless shelter, a hospital cancer unit or a first responder treatment center — crowded environments filled with trauma, stress, fear, depression and isolation — we the people relax. Our voices become stronger; strangers bond intimately; we laugh together; life force flows and profound healing occurs. 

             This knowledge is my rock. Story helps me remain stable and focused in my own life’s rocky places. It will help you, too.

           It's true that storytellers create the world. We spin a world with our words and metaphors, plots and yearnings that ultimately manifest in physical reality. When one world story is created or dies, we spin a new one. It gives me some small comfort in this dark time when so much that we hold precious is being destroyed and reminds me that we must carry on, telling stories and bearing witness to life’s hard beauty as well as its continuation.

All rights reserved. Jun 3, 2019  Juliet Bruce, PhD. Excerpt from "A Write of Passage," and from a chapter published in the journal of the National Storytelling Network, January 2019.

NEXT STORY SANCTUARY: LIFE THROUGH A HEALING STORY LENS

VIA 4 Powerful Ways to Use Storytelling LIFE THROUGH A HEALING STORY LENS

Monday, July 16 8-9:30 eastern Free and online The one gift I can see in these horrific times is the emergence of powerful healing communities at the grassroots and global levels. We are taking our destinies out of the hands of a government that doesn't care about the people and entrusting them to small communities of people who do care -- both locally and globally through the wonders of the internet. These Story Sanctuaries are intended to be a place for building a grid of deeply caring people and communities. To me, there's no more powerful way to build community than to sharing our stories. Story (an artistic re-imagining of our lives) offers both a narrative through-line moving ever forward like a river to the sea, and a great maternal container that holds all of life in a moment -- light, shadow, yearning, resisting, external obstacles, looking forward, looking back, and being grounded in the present. Whether you are interested in writing your story or living through it resiliently, this session will focus on deconstructing and reconstructing the moments you are living into an emerging through-line that can bring you home to your calm center. These groups are small and people have begun registering for this one. To register, please write julietbrucephd@gmail.com. I will send you my Zoom Room link a few days before. Image: via 4 Powerful Ways to Use the Art of Storytelling

ROW BEYOND THE ROCKS My book in progress: A Write of Passage: In the Darkness, a Story Path Home Authors Guild Website: The Story Zone "Everything is clear now: why I had to go there, why things happened the way they did, what I learned and how I changed. But at the beginning of this tale, on a sun-burnished September day in 1994, I stood before a locked iron door to a maximum security unit for criminally insane male inmates–killers, rapists, kidnappers and burglars declared not guilty by reason of insanity, and incarcerated here until at some undetermined date they were deemed safe to return to the community. The door held a peculiar message. Once upon a time, it had read "Welcome to Ward 10," in contac paper letters attached just below the barred window. By the time I arrived, the "l" had fallen out and faded blue letters spelled, "We come to Ward 10." I noted it with some unease, but followed my escort with a spirit of adventure over the threshold into the unit." ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, Juliet Bruce, PhD, 2018.

WANT TO WORK PRIVATELY WITH ME OR BOOK A TALK OR STORY SANCTUARY FOR YOUR GROUP? I am available for professional trainings, community, family, and individual sessions. Please visit my Living Story practice website for more information on content and fees. Living Story I will be giving a talk at the Jung Institute/NYC on "The Firebird: Exploring Depression as Transformational Ground through Story" on Oct. 2, 12:30-1:30.

How to Be a Creative Listener: Ceremonies of Engaged Witness

The deepest emotional need for any human being is to feel valued – to feel seen and heard, and to have their experience acknowledged by others. In other words, to be visible.

Increasingly, in spite of our ever-expanding communications technology, many people (especially those most in need of outer support) feel invisible. This is because fewer and fewer people know how to tell their story, and even fewer people know how to listen. By listening, I mean being fully receptive to what they hear, without interrupting, contradicting, trying to fix, analyze, interpret, diagnose, or judge. In other words, to bear witness.

One of the smartest, most healing and transformational things we can do in our families, healthcare settings, mental health clinics, classrooms, communities, and workplaces is to create story sanctuaries where small groups of people can engage with one another outside their normal roles. Where they free to speak their truth: who they are, where they’ve been, and where they’re going. Where quantum change happens through communal creative process and empathic relationship.

I’m going to briefly share with you a process for teaching people how to be creative and generative listeners. But first, a little background:

In the 1970s, cultural anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff observed a community of elderly Jewish immigrants in Los Angeles. Many of these people had migrated to the US from the shtetls of Europe at the beginning of the 20th century and had lost their extended families in the Holocaust; a number had outlived their own children. The result was a sense of isolation from the rest of the community, a sense of invisibility, which manifested in depression, deeper isolation, loneliness, and frail health.

With help from a community organizer, these elderly citizens created a community in which they could recuperate, be re-energized, and regain their sense of existence. The way they did this was to tell and retell, perform and re-perform the stories of their lives. It was in these small story sanctuaries that these old people had the opportunity to become visible on their own terms. Meyerhoff called these experiences definitional ceremonies – the storytellers got to define themselves and be witnessed for it.

In the 1980s and 90s, Australian family therapists Michael White and David Epston, who had been using narratives with families, began to experiment with Myerhoff’s definitional ceremonies. In their practice, the therapist maintained their central role and elicited the stories through interviewing the clients and their outsider witnesses.

In the process described below, the therapist or facilitator steps back from their central role as interpreter and expert. After explaining the process to storyteller and witnesses, the facilitator does not intervene except to gently keep the process on track and focused on the central storyteller’s sharing. I call these storytelling and story listening experiences ceremonies of engaged witness.

