The Healing Power of Telling Our Story

I just finished a 3-hour garden shift with a new intern. My back is sore, lip sun-burnt, and nails caked with dirt, but it’s days like these that my griefs and regrets feel lifetimes away.  This young woman’s soul and mine met over sifting through soil, sifting through ourselves, and finding nourishment.  We pulled bits of sticks, rocks, plastic packaging and zip ties from what will feed our green babies throughout the summer.  And we sorted through the fragments of story we have collected throughout our lives to feed our sense of self.  We both burnt out on the scarcity mentality of the nonprofit sector, competing for funds which often came from the perpetrators of the same systemic issues we were fighting to overcome.  We both struggle with addictions we developed to soothe the emptiness and vulnerability of living in a world of unreliable love, gathering wounds from the wounded around us.  And we both eschewed organized religion for a deeply personal connection with the benevolent energy inherent in the natural.  As we sifted and talked, all around us rolled the lush green hills and sparkling ponds, swifts reeled overhead, and we parted ways feeling healed at the very least in our mistaken sense of being alone.

Our afternoon brought to me the image of all the women across the ages who have found spiritual nourishment in shared stories over communal work – milking cows, gathering grain, stirring pots, bouncing babies, and stitching cloth in the hot sun and over frozen candle light.  I believe that this urge to tell stories is a uniquely human gift, our way of using our innate capacity for language to make sense of our world and our place in it, and to create some sense of life-affirming orientation toward our future.  Today, according to Joseph Campbell, we live in a unique time of accelerated change in which our cultural myths cannot adapt to support us as they did our ancestors, and so it is up to us to each craft our own story about ourselves and the world that provides guidance and healing.  Those who have responded to this shift by choosing to embrace a constantly unfolding state of presence, cautioning me against “telling stories” or “thinking too much”, have always seemed to me to be in denial of what I believe is part of our purpose as human beings: to enable our divine consciousness to experience the three-dimensional world of matter in a whole new way.

My first experience with the healing power of story came in the months following my decision to leave my marriage.  I was feeling a painful sense of disorientation and scheduled a phone counseling session with an EAP advisor.  She asked me to tell her about my past and after I had finished relating my version of my life story she paused and simply said, “I could have listed those same life events and drawn completely different conclusions about who you are.”  I realized that it was the way I was telling my story and not the experiences themselves that were limited me.  In that moment, I was done being a victim.  I was ready to see myself not as weak, but attuned; not as indecisive, but as diligent; not as abused, but resilient; not as anxious, but courageous.  And I finally understood the wisdom in a passage I had ead which stated that we cannot find peace with our past until we are able to integrate into the story we tell of ourselves and our world in a life-affirming way.

How do you tell the story of your life?  If you are like me, your story was pieced together by the messages we receive from our culture, many of which have been co-opted by the media and marketing campaigns, capitalizing on our sense of disorientation and emptiness, and completely disinterested in the heroic quest of our souls.  Our modern mythology is one that, if it remains unconscious and unquestioned, discourages us from making mistakes and is inherently risk-averse.  It tells us that our noblest goal is a job with a regular pay check that enables us to own a home, raise a family, and save for retirement.  Ideally, we will have time to do some volunteer work, travel, and enjoy hobbies like painting or gardening.  We gift thoughtful gifts, host parties for our friends, and keep our yards tidy, and we are patient, cheerful, generous, and moderate in our behavior.  If we do our part, when we are old, we will be comfortable, healthy, and free from loneliness and worry.  Our children will visit, our bills will be paid, and we will rest peacefully with a sense of being kind, respected, and secure.

