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 

"PICKING UP THE PIECES OF A BROKEN HEART"

http://www.fionareilly.co.uk/articles/the-incredible-value-of-women-gathering-in-circle

At a time in my life when I had lost my moorings, I offered a writing group to homeless women fresh from the streets in a church-run shelter. Most of the women who attended this program were coping with addiction and mental illness, as well as the effects of chronic domestic violence. It was not unusual to have women sleeping on couches and the floor and coming off crack during our sessions. The women had named the group, “Home is Where the Heart Is.”

A woman named Jackee arrived one day, only to sit silently staring out the barred basement windows at the sidewalk and legs of passersby. Thick tears rolled slowly down her cheeks.

Although it was early in my healing story career, by this time, I was gathering tales that resonated and that I could authentically share with others. On this day, I told my rendering of the  Iroquois creation tale, “SkyWoman and the Creation of Earth.” 
In this tale, a young wife had been pushed off the cloud of the Sky People by her jealous husband who believed she had become pregnant from another man’s breath. Far below, the winged and water creatures gathered in a circle to save her from a terrible end in the vast sea below. She was gently laid on the shell of Great Snapping Turtle, and she awoke to find herself protected by a community of creatures who wanted only to help her. On taking a small step, she saw the turtle’s shell expand. Another step, another expansion, until walking around the turtle’s shell, she created a whole new land, an actual continent, which you may know as North America, but that the People call by its true name, Turtle Island.

"In the Story Zone, there is never an end to hope" I ended. "There are always helpers. Just be open to them." Most of the women nodded. 

“Stupid,” said a voice.

“Shut up,” said another. “It’s a metaphor, that what you call it – metaphor?”

“Yeah, it means fuck you in Greek.”

But some of the women took me up on my invitation to write whatever came to mind.

I invited Jackee to write. “I can’t,” she said. She felt too bad about herself to do anything. A crack addict, she has lost her parental rights and her kids had been moved to foster care. She was not allowed to see them.

After a few minutes, Jackee asked for a piece of paper and pen. She wrote and then ripped the paper into pieces. “What a piece of shit!” she cried.

“If it’s how you feel, it’s good,” said one of the other women, looking up from her page. “Just keep writing.”

Meanwhile, I kneeled down and gently gathered the torn pieces and handed them to Jackee to hold. 

At the end of the writing period, when everyone had read their work, they gave me their poems to type up for our newsletter. Jackee held on to her fragments. But the group cajoled her into letting someone read all the crumpled pieces. Piece by piece, Jackee read:

Round and round I go

Lost in a maze

Trying to find my way out

Crying and crying

I want to stop

No more tears in my heart

Window, look out

See my life

Go by so fast

Time goes by so fast

Give myself time to heal

One day at a time.

            “If I were going to give it a name,” I said, “I’d call it ‘Picking Up the Pieces of a Broken Heart.’” I said I heard a shift from the despair of the first line to the medicine of the last.

            “Yeah, maybe,” she said.

            The following week, Jackee appeared on time and sat quietly off to the side, carefully writing and rewriting on a legal pad. Halfway through, she asked if she could read something.

            It was a short poem thanking everyone for their support and read another poem:

            When night falls

            I look at stars.

            I feel hope

            Facing a new day.

            Every day I try to say a kind word

            To someone.

            “Hold on. Don’t give up on yourself.

            Remember, one day at a time

            God loves us all.”

            The group burst into applause

“That’s beautiful, Jackee.”

“Write one for me,” said another.

Thus began Jackee’s new life as the poetry lady who created birthday cards for the other women to give to their family members.

Little things revealed her changing sense of herself. For example, she still sat in the same chair but she moved it into the center of the circle. She began to wear lipstick and to carry a small mirror, which she consulted frequently. This role became the foundation for a new life. Jackee had wanted to be a child minder, but her history made that impossible. Under the monitoring of the homeless center, she was able to fill this role.

Jackee has her good weeks and her bad weeks. For addicts like her, staying off crack is like trying to climb bare-handed out of an icy pit. What it ultimately comes down to is a persona’s ability to make healthy choices. Only Jackee has the power to change her life.

But the poems and stories are footholds. They bear witness to her struggle and her progress. “You got this far,” they say. “Keep climbing.”

It was becoming clear to me that my true ground lay within this healing story process. Whatever was meant to happen with my marriage, however I was supposed to make a tolerable living as a writer, it would come through this work. I didn’t know where I was going. But I knew it would be through this process. I had come to center. I at least had found something I could do with my whole heart.

BREAKING THROUGH TO LIGHTEN UP IN DARK TIMES!

Photo by Larry Pence

Are you struggling with something that doesn't seem to give way despite your best efforts?

The dynamic metaphor we call a story galvanizes powerful internal energies needed to change our realities -- for ourselves and our world. That's why we tell stories; that's why we listen.

Here's some encouragement from the Story Zone for you.

