“To follow Story is to understand the path of healing. Each of our stories is a universe. Each one of us is living a story. To discover its shape and essence is essential to soul making.”
Deena Metzger
What stories are inside you mama? What stories are you pregnant with? What stories live and breathe inside of you? What stories are you caught inside of? What stories are you navigating?
“Who are you?” asks somebody. “I am the story of myself” answers a voice.
Stories don’t travel linearly or in straight lines.
Stories travel in spirals and circles.
In order to navigate the awesome landscape of story,
it is helpful
to think like a spider
and become a weaver of words.
Some stories can be
sticky
or stuck.
Some stories go
around and around and around
in circles that generate no momentum or life.
Stories like these can be flycatchers,
and we, like flies remain stuck.
To think like a spider
is to catch the story flies
(not be caught by them)
and to put them into a cocoon
and then drink them
digest them
embody them differently.
There may be a story that you are lost or stuck inside of. Or a story that you resist telling. Or a story you haven’t fully returned from. Sometimes you have to tell the story you don’t want to tell in order to fully transform it.
Speaking of spiders and webs and story threads …stories lead us into labyrinths. Imagine that you are following Ariadne’s thread into the heart of the labyrinth at the center of the psyche. The ball of thread is your golden alphabet. The way you language an old story. The way you spin yourself out of story cocoons and grow wings on stories.
In the ancient greek story of Ariadne’s thread, there is a Minotaur or beast at the center of the labyrinth. The hero must face and slay the beast before the beast slays and eats him. Ariadne offers the hero a ball of yarn to follow into the center. She will keep holding it as he navigates his way through the dark. she will keep holding it while he gets stuck in labryinthine squares. She holds it while he gets ever closer to center and while he faces and battles the beast. She trusts the process. He trusts the process because he knows that what could destroy him also has the power to transform him.
He gets closer…and closer…to the center…navigating through a maze…He slays the beast. And because of the thread he has taken with him, because of the power of story, he navigates his way out again.
Here is a writes of passage story example of how we do this with language and story:
I’m lost inside the story of myself. It’s sticky in here. Lots of cobwebs. Dust. Broken furniture. Sealed dream boxes. Ghosts of pixies. Ghosts of former identities. Ghosts of outworn stories. I’m lost inside myself. The story about how I’m not good enough. The story about how stuck I am in this relationship. The story about how I don’t deserve more. The story about my small stuck desperation. The story about how really, I’m crazy. The story about how depressed I feel right now or how emotionally unstable I really am. I’m lost inside a monster story. This story is the Belly of the Biggest, baddest wolf beast. It has broken me down in its devouring juices. And I hold onto these false stories because they are all I can cling to. I was broken down long before it was ugly. And I was born new and pink and shiny but I became afraid to venture into the Story landscape with a capital S. The choose your own adventure Story. I became afraid to venture into a land without words, without alphabets raining down from trees. I went back into the belly of the beast bc it was safer. And I drown. Am I really drowning? Now that I name it, can I claim it? I am in the belly of the wolf. But am I really? This “I” that tells these stories…is it really me? What if there is another ‘I” another ‘Me’ hiding, like a violet beneath a grove of redwood giants. Pregnant with a scent that plays hide and seek with stars. –s.g.
The stories that are our greatest challenges or weaknesses can be turned and churned inside out on themselves, transformed into our greatest strengths by having the courage to walk inside of them (or on top of them, like the spider consciously crafting her web.)
I invite you to travel into sticky or challenging stories through a writes of passage process. into the heart of some of your story beasts, I also invite you to play with language, to write for the love of writing, to travel to foreign lands with your pen and paper.
Maybe you do not need the medicine of cracking open stories. Or maybe you do. Maybe you do not need the medicine at the heart of the beast at the center of your story or maybe you do. Curious? Reach out. Book a Life Story Tarot session and/or enquire about a personalized writes of passage one-on-one process, or tune into my upcoming Return Sessions: Story as Elixir group process.
Story. She is my middle name. The liminal. The here now and in between. Seek her. Stalk her. Eat her. Transform her.
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