Heart-lifting for Disheartening Times – Storytelling is HEALING

It’s all so overwhelming and it seems everyone is tired, discouraged, maybe angry or cynical or depressed, maybe confused or disheartened…just weary.
Each day during this April A-Z Blogging Challenge I’ll offer a short musing on an aspect or two of the many ways the ancient-yet-very-contemporary experience of storytelling – both listening and telling – is an enjoyable, fortifying and heart-lifting practice, for anyone!

H – Storytelling is HEALING

“How Storytelling Heals” – that was the title of the keynote I was invited to present several years ago at the Westberg Symposium (an international conference of parish nurses) in St. Louis.

The more I thought about the requested topic in the preparatory months before the event, the more I realized that, though I knew that storytelling is HEALING, I really didn’t know how it was!

It’s a huge, deep, important reality that invites much time and thought and reflection (and studies and articles…). In the 90-minute keynote presentation, we explored interwoven concepts of how storytelling is whole-brain, meaning-making, relationship-and-community-forming, opening-to-the-other…but why or how this is HEALING? I shared this:

I had something of an epiphany as I was walking along one of my favorite paths, alongside a favorite creek here in Colorado. The sound of the water, sunshine sparkling on the ripples, the green-green grass, the cool shade of the trees, a mourning dove, the wind rustling through the leaves, a robin chirp…The moving, living water…so-o-o-o healing to me.

Why? How?

What came to me alongside that creek is: I am truly, fully present, in the moment, in the experience. It felt like it was holding my soul.

Such experiences have been crucial and life-saving for me. Like perhaps many reading this, I have suffered grievous loss and pain, and for a time the only solace I found was in nature, music, and stories.

I find that the immediacy of the experience of each of those somehow holds our very souls.

My epiphany from that day? – The immediacy of being fully present in the experience of nature, of that water running and those trees rustling…is, for me, qualitatively the SAME as the immediacy of being fully present in the experience of storytelling/listening/watching.

There are many stories that may offer healing to the listener and/or the teller due to the content, narrative, theme…specifics to the story and to the context. (See P.S. below).

But nearly regardless of story specific content, the very act and activity of storytelling – being fully present in the experience of whole-brain, meaning-making, relationship-and-community-forming, opening-to-the-other STORYTELLING – is a manifestation of harmony, and creates wholeness for us.

This is how storytelling is HEALING.

Thanks for reading – Pam

P.S. The Healing Story Alliance of the National Storytelling Network has good resources. And Story Medicine: Multicultural Tales of Healing and Transformation by Norma J. Livo is a wonderful collection.

Both photos of Coal Creek in Boulder County, Colorado, by Pam Faro.