Three-fourths of the way through a good story, the protagonist, who has long been oppressed by the forces of darkness, suddenly gains the upper hand through a transformational insight or surge of power. Call it the Grail moment—when the truth hidden deep within the crisis is revealed. In a revolutionary action, the protagonist seizes the sword and kills the enemy. With that, the world changes.

What has happened is that our protagonist's relationship to the problem changed.

The moment of highest tension and ultimate constriction becomes the one of complete unknotting. The most excruciating pain opens to joy, and joy expands to freedom.

It is here, in the most awful place, that the protagonist has claimed the inner quality needed for breakthrough. Now they can truly claim the identity of Hero -- the one who changed the story.

The plot changes from quest to return, as our hero slowly finds the way back to their waiting land or cuts a swath to a new home that is ready to receive the priceless gift they bring.


Imagine yourself into the above scenario.

What is your challenge?
What or who stands between you and the solution?
What qualities have helped you overcome challenges in the past?
How can you put them to use now?
What will you do when you've solved the problem?

For story-based help in dealing with your personal or group challenges, write me at julietbrucephd at gmail.com

EMOTIONAL RELIEF FOR STRESSED OUT CAREGIVERS

Online Story Sanctuaries for Caregivers 

Monday, December 19 - Family Caregivers 
8-10 pm EST
$25

Tuesday, December 20 - Professional Caregivers 8-10 pm EST
$25

Space is very limited for both of these sessions. Please register at julietbruce.com. If you're accessing my website from your phone, please scroll down to the announcement.

As a caregiver for many hundreds of suffering clients, a departed parent who suffered from Alzheimer's, and as a recent cancer survivor myself, I so understand the anxiety, exhaustion, and special kind of loneliness that afflicts everyone trying to cope with serious illness. The isolation imposed by illness is among the worst side effects of disease and treatment, while meditative writing within a supportive group, especially through the lens of dynamic story structure, is one of the most effective medicines for reducing stress. A former client who was just finishing up breast cancer treatment once told me that the support she had received from her peers in a 6-week oncology writing group was the best support she experienced during her cancer journey. Now that I'm three weeks beyond treatment myself, I'm pleased to offer two special Story Sanctuaries for family and professional caregivers. BEING HEARD IS THE BEGINNING OF HEALING. Through the creative and communal approach I offer in these sessions, you will: 1. Stabilize, connect with, and free yourself from the isolation imposed by the demands of caregiving; 2. Become both more attentive and more detached from the present moment; 3. Reconnect with yourself and your deepest passions, which may have been sacrificed; 4. Design a new vision for how you could live in the future; and 5. Rehearse generative actions on the page before you take them into life; 6. Help to weave a more deeply connected and conscious grid of people dedicated to a new story for family, community, and country. You'll experience story as not only about the past but also about your way into a new reality. In the timeless, limitless place that story holds in our psyches, we participate in this ancient ritual that has empowered, enlightened, and shaped civilized societies from the beginning of time. Space is very limited for both of these sessions. Please register at www.julietbruce.com. If you're accessing my web site on your phone, scroll down to workshop announcements. COMING IN JANUARY January 2, 8-10 - Free introductory online story sanctuary for those who have not joined one previously. January 3 - Ongoing online story group, 8-10 -- now $25 to help me cover my expenses. January 18 - In-person story sanctuary for New Yorkers suffering from pre-inaugural blues, 7-9, private home -- $30 January 19 -- Online pre-inaugural story sanctuary for anyone who feels depressed or anxious at this time, 8-10 -- $25 I hope to share the healing power of story with you soon, and I wish you a loving, healthy Christmas, Hannukah, and Kwanza. For all of us a peaceful and happy new year. Juliet

Resilience and Healing Story

No matter where I have brought healing story in the last twenty-five years, a quality of relaxation, refreshment, and

facebook.com/just lovely

renewal has flowed. 

Whether it’s been in a prison, a homeless shelter, a hospital cancer unit, or a post-9/11 first responder treatment center—crowded environments filled with trauma, stress, fear, depression, and isolation—people relax. Their voices become stronger; strangers bond intimately; they laugh and weep together; life force flows; and profound healing occurs.

Again and again, an image, character, or situation in a modern story, 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. Sometimes unimaginable transformations in mood, behavior, and life flow from this opening that emerges between a story and a listener. 

While trauma or loss may have tossed you out of the web of life, writing and sharing your story is the way back in. You’ll enter a larger field of human energy where you’ll find nourishment, light, restoration, and resilience based not on hope but on the reality of life’s hard beauty and its continuation. You’ll find sanctuary where new and healthy realities can emerge. 

“Even the worst losses become workable over time,” writes American Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield. “They become part of your life story and destiny; they become an important part of who you have become. Through surviving your difficulties, tenderness and compassion naturally arise. Your hardships are not only something intensely personal and intimate but also something you share with the entire world.” 

If you have experienced a traumatic event or a devastating loss; if you are feeling depressed and anxious; if you are stuck or lost, writing your story will endow you with a spirit of life-giving adventure. Sharing it with compassionate listeners will help you create a rich, warm life from the inside out and provide a channel for extending that warmth to others who are starved for light.

