Monday, December 28, 2020

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

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

You could say that we step across the threshold of the corpus callosum, which separates left and right brains, and from the highly evolved pre-frontal cortex, into our ancient and instinctive limbic brain, which is connected to all our physical senses, nervous system, and energy matrix. This is where deep story lives. Everything that has ever happened to us is stored in this crossroad of mind and body. We enter into the ancestral realm of body/mind connectedness, where deep story lives.
I call it the story zone.
Traditional healers understood that words, images, and cadences affect inner organs, tissues, and brain. They diagnosed illness through whatever image, character, landscape or situation resonated with the suffering person and told a story with the appropriate language that supported the flow of life force to that particular area in the patient’s body, mind and spirit where it was needed.
This ancient tradition of healing story can be as effective today as it was through the ages. The metaphorical places and beings in myth and fairy tale call forth the emotional states we need during a period of transition, when our old world is dead and the new world not yet formed. Just as birds in many tales represent the presence of the Divine and higher consciousness, stories with water and earth evoke nourishment, flow, and groundedness. Story protagonists, in struggling to master their circumstances, awaken heroic resilience within ourselves.
People whose lives have been shattered by traumatic loss or who are struggling to survive serious illness may find relief, healing, and wholeness here.
An art therapist in Prague wanted creative help with Parkinson’s disease patient who, embittered by the betrayal of her body, sank into a wheelchair in depression and anxiety about the trembling and stiffening of her limbs. My colleague described entering the sunlit apartment filled with family photographs, finely matched old chairs and sofa and a brown upright piano — a story of a happy, engaged but now lost life that made her client’s situation all the more poignant. My colleague said she felt layers of grief permeating this space as well as the woman’s fear and despair. Her client was exhaling and inhaling her own self-defeating stories.
I suggested she aim to support fluidity and grace with creative exercises, such as inviting the woman to imagine the two of them as silken parachutes gently floating on the winds and to mirror each other’s floating arms. The woman said the parachute made her think of Sedona, Arizona’s hot air balloons that floated serenely over a long-ago American holiday with her late husband.
I shared over the phone -- a disembodied voice coming from the ethers -- a tale about a small stream as protagonist. This story tells both of life’s impermanence and its continuity, while conveying the sensory experience of flow, which the woman had lost. The tension the woman carried in her rigid limbs like the harsh resistant desert and that the therapist felt in her empathy for her, dissolved into relaxing and caressing rain within their own energy systems. The woman did not leave her wheelchair, but she slightly waved her arms as her caregiver slowly danced the story around her living room like the wind, the stream, and the birds that filled the sky. Together they created a new imaginal reality.
Listening over the phone, I wondered if her body remembering when it was young and she was a dancing thing.
This creative healing did not cure the woman’s chronic disease of course; but it softened her fear and opened heart to hope. It also gave the therapist a new treatment path through poetry, myth, and movement.
From A Write of Passage: Timeless Lessons for Your Journey from Shattering Loss to Renewed Life, in progress