Remembering Story Medicine

(Image: untitled original work by Kristen Oud. used with permission.)

... Life got you chasing your tail? Catch a proper tale instead ...

Remembering Story Medicine is a monthly gathering to delve into folktales, myths, faerie tales, fables, parables and the profound wisdom they bear. The evenings will be medicinal, entertaining, ceremonial, and instructive. There is an art to the telling of stories and an art to listening to them. There is medicine in the speaking and the hearing. This is often called the oral tradition on account of the spoken word, but it could equally be called the aural tradition for the art of hearing and listening. Stories serve many purposes. They gather people together, enabling strangers to become kin, competitors to become companions. But they are also legitimately for entertainment, allow us a reprieve from the existential weight of thought, to find relief in bereavement, sweetness in sorrow, to laugh at the absurdities of life and to find blessings in disguise. There is medicine and instruction in stories, gathered up from a thousand generations of elder wisdom. They have been with us since the very beginning, along with fire, the prepared meal, dance and song. 

Each evening will include some guidance about how to receive a story, how to respond to a story and how to court it and embody it. There will be a variety of shorter tales, fables and parables that you will get a chance to respond to in the group and even try your jaw at telling, and there will also be some bigger stories that you can chew on for the month before the next evening. You may leave floored and flummoxed, muddled and befuddled. Any good tale will take some time to ponder. They will bear fruit in your life if you let them in. True, deep, and ancient stories are not easily digested, interpreted or enfleshed. As with a dream, so with a story — the better path is to embody the mystery of the dream or the story rather than to figure out mentally what we think it means. There are those who interpret with their minds and those who live the paradox, becoming mythical creatures in their own right. They say of the Blessed Virgin Mary that she first conceived of the Messiah in her heart before ever she conceived in her womb. That, in a way, is where the spoken word is most indelibly and beautifully written - in the flesh of a life, an embodied soul, an incarnate myth. 

Practices you will learn

One of the practices you will learn in these evenings is lectio divina which hails from western monasticism and means divine reading. It is a way of giving utterance and embodiment to the quickening of spirit we feel in our hearts when we resonate with the spoken word, clothing the story with the flesh of our own lives. Martin Shaw calls it 'feeding the story'. The very speaking of the words we heard begins to activate the story's medicine in our lives. Stories are living beings, they want to be fed and entertained and to belong. If a story doesn't speak to us we won't feed it and it will be forgotten forever. This isn't a tragedy, it's just mortality and composting. Something else you'll learn is the notion of 'sitz im leben' (context in life), which is a German phrase that highlights the importance of context, of a sense of occasion, appropriate setting for a given story. For those familiar with the wisdom of psychedelic medicines, you may know this as the notion of 'set and setting'. When story is medicine it is good to digest and rest on it. When it is entertainment, it deepens the bonds of kinship. When story is instruction, it will inform your next step. When story is ceremonial, it will bring you into the presence of the sacred. Some stories want incense, others bring laughter, others bid for applause, still others give prayerful tears. How we prepare and tell and respond to a story matters immensely. If a story is offended, we will miss out on a great treasure. You will learn the art of courting a story, of preparing to tell a story, of telling in your own way and you will get the blessed gift of hearing a tonne of stories to practice being fed by them.  

The Power of Stories & The Art of Storytelling

Stories are ancient technology, one of the primordial ways we gather around the fire, along with food, dance, and singing. They help us find our place, our cooperation, our contribution. A story provides a context, frame, lens, and genre within which we understand our sense of identity, character, destiny, and participation. Stories tell our lives, and they also tell of the lives of all the other beings we often ignore - other animals, living rocks, and the spirits, deities, and gods we have forgotten. In such ways, stories can open our eyes and bring us new friends and guides, bigger living community.

Stories can free us from the fixation on goals, targets, timelines, outcomes - they can connect us with something bigger, something that has our greatest fulfilment in mind, and stories can inspire us to trust in a greater fate, greater mystery, greater participation, than our own meagre ideas and plans. Would you rather perfect knowledge of how your life will unfold, or a brave blind date with destiny? Would you prefer clockwork accuracy or uncanny chance meetings, synchronicities, happy accidents? Will you prefer to be the god of your own life, master of your fate, or be part of something much greater, much more magical and mysterious. There are pros and cons to be sure.