All Rights Reserved, Juliet Bruce, 2015, from "A Write of Passage"

Rites of Return: Helping Our Warriors Come Home

Rites of Return: Helping Our Warriors Come Home

Every year around this time, I post this article in honor of our warriors -- those who have returned, those who still serve, those who will never return.

No one has described the challenge of homecoming for combat veterans better than U.S. Army chaplain, Fr. Sean Levine (OCA). Speaking at a conference on integrative therapies for vets suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Fr. Sean poignantly described the loneliness of return and the need for transitional programs to help veterans tell their stories of war, grieve their losses, and begin the arduous process of rebuilding a true warrior identity.

Ironically, veterans' alienation is exacerbated by the speed of their return. One moment a soldier is packing up in their barracks in Baghdad or Kabul and nine hours later they're sitting on the couch in their living room. That's the beginning of the new war for a veteran -- arriving home with a knowledge of things about which home doesn't want to know. Just a few decades ago, soldiers coming home from war traveled on ships, a voyage that took a couple of weeks. During that time they shared their stories, cried together, and began the healing process.

Fr. Sean described the first 36 hours at home as ecstatic. Back in the familiar embrace of family, the veteran can barely believe he or she made it. Then comes the crash. Bodies have rejoined; stories have not. The veteran is no longer the same husband and father, wife and mother that they were before deployment. War has changed them -- forever. The family has changed too, learning to cope without the deployed member, with the spouse who stayed and even the children taking over many of the roles and authority of the absent one.

Within the barracks, the family had become safe and reassuring figures on a computer screen -- anchors, familiar and loving. But now in their midst, without the military structures of war, filled with a jumble of emotions, grief, memories, and a growing anxiety, a veteran may even wish at times to be back in combat. Instead, they repress the storm and try to get on with life.

Desperation grows, until one night a 6-year-old tugs at a pants leg once too often, and the veteran throws a plate. Breakdown begins.

WAR -- A MYTHIC EXPERIENCE
"They have arrived from hell, old before their time, initiates among innocents," writes the late James Hillman in his book, A Terrible Love of War. (Hillman, a Jungian psychotherapist and scholar, and founder of archetypal psychology, died last Thursday, October 27.)

Post-traumatic stress disorder is a misnomer, writes Hillman. In fact, the trauma of war is not "post" -- but present; an indelible condition in the soul; a living ghost in the bedroom, at the lunch counter, on the highway. The "disorder" is the remnants of war carried home to a society where there's no place for expression, release, or witness; no platform on which to rebuild; only a culture whose language and psychology are inadequate to the ordeal from which they have returned.

One of the reasons for so much of the ongoing maladaptive behavior of Vietnam vets, writes trauma psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, MD, in his books Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, was just this: a lack of communalized witness. With a distant and unhelpful government that sent them to war; with few listeners to whom they can tell their stories, help them grieve their lost innocence, or witness their struggle to return home, Iraq and Afghanistan vets -- as have so many veterans before them -- have become the archetypal orphans of our culture.

Yet Hillman also writes about the ambiguous nature of war. Alongside the horror and death, the aliveness; the transcendent, almost religious experience of what is best in human beings: courage, self-sacrifice, altruism, and being part of something greater than self. He quotes a World War II veteran: “My combat experience was the most meaningful part of my life. I have never felt so alive, before or since.”

How can people who have been through experience at the furthest -- even mythic -- edge of life begin to fit back into an ordinary world? How do they find their way back into families, jobs, communities that knew them as a person they once were, but that no longer exists?

Not possible, says Hillman. "A veteran cannot complete an intact return from combat until he or she undergoes some kind of detoxification as long and thorough as the ritual of boot camp training -- a rite of return."

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CHECK OUT THIS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED RETREAT FOR RETURNING VETERANS:  http://www.traumaandresiliencyresources.org/

Changing the Conversation about Depression

painting by Zoltan Gabor
http://z-gabor.dk/

…The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond. -
Rumi, "The Guest House "

Many people are coping with depression and anxiety these days. How painful! And what an opportunity for personal and collective transformation! This month I want to share some ideas with you for changing the conversation about depression.

This approach -- an ancient one -- looks at these painful states as “emergence” experiences rather than disorders. In the words of teacher and author Jean Houston in her book A Mythic Life, ancestral healers mythologized rather than pathologize depression, as we do. Rather than a state of deficiency, depression becomes in mythic story the ground of noble quest, a dignified and difficult journey toward healing and wholeness. No accident that emergence is the root word of emergency, for these crises in our personal and collective lives are calls to awakening to the fact that something new wants to come forth.

In story language, the dull pain in the gut, the spinning thoughts, inertia, and intense emotional anguish of depression are viewed as signs that we are at the threshold of becoming more fully who we are, if we are able to friend and not fight the beast we call depression. The creative images and language of myth, parable, and story enable us to safely contain, express, explore, and dissolve depression. Through these archetypal story forms, we can step outside of our biography, outside of ordinary and inadequate rational expression, and into a space of epic understanding and transformation.

