Reclaiming our stories
This morning I sat with my journal and a hot cup of coffee, and I wrote about the work I do in the world. Which is to say I wrote about writing, and about storytelling, and about how the telling of these stories influences how we exist in the world, and the ways these stories live inside our bodies.
I have a lot of titles, and fancy letters after my name (Something I once never thought possible, but that’s a story for another time) and in the receiving of each of these letters, and with each new course and training and certification, I came closer to the realization that what I love to do more than anything else is tell stories. My work as a mind body coach and a yoga teacher and a support group facilitator, they all come back to my love for stories, and the ways I believe the telling of the story can aid us in reclaiming what has been forgotten or lost.
I’ve always loved stories, and as a child I wrote thousands upon thousands of words by hand, detailing stories and sagas to make sense of my own reality. And it was when I was thrown into the world of pregnancy loss, chronic illness and organ transplantation, that I began to see all the ways in which stories, and myths, saved me.
In my first year post transplant, I took a course on medical narratives, and I was introduced to the idea that myths and stories hold a blueprint for navigating our own human lives. While no one had written about my particular loss, they did offer me a framework for understanding the brutal becoming I now found myself in. I learned the stories of the body, and how these stories are experienced differently by patient and provider, by caregivers and by the general public, and how each of these perspectives carries different weight. Societally my perspective as a patient is given less weight than the perspective of a physician, for I am more often than not assigned the role of victim while they are assigned the role of hero.
These stories gave me a new understanding, a new way of looking at my own potential, teaching me of the secrets hidden within sorrow as they were unpacked by the artists before me. I read everything from memoir to fairytale searching for the common thread between all of it.
I’ve realized since then that stories not only hold great potential, that they are pulsating through us all the time and connecting us, but also that they can be co-opted.
When I began to understand there were a million different ways to use my story to heal and empower, I also began to understand there were people and systems who profited off of my story not belonging to me. The story told in a way that benefited the system was not necessarily the story told in a way that benefited me, and it was the shapeshifting of the story that could tell more than the story itself.
My story had been assigned a certain narrative before I ever had a chance to tell it in its wholeness. As a transplant recipient, this story looked like one of being eternally indebted to my medical team, and my donor family. It looked like control and compliance, and a miraculous before and after story worthy of any front page. I could make my story say that, and at times I did. But none of that encompassed the wholeness of my story. None of it offered me the power, strength and honesty I would discover when I let my story breathe in the light in its entirety.
Who benefits from how we are telling our stories?
In what ways are we shape shifting our stories to fit a more socially acceptable narrative, and abandoning our wholeness in the process?
This is the work I do with people, in 1:1 coaching sessions (or story sessions), in workshops and classes. It’s the work I love more than anything else.
Using the body, using the nervous system, using somatic embodiment tools, how can we shift the narrative, and begin to tell our stories in a way that sets us free?