Going Further:
Catalyzing Change through the Telling and Retelling of Stories

1. Tell a story, recite, a poem, or use the “Five Elements” storytelling exercise to build a safe container and create a theme for participants in this experience. I often use myths and fairy tales, as they release people from “reality” into connection with their imagination, intuition, and inner lives. Also, these old stories are metaphors for present experience and as such, are not invasive. I’ve never seen it fail. People universally respond to fairy tales and classic hero myths.

2. Invite a collective response to it – Ask the group what sensory images, phrases, or dramatic moments stand out for them. Not why. Just what. Anyone can share. No one has to.

3. Invite private writing time – Ask each person to find their own private “studio” space, then to write down five words that come immediately to mind. Ask them to choose the word that most captures their imagination, and to make that the first word of an improvisational piece of writing. Give them 5-15 minutes for this exercise, telling them at the outset how much time they’ll have, and that everything they need to say will come out in this time. I often play meditative music during this period to create safety and privacy within the group.

4. Invite reading for whoever wants to share with the group. Again, everyone is invited. No one has to.

5. Invite each witness to retell what they heard, without analyzing, interpreting, giving advice, or judging in any way. This is the critical and catalytic part of the process.
Instruct listeners to focus their feedback on four areas without being rigid or judgmental if they fail to address all the feedback questions in the way you want:
-- The values expressed in this writing, drawing, or performance (what matters to the storyteller);
-- Images that stand out for you and the felt sense, atmosphere, or mood you get from their story;
-- Go further with inner resonance. What areas or memories in your personal life that you may have forgotten are lit up by hearing this. (These last two steps are catalytic because they merge storyteller and witness stories, move the storyteller forward into a bigger story, and create a communal story.)
-- Share a personal shift or change in perspective gained as a result. This lets the teller know how valuable their story is to others.

6. Invite the teller to retell the retelling: What do they take away with them from this experience? WHAT POSITIVE STEPS CAN THEY NOW TAKE IN THEIR LIVES?

by Juliet Bruce. All rights reserved.

How Can We Help the Children? Giving Troubled Kids a Better Story

This re-post from years ago seems relevant these days. It may be especially so for teachers, counselors, and other community professionals who work with frightened and at-risk young people.

Last week-end an art therapist posted the following message on a creative arts listserv to which I belong:

I am running a group for 6 students in 3rd grade who have behavior problems and aggression. I found that for the first group, the rules were consistently broken, even when reinforced and warnings were given. I spent so much time on just trying to get the students to be quiet when someone else was talking, take turns, ask for materials rather than grab them from another student, sit in their chair, not name call, tease or swear, that there was little time to focus on the artwork. Any advice on things that will work for them?

This was my response:

I co-facilitated a social skills summer camp for special needs kids with many of the problems you described. They ranged in age from 6 to 12 and there were 10 of them.

What I did was to give them a better story than the one they were used to hearing about themselves -- a profoundly negative story that was imprinting itself more deeply every day on their sense of who they were and what life would be like for them. I completely changed the ballgame from a therapeutic or teaching environment into a Native American warrior rite. (Thus going with their aggressive impulses rather than trying to change them.)

To start with, I played non-percussive music -- mostly Carlos Nakai -- to create a relaxed and mysterious space totally outside of their ordinary lives. All the chairs were placed in a circle and they drew on the floor. I had each one draw fire (implicitly allowing safe expression of their anger and aggression through the metaphor of flames) and had them arrange their drawings together to create a campfire in the middle. I named my co-facilitator -- a social worker -- the Village Chief and myself the Medicine Chief. (Amazing how we both rose to those roles!)

I defined the kids as braves who were becoming adult warriors of the tribe. Their mission was to protect the people, not go to war because that wasn't necessary. All activities and social skills teachings were presented within this context of a brave band of warriors and their mentors. I told stories and myths about indigenous people and they responded with pictures and stories about themselves (some revealing through metaphor that they were experiencing violence, chaos, or trauma at home), and they learned the "warrior code" of behavior rather than "social skills" or "rules of conduct." There were no sticks, but there were plenty of colored rubber balls. To talk, you had to ask for and hold a "talking ball." Only it turned out not to be a ball; the kids decided that it was a sacred fossil containing the bones of a dinosaur that were the source of the power of the tribe and its warriors.

What happened with most of the children was that they were so spellbound by the imaginative world they found themselves in and who they were within that world that they forgot to be disruptive. Teaching took place "under the radar."

It wasn't perfect, of course, but we built in an exit point whereby kids who were disruptive could ask for or be "given" a time-out to go out into the hall with one of the co-facilitators to talk or just to sit quietly. No punishment, just calming retreat.

A year or so later, I used basically the same approach in a more subtle, sophisticated way with youths in a diversion from incarceration program and after that, with teens with HIV/AIDS who were living on the streets. Again, it imbued the groups and each member with a dignity and respect from adults and other kids that they rarely if ever had experienced, and they got to perform "up" to that new self-image rather than "down" to the low expectations most adults had for them.

All of us -- especially children and teens (and adults going through difficult times of loss and transition) -- hunger for dignity and self-expression within the structure of respectful community, as well as some kind of "roadmap" or pathway forward to a better sense of self and future. I've found the traditional rite of passage model and myths of all cultures immensely useful in creating these kinds of dynamic and nurturing environments.

by Juliet Bruce. All rights reserved.