A Caveat  

The creative approach I describe here served as my own path to recovery many years ago and has helped others as well. However, in no way do I suggest that it replace traditional forms of treatment, if they help. Working with metaphor gives access to the deepest places in our being, which can be out of reach to more cognitively-based approaches, and it provides a structure for remaking ourselves. But to be protected from inner overwhelm, I highly recommend an external integrating container, as in the safe structure provided by the ongoing relationship with a trusted psychotherapist or healer, 12 Step group, or formal meditation practice -- in other words, a compassionate, engaged witness, mentor, and story listener.

 

Depression as Call to Awakening

Jean Houston observes in A Mythic Life that the Arthurian legend of Parsifal is an appropriate metaphor for our difficult times, which she describes as the phase of necessary breakdown before breakthrough. 

 

Parsifal was a young and untested knight (the name Parsifal can be translated as fool or innocent) who finds himself in a wasteland where everything was crumbling and all living things were dying -- flowers no longer bloomed, the rivers had dried up, the animals and people were sick in body and spirit. This was the kingdom of the Fisher King, a monarch who suffered from an unknown illness caused by a wound in his leg; his illness had infected the land and no one knew how to cure it. 

 

Directed by an ailing man to a castle that suddenly manifested within a mist, that night Parsifal sees a magnificent chalice, glowing brighter than all the candles in the hall, being carried back and forth by a beautiful young woman. This chalice was the Holy Grail -- the vessel that had collected Christ's blood as it dripped from his wounds on the cross and that was found in his empty tomb three days later. Throughout the ages, the Grail became known as the container of the life force that healed all wounds. Parsifal vowed to find out the secret of the Grail the next day. But when he woke up the following morning, the castle was empty; there was not a soul around to ask. Seized with fear, Parsifal jumped on this horse and rode back across the drawbridge just as it was rising and the castle was becoming enshrouded in mist.

 

For many years after that, Parsifal wandered in a dark forest, trying to find his way back to the Grail castle by sorting through the tangled roots. During this time, he had many adventures, but he lived without passion, longing for the joy he had felt for one night, in what seemed to be a dream. But these years were not really about loss; they forced the knight to go on an inner journey as well as an outer one. What he lost was his innocence, naivete, and his unconsciousness. What he gained was simplicity, clarity, and maturity. Like a blade, he was sharpened in the fire of adversity. 

 

Finally, one day he asked a simple question: “Where is the grail? Whom should it serve?” With that question, life opened: the earth turned green, waters flowed, the drawbridge to the Grail Castle lowered, the ailing Fisher King was healed, and the kingdom too was restored to health. The Grail was brought out of the castle to serve the world.

Story -- especially the universal story plot that runs through all times, cultures, and places -- begins in wounding, confusion, despair, imbalance, loss of vitality. A land has been overtaken by darkness and from the sovereign to the people to the earth herself, there is withering, exhaustion, contraction, and spiritual death. In this archetypal plot, someone steps forth to do battle with this dark force and to claim the healing object or secret knowledge that will restore the kingdom. This protagonist struggles mightily with external and internal antagonists who guard the grail until he/she asks a question that opens the door, regenerates, and heals the land. In the process, the seeker has become someone new who is now capable of using this magical formula for the good of the whole kingdom. Heroes change the story.

Seen through a mythic lens, depression announces the beginning of a new story, a Call to the great adventure of change. Yet we are afraid; we resist; we grasp more tightly what we already know. Resistance in the face of the unknown is natural; we resist until the pain becomes worse than the fear of going forth. That resistance manifests in our life as depression, inertia, anxiety, and in somatic pain.

If we can stop running away from pain, put forth the simple question, "What is life asking of me now?" -- and pay attention to what shows up -- we too may find our world becoming green. “And this is why it is so important to be attentive when one is lonely, sad, or afraid," wrote the poet Ranier Maria Rilke, "because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us on the outside.” (Eighth letter, Letters to a Young Poet).

Working Creatively with Depression

1. How does the Parsifal myth translate in your experience? Rewrite the myth from the different perspectives of Parsifal, the ailing king, the Grail itself, and the land -- both in its dying time and in its rebirth. 

2. What does the question, ""Where is the grail?" sound like in your voice? In other words, what's the question you need to ask? Try a few and see where they lead.

3. Try writing it in first person, past tense. Or third person, present tense. Play!

4. Share it with someone who cares.

5. What do you take from this exercise? What is the Grail in your life? What is depression a metaphor for in your inner life? What needs to happen? What's the smallest, least difficult step you can take into the larger life?


All rights reserved, Juliet Bruce, 2012


Reference
You can purchase this book, new or used, directly from Amazon here. As an Amazon Affiliate, I make about 4% on each purchase.  