Inspiring protagonists aren't captivating because they know the outcome, but because of their willingness to follow an inkling in their gut, an intuition, an inner whisper. We follow them into the unknown with a fool's hope. In 1900 Ernest Shackleton published an ad in a London paper for an expedition to Antarctica which read, "Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success." He received over 5,000 applications. That is the power of story, of adventure, of incarnate myth. Almost by magic, the original ad has never been found and some suggest that it was 'just a myth'. That could not be more exactly true! It is the epitome of myth, incarnate myth, the power of a dream, vision, story. Stories don't need to be factual in order to be true. And while a spoken story can be powerful, there's nothing quite as powerful as an embodied myth, the incarnation of a personal myth. That's why people follow other people - they mirror our not-yet-embodied personal myth. That's why we like stories. You and I may not be the best tellers of our own story, but if we live like Shackleton we will become the myth that others love to tell. There's an Irish notion, out of the tales of faerie, that when the gods gather by the ancient fire they tell stories of us mere mortals. That is what stories are ultimately getting at - trying to kick us out of our stale operations to get us living inspired lives. That is what these evenings are ultimately serving. May it be so.

The great mandate of the dreamer, visionary, mystic and meditator is to live their dream, remember their vision, embody their soul, incarnate their personal myth. Stories help. A story can rescue us from the prison of the wrong story, or from an old story, or one that just isn't big enough for us to fill our full shape. Stories aren't just told, they tell us. In these evenings you will hear and have the invitation to learn some stories that will then begin to retell you your own life back at you as you haven't yet known yourself. But something deep within you will recognise and remember. That may well be your soul. We will be remembering story medicine.

The Healing Power of Stories

As a trauma and addiction therapist, I've witnessed the power of story as healing medicine. Stories can expand our lives, freeing us from the prison of self-obsession. A story can interrupt our train of thought. Thinking - as you will know - is both a gift and a burden. The very possibility of imagination means that we can live disembodied lives (the numb bypassing option) or we can embody our imagination (the 'oh crap!' option). We can refuse and stay in the dreamworld and remain disembodied, or we can reduce our dreams to watered down interpretations or dismiss them as insignificant phantasms. The path of living our dreams, embodying soul, incarnating myth really is a difficult path, especially in an overly materialistic and pragmatic culture. Hearing stories will help you to tend your dream, soul, myth. This gathering might become a community that supports your nesting and birthing of a tender new mythical life. A kinship that will revere your dream, treat it as hallowed speech, eminently true and inevitably possible. 

The old stories build community, tribe, kinship, village and culture. They are not individualistic, even when they have a principal character. The telling brings together a community around the fire with food and song. In these modern dislocated times I often think of us as embers that have been spread out, losing their heat. It only takes something like a story to bring these embers together and soon there is a fire and warmth, a blaze to cook upon and warm ourselves, sing over.

Who is it for?

Anyone who needs to hear a story. These evenings are an invitation to take up your inheritance - you born of woman, you born under the stars, of flesh and bone, you who long for deeper roots and greater reach. You may hear echoes of your grandmother's lullaby and your grandfather's evening murmurings. You may meet your ancestors, hear whispers of your mother tongue. I'm sure you will leave with a quickening in your heart and reassured of your place in the mythic ground. For retreat leaders, soul guides, Steiner teachers, and therapists, come and learn not just stories but also what a story can do for your people. Get nourishment and take baskets full, a boon to take back to your kin and those who drink at your well. I've got a swag of stories to share and much to offer about how to work with a story. I've trained with Dr Martin Shaw and worked with Catholic schools helping them rediscover their lost mythic ground, their raison d'être (reason for being). I've gathered biblical stories, parables, fables, and magical tales from the lives of the saints, from a decade of monastic life, which I can tell in ways you've never heard. You may not think of yourself as a storyteller, and perhaps not, but I wouldn't be surprised if you've been training for it without knowing it, a la 'wax on, wax off'. That's how it was for me. It wasn't until I sat with Martin Shaw as he told stories that I realised I knew what he was up to. It was the epiphany of the ugly duckling - shit! that's what I am!

Come catch a tale

Join us from 6-9pm every third Sunday, beginning 20 October at Kangaroo Ground Centre, 25 Donaldson Road, Kangaroo Ground. If you prefer to pay cash, select a free ticket and bring $20 cash on arrival. Please also bring an open heart, something to write on and some nibbles to share if you like.