The main problem with this myth is that even if it may have worked at one time it certainly isn’t working anymore. Charles Eisenstein goes so far as to say that it is actually killing us.  This culturally dominant story outlines a “practical” life and is characterized by our ability to exert force over money and people in order to control an outcome.  It is based on an assumption of a linear, long-term process of cause and effect, which leads us to sacrifice our youth for the comfort of old age.  The younger generation, however, has seen their grandparents lose their retirement in the stock market crash, has watched their parents slave away at multiple jobs without security, and is coming of age in a job market where making the rent is enough of a challenge, let alone raising children or owning a home.  Young people have no foundational identity, no rites of passage, and no sense of a future that connects them to an interconnected.  Those without privilege flounder and those with options see no point in waiting for retirement to enjoy travel, hobbies, and meaningful work.  They are increasingly launching their own quests for meaning through exploring their gifts, experiencing other cultures, and dabbling in various spiritual teachings.  Joseph Campbell describes this process as an expression of our innate human need to structure our experience and to secure the freedom to self-actualize when a community lacks a unifying mythology relevant to their day and age.

The courage to challenge the outdated story we have inherited is the heart of the true hero’s journey because an authentic exploration of who we are creates more worldly conflict, especially around job security, academia, and concepts of politeness, family responsibilities, and gender roles.  But by being increasingly attuned to ourselves, we also access a deeper sense of peace, a more solid sense of purpose, and attract a widening circle of supportive people, all of which embolden us to face criticism and rejection.  In this fertile ground, our gifts gather the strength of expression and our stories gain a momentum which is healing to both ourselves and our world.

Stories, as Marc Lewis shared in his work on the neurobiology of addiction, keep our lives moving, and keep us from getting stuck in the past and in a sense of our limitations.  Regardless of how the individuals he interviewed got clean, what they all had in common was coming to see their addiction as a crucial and ultimately positive chapter of their life story.  Chellis Glendinning extends the healing power of story-telling by applying it to the collective grief process, which allows both individuals and entire communities to own and release pain through being seen and acknowledged by others.  I experienced this directly during a Black Lives Matters march I attended earlier this year.  While walking boldly down the middle of Rosa Parks Ave and chanting “Black Lives Matter!”, I, as a young white woman, made eye contact with an elderly African-American woman who had pulled her car to the side of the road to let us pass.  In that moment, I realized that the true power of that peaceful protest was not so much about motivating our society to change as it was about witnessing the collective suffering of the black community.  As a representative of the oppressor, I had shown a sense of outrage over the injustice of her story and at least a willingness to try to hear and understand.  The truth and reconciliation hearings in Rwanda brought the Hutu and Tutsi people back together by creating a safe container for those who had committed and endured atrocities of violence and hatred from and against their neighbors to share their stories of shattering grief and regret.  This witnessing led to an imagined degree of forgiveness and enabled them to rebuild their community together.  Anything can be healed when its story is told and received with honesty, humility, forgiveness, and a reverence for life.

In that afternoon with the new intern, the stories we had been telling ourselves in silence converged over the ancient ritual of putting our hands in the soil – remembering where we came from and what it is that truly nourishes us.  Having witnessed and thereby begun to heal our individual pain we have also begun to craft together a new story together – one that, as Charles Eisenstein describes, does not replace, but builds upon the stories of our past.  We are expanding on our past frustration with trying to fix a broken world by building a sense of community rooted in the way the land around us moves when we release our compulsion to exert our will over it.  Warmth, water, and nutrients will come to nourish a variety of beings can, and we can ensure all thrive by giving what we can and taking only what we need.  If we continue to share our stories with courage and humility, and if we let the truths in them loosen our fears, perhaps others, too, will find their own words and reclaim the life of freedom and hope and were all meant to live.

Nancy

“Writing our story takes us back to some moment of origin when everything was whole, when we were whole.  We re-member, we integrate that which has been alienated or separated out, revalue what has been disdained.  In the process of writing, of discovering our story, we restore those parts of ourselves that have been scattered, hidden, suppressed, denied, distorted, forbidden, and we come to understand that stories heal.  Stories heal us because we become whole through them.” – Deena Metzger in “Writing Your Life”