The Call to Adventure

We don’t tell the stories we live: we live the stories we tell ourselves. In other words, to a large extent, our outer lives reflect our inner realities, and we have more power than we think to shape our lives – whatever the outer circumstances.

We are born into this world as creatures of infinite possibility. From our first days, we connect dots of random experience that pour in through our senses. These connections become our foundational stories -- templates of expectation about who we are and how our life will be, deeply embedded in our unconscious and our senses, and generally inaccessible to the rational part of the mind.

Sadly, many of us become trapped in limiting stories about ourselves and our lives. These stories usually have nothing to do with our inherent gifts and everything to do with negative early experience or familial, gender-based, and cultural expectations. For the rest of our lives, or until we become fully conscious of these core stories and begin to intentionally express and transform them, they replay over and over again, in school, work, relationships, and self-sabotaging behaviors -- creating painful situations in our outer lives that mirror the inner pain from which we're hiding.

Often it takes outer crisis to drive us inward to really take a look around at what we’re projecting onto experience and how that may be contributing to our difficulties.

From a story perspective, the moment when life falls apart -- whether we are shattered by external events or bursting with inner yearning -- that moment is the call to life-changing adventure.

The good news is that no matter how harsh a story you have to tell, it is your strength, because it is your truth. You can honor this story and tell it as it is, or you can choose to rewrite it. Either way, you are a living story.


How Does Story Transform Life?

1. Story provides structure for safely expressing pain and negative beliefs that hamper development. Telling the story of difficult experience makes you its master rather than its victim.

2. At the heart of every creative or life block is an untold story that obscures who you really are and what wants to emerge. Once that story is fully told, energy can flow into the new realities you want to create.

3. Story and other arts activate your inherent powers of resilience and self-esteem, especially the generative, playful, and balancing energies of your body, mind, and spirit.

4. Story is a spiritual practice that makes you more present in your daily life, in touch with your senses, awake to your larger world, and alive to deeper dynamics and possibilities.

5. When shared with receptive others, telling your story releases you from loneliness and isolation, bringing you into community with others. I call these communities "story sanctuaries" and the storytelling process "healing as gift exchange."

Living story isn't about forcing change. It's about knowing you're exactly where you need to be, fully embracing and expressing every aspect of the Now through a story perspective, and allowing the natural emergence of a new inner story and outer reality.


Tools for Creative Practice: The "Five Elements" of Your Story

My arena of emergence is the page, with words, images, weather, landscapes and interiors, characters, needs, conflicts, and actions unfolding as they need to. They show me the way forward in life. Poetry, dance, visual arts, dramatic enactment, drumming, and song tell stories too. Express your story in your own language.

1. Time. Time gives story its basic structure and dynamic quality. Time has two dimensions. First, it bestows beginning, middle, and end. Second, time refers to a specific narrative moment -- a day, a season, a year, or stage of life. What is the time frame of the story you want to find and tell? Is there a moment in your life that's ripe for exploration?

2. Environment, atmosphere, mood. Atmosphere is the context or foundational quality that underlies everything else. It's the ground from which arise images, language, characters, and situations. What's the context of your life at the moment? Turmoil? Stuckness? Probably not contentment, or you wouldn't be reading this blog!

External settings often mirror the inner environments and landscapes of the characters who live there. What stands out? What are the features, qualities, and colors of your world? What do they reflect in your inner life?

3. Character. The passions and needs of characters propel stories. Often we draw people into our lives who mirror unconscious aspects of ourselves. Who populates your story -- both in the outer world and in yourself? What's their most striking feature? Tricksters, mentors, destroyers, warriors, caregivers, lovers, rulers, and sages -- they're all there. Look for them.

4. Situation. What's going on that brings you to this process? Where's the lack? What needs to happen? The conflict between a character's needs and external obstacles creates action. This dance between need, situation, and action is your roadmap, otherwise known as plot.

5. The Storyteller. This is your place of power and the voice of freedom from circumstances. To whom are you telling this? What do you want to give them with this story? Tell a story and it no longer controls you. Tell your story and you step out of isolation into a larger life. Tell your story and you give hope or companionship to another.

Once you've seeded your story with the above elements, give it a title. Then write. What wants to emerge from this raw material? Feel the deliciousness of letting go. Let the words lead you. If something arises that disturbs you, dialogue with it. Find out more. If another medium appeals, draw, dance, act it out, drum it, sing it. Compassionately or exhuberantly, tell it! We're listening.

Living story is the path of unfolding adventure. When things get murky and you can't see a foot in front of yourself, remember this quote from the poet David Whyte:

"If the path ahead of you is clear, chances are it's someone else's path."

by Juliet Bruce. All rights reserved.

Chaos and Creation

Forging Wholeness from Crisis through Story

Hurricanes come in many forms. A breast cancer patient whose sexuality was attached to her beautiful face and figure. A newly single woman broken free from her umpteenth relationship with an unavailable man. A talented writer, shamed by his creativity as a child, anguished in his job as an arts non-profit administrator. A single mother tries to build a business while caring for her infant; another is torn between keeping her life going in one city while caring for an elderly parent in another.

What these people need is more than "reinvention." They need rebirth. Almost every counseling client who comes to me, no matter what their particular issue, has a similar need: they want, or are being forced by life, to change their deepest concept about who they are and what life holds for them. Change not just their beliefs and attitudes, but their assumptions about life, patterns of thought and behavior, habitual relationships, and their core identity -- to create a new story. Not so easy. No longer the person they were but not yet the person they will be, they must cross that painful threshold between worlds and lives, and endure the conflicts, grief, confusion, and fear at being unmoored in the void.

Increasingly, mainstream psychologists understand wellness not as "happiness" or conformity with an established norm, but as the ability to tell a coherent narrative about one's life. Telling your story as the storyteller and witness, not only as the victim, can help you integrate negative experience, find the ways you survived and prevailed, and discover more about what happened, who you were, and who you became.

As Hurricane Irene raged outside my windows, I read Pema Chodron's book, The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Lovingkindness. She writes, "There's a common misunderstanding among all humans who have ever been born on earth that the best way to live is to try to avoid pain and just get comfortable. A much more interesting, kind, adventurous, and joyful approach is to develop our curiosity, not caring whether the object of our inquisitiveness is bitter or sweet."

In other words, no chaos; no creation. In my September newsletter, I offer a Sufi tale, "Fatima the Spinner and the Tent," which is the long and arduous journey to ultimate happiness of a woman whose life is continually thrown off course by shipwrecks, kidnappings, every possible kind of disaster and loss. I also offer suggested narrative and other expressive exercises for working with this story. In addition, I feature an article on Qigong -- the ancient practice of dance stories that is the basis of Chinese healing and martial arts -- and that can help to relieve the stress of change and loss that manifests in bodily symptoms.

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Creating Coherence in Modern Life Through the Lens of Ancient Myth

In providing a container for us to work out our conflicts, release our fears, express our best and worst selves and the best and worst of our loved ones in metaphor, story assures us that we can find a path to our inner, most essential life and return refreshed, re-formed, to reality. We won't get lost because story structure doesn't get lost: it takes us into the depths of the forbidden forest or enables us to look at the ancient drawings on the walls of the deepest cave and returns us safely home again. Through the fantasy of story we gain an intimacy with inner life that reality blocks and emerge more able to handle reality as a result.

Here's a story lens for taking a fresh and redemptive look at the sometimes harsh journey we must take in life:

1. Story has a beginning -- a “Once Upon a Time” that sets the scene, but more importantly, opens the door to an adventure.

What was your "normal"? What was life like "before"? Think in terms of story elements: environment and atmosphere, characters, situations, conflicts, desires.

2. A misfortune or surprising event throws everything into confusion and sets people wandering around lost and in need of help.

These big shatterings can be happy too! Falling in love, winning a prize, getting a coveted job, publishing a book. What was the effect on you and your world?

3. A character steps up to the task of solving the problem.

What action did you or another take to set things right or to follow up on a stroke of good luck?

4. Another character, group, situation or natural obstacle that opposes the new resolution, that wants to keep things the way they are for their own interests.

Who or what opposed you? An obstacle can be an illness, a habit, addiction, cultural standard, or a corrupt system, just as it can be a person.

5. A journey or a task the main character undertakes to solve the problem. Usually it takes three attempts. The first two fail, but with each failure the character grows in strength, wit, tenacity, and intelligence.

This is the long transformational struggle to fix the problem, oneself, become a dancer, or write the book. What was the time frame of your struggle. Where were the peaks and valleys, the places of breakthrough and growth? In story and life, there's often a point of surrender. Nothing has worked. This is when we finally become receptive to the wise help that's likely been there all along, but that we were unable to see through the veil of will. Did you have such a moment? Are you now experiencing surrender? Who or what did you turn to?

6. The climax – where the main character defeats the enemy and claims the grail, medicine, greater knowledge that doesn’t just fix but transforms the situation.

What was the inner grail -- the gift of this experience? How did you change and grow as a person? What was the outer grail?

7. The hero/heroine returns with the grail along an equally arduous road, and if they succeed in being accepted (not a given, part of the heroic journey) end this adventure with a celebration in which healing is restored to the kingdom and the land and its creatures begin to thrive once again.

Ultimately, the gifts we gain are not ours to keep. We're meant to share the wisdom or power gained on the hero's or heroine's journey with our families, communities, and world at large. Who and how can you now serve?

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We unconsciously create outer lives that reflect the inner stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we can expect. These stories were planted within us as children and early experience. When life is shaken out and we're left with the essentials, we learn what we really value and who we really are. In that sense, chaos is one face of an angel, the frightening one. In the darkest times, ask whatever higher power you believe in for help. You've seen the dark face of the angel, now ask to be shown the light.

by Juliet Bruce. All rights reserved.

Releasing Light in Dark Times Through Storytelling

"I saw an angel in the stone and I carved until I set him free."

No one since Michelangelo has more aptly or succinctly told the story of creative process. In one sentence, the sculptor describes its stages: encounter with raw material, receptive attention to the point of love, trusting that inner presence through the not-knowing-for-sure time, illumination, patient and committed toil, and finally manifestation in the concrete world.

So too with life. Whether we are trying to nourish the inherent strengths of a troubled young person, find deeper love in a conflicted relationship, rebuild our life after loss, create common ground between adversaries, or express ourselves in a fresh way, there is no system, structure, or formula more powerful than creative process.

In his book Narrative Medicine: The Use of History and Story in the Healing Process, Dr. Lewis Mehl-Medrona shares a Pasqua Yaqui native American tale from the southwest about an old man who owned light, but kept it hidden in a box within a box deeply buried inside his house. He was afraid that if it was released, he would discover that his daughter, who lived with him, was ugly. Writes Mehl-Madrona, "You've probably seen the same thing I have, where people are so afraid of what could happen that they hide their gifts and capabilities from themselves and each other." (p. 59)

Through a messy series of mishaps instigated by the trickster Raven, the light is eventually freed from the box, only to be dropped by Raven in his escape, shattering into millions of tiny fragments. The pieces of light hit the ground and bounce back into the sky, where they appear as the moon and stars. Raven gathers together the remaining fragments, shapes them into a ball, and carries the throbbing orb high into the sky. It shines every day as the sun, making life possible on earth.

Once the world becomes visible, the old man sees that his daughter is beautiful. There had been no reason to hide the light in the first place.

Are we not in many ways like that old man? So afraid of finding out we're not good enough that we hide who we are in boxes within boxes? Yet what the world needs more than anything in these traumatic times is for us to be exactly who we are: imperfect, vulnerable, but fully alive and radiating our life force -- the luminous heart at the center of all living things.

One way to do that is to carve away the masks and walls we erect to protect our inner selves from pain, which we learn to do very early in chldhood. To shape the fragments of images, echoes, and moments into our story -- the deep soul story that carries our passion and our purpose for being here. To release Soul into our yearning world.

Working in the metaphors of story, we relearn what we have always intuitively known: that the processes of growth, healing, and transformation mean asking not "How can I fix or change this problem?" but rather "What wants to emerge right here and now from these circumstances and from this person that I am?"

Like rocks obstructing the flow of water, obstacles in our own lives slow us down, ask us to pay close attention, look for the meaning of experience in our interior world, and ask ourselves, "How can I set the angel free?"


Find the Story of Now

Thinking now as artist, storyteller, and sculptor, ask yourself in the third person:

1. What time is it in your life, in the life of your family, your community, the world? Find a metaphor to describe your intuitive sense of time.

2. What's the external environment? And what's the mood? Landscapes and built environments mirror something important about the people who live and work there. The overall atmosphere reflects the deeper emotional context.

3. Who's there? What do they yearn for more than anything? What do they resist with all their might? What private stories do they carry that may be colliding when they interact?

4. What's a healing story plot line you can carve out of these fragments? Remember, healing story has a basic structure of crisis, struggle, unexpected and marvelous help, and transformation.

5. Now write this story line fast -- in 10 or 15 minutes. Get it down on paper. Make it real. The writer is the voice of your internal Storyteller, the voice that reframes, changes, shapes, sculpts, listens, and tells the story. This is the voice that externalizes inner conflicts, moves you out of isolation into community, and releases your light and warmth, which are so desperately needed in these times.

6. Now -- very important -- share your story with trusted others.

Start right here, right now, to open a channel for life force to flow into the world. Set the angel free.


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Maya Angelou: "There's no greater agony than carrying around an untold story inside yourself."

I maintain a private practice in New York City and a long distance one by phone with clients in other cities. The journaling, storymaking, and visual arts exercises I offer along with my creative approach are extremely effective in helping you heal from:

~ unhealthy stress;
~ anxiety and depression;
~ unhappiness in a relationship;
~ separation and divorce;
~ deeply rooted financial issues (beyond money itself);
~ impact of childhood trauma;
~ loss and grief;
~ general dissatisfaction with life;
~ unfulfilled creative potential; and
~ career and life transitions.

Working in right-brain expressive modalities helps you make quantum yet grounded leaps forward to the life you want more than anything to be yours. You go deep and you go fast -- and given the creative and incremental structures of poetry and story -- within a safe emotional container.

When you fully tell the story hidden in whatever is blocking you, the block dissolves. Creative, passionate life energy flows freely. "This feels light," said one client, "even though we're dealing with some dark stuff. Big and light. I don't want this to end."


by Juliet Bruce. All rights reserved.

If you would like to schedule a free half hour phone consultation or receive a free storymaking tool, please write me at julietbrucephd@gmail.com.

In the Deep, Dark Cold of Winter Comes the Warmth of Story!

Now's the time of year to deepen your roots in preparation for a greater blossoming. One way to do that is through discovering your own myth -- your deepest and truest story, the one that holds your passion and purpose in life.

Here's a quick story exercise to help you find your myth. It's taken from Tristine Rainer's book, Your Life as Story: Discovering the "New Autobiography" and Writing Memoir as Literature, (New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1997). I highly recommend this book to people who want to find the story in their life, and I often use it to help my private clients get a big-picture story sense of their life and the shape of our work together. This tale can be drawn, danced, sung, and acted out. But the essence, in my experience, is writing it first. (Please remember that this exercise, almost verbatim, is Ms. Rainer's, and not mine originally.)

"Write a fairy tale about yourself in 3 sentences or short paragraphs, without too much thought, in 10 minutes or less.

In its simplest form, a fairy tale has 3 parts:

-- Something happens that causes a problem for a person or a group.
-- They struggle to find a solution.
-- They experience a transformation and have a realization.

(Example from Tristine Rainer's book, p. 45:
-- Once upon a time there was a little girl whose mother was dragged away kicking and screaming by men in white coats.
-- The little girl began to hate her mother and wish she would never come home.
-- In the end, though, she felt compassion for her mother and loved her as she had always wanted to love a mother.)

Now it's your turn. You can pick something that happened in the past, or that is happening in the present and imagine the change it can bring about:

'Once upon a time, there was a...(little girl, woman, boy, man, family, team, village, etc.)'

-- the problem;
-- your struggle to resolve it;
-- how you changed and what you learned (or how you could change and what the experience might teach you)."

Me again: You have here the bones of a possibly huge story that can be fleshed out over weeks or months. This is at least part of your personal myth and it can help you understand in a deeper way who you are and where you're going. The point is, and I hope you see from this quick exercise, that you have a story. Your story imagination is instinctive, it's dynamic and full of unseen possibilties, and it gives structure and meaning to difficult experience.


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Are you interested in this? Please write me at julietbrucephd@gmail.com if you would be interested in participating, either in person or online, or if you have questions about any other services I offer.

WRITE OF PASSAGE: 7-WEEK MYTHIC JOURNEY INTENSIVE

For healers, writers, other artists, coaches, people in transition, and anyone interested in applying the power of the story imagination to their life.

When someone undertakes a great work -- be it getting well, rebuilding a life after it's been shattered by loss, finding meaning and purpose in life, or starting a creative project -- they step out on a hero's journey that mirrors the first great heroic journey in life: the developmental stages through childhood to adulthood. In story, these stages are thresholds expressed as chapters, scenes, and vignettes. Creative struggle in adulthood can bring to light buried thresholds and parts of the self that need attention and nourishment for one to become whole.

Working in a metaphorical, right-brain developmental model such as the hero's journey provides safe access to these places in the unconscious, at the crossroads of mind and body, that lie beyond the limits of rational exploration through memory and ordinary language -- often without ever talking about them. This is the healing power of art. In the "Once upon a time" realm of myth, crisis or challenge opens a path to the inner grail that all people seek: peace of heart and mind, alignment of intention and action, and full release of the life force into one's present life.

The ancient narrative of resilience and transformation that tells of disaster, quest, victory, and wise return can be found in every great story, transformational experience, and meaningful life. It tells of the universal struggle to navigate and grow through crisis and shows us how to transform personal and collective misfortune into deep and necessary change. Using stories and poetry from the exuberant mosaic of the world's written and oral traditions, this unique writing group will teach you how to apply the inspiring hero's/heroine's journey paradigm to any challenging project, difficult life passage, or simply to enrich life itself.

Comments from previous participants: 

"Life changing. Affirming what I thought, taking me to the next level from where I was to where I want to be in life. I gained many new insights into myself, relationships, and place in the world. Deep inner change at my core. I took on a writing challenge during this group to write a novel in one month, and they each seemed to feed each other. Would I have accepted the challenge if I hadn't been on the hero's journey? Who knows. The depth of change would probably not have been there. My imagination seemed to open up. I became a better writer and person. I started a book on 11/1 and completed it on 11/22 -- 177 pages, 53,480 words! Woohoo!"

"I loved that it was a small group, with a sense of space and time that I loved. I felt seen, heard, understood, and encouraged. The framework of the heroine's journey is very empowering. To see my life as an epic adventure allows for all the catastrophes and losses to be incorporated, to be seen as part of the celebration of life, rather than shameful episodes that need to be covered up as quickly as possible."

"During the course I felt more and more comfortable about my work and sometimes even proud or surprised. Every class was a new thing and I never knew what to expect from myself. It just felt like I could trust my gut, let go of the inner police, and enjoy, create like a kid, play! I was able to remember how to play!"


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In my private practice I work with adults coping with past trauma, loss, life transition, and relationship/work issues. My clients also include people who want to explore their creativity or need support for a creative project. In addition, I am now offering my story consulting services to socially-conscious businesses and organizations that want to provide stress reduction and team building programs for their staffs. Write: julietbrucephd@gmail.com.

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.