Ana didn’t realize it at the time, she told me, but it was storytelling that helped her begin to move from a wilted old dream into the budding seed of another. “I was feverishly imagining other ways my life might look. I told people, ‘I love to bake. I’m going to open a bakery.’ I’d announce on social media that I was thinking about opening a day care with all the most recent child psychology research in mind. When strangers would ask what I do for a living, I’d try out my newest idea. ‘I am applying for jobs at nonprofit domestic violence shelters’; ‘I’m going to do a yoga teacher training’; ‘I’m a writer.’ ”
Ana confided in me that she often felt embarrassed that she’d told people she was going to do something that never came to fruition. More often, however, the stories she told about her future helped her imagine herself beyond the pain and fear she felt at making this change. If Ana could imagine her life differently, she said, then she could live her life differently, too. “I had to inhabit a new life a little bit first. It was like trying on new clothes to see myself in that way, like when I was little playing dress up.” And that’s how she worked her way out of a dark and confusing time of personal upheaval; through imagination and play, one of those alternate dream paths became her new reality.
Playing and imagination are both central to storytelling. I’m not talking about freewriting as a form of therapy, where you just pour everything out onto paper in a stream of consciousness (although that can be great, too!). I’m talking about telling stories as an act of creativity and creation. I’m talking about a mixture of knowing and mystery. As author and activist Parker J. Palmer writes, “The facts can never be understood except in communion with the imagination.”9 Don’t feel limited by your current reality. If we are to get in touch with our sacred purpose then we must be willing to dive into the not-yet, and dance around for a while in the endless possibilities open to us. You’ve written your dreams down and rooted yourself to the earth, now air them out a little. Stretch the boundaries. Through language we can rewrite our stories, we can tell our stories with ourselves as the protagonists, and we can tell the truth; otherwise, someone else is measuring our lives.
Don’t be fooled by the idea of your life as one linear timeline—from birth to death—as if a neat, orderly narrative is the organizing structure of your existence. The power to craft and create through your creativity and nonlinear imagination: this is your birthright. It has been passed down to you from many generations of storytellers back to the origins of humanity. It will probably be messy. All great works of art require rough drafts. You might feel you are too old to engage in such seemingly frivolous creative pursuits—only children get to play dress up, you might think, or only children get to play make believe. But I’m here to tell you that through imagination and play you are creating a great work of art. It’s an ongoing project of revision and reimagining that has no clear beginning or end, and is a project worth doing at any age.
I once attended a book club discussion of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic led by a woman who began the meeting by asking everyone to introduce themselves with their names and their favorite creative pursuit. One woman responded, “My name is Tracy and I’m a singer,” another said, “I’m Noelle and I’m a writer.” And so I met a singer and a writer. As the discussion proceeded, however, we learned that these women were not writers or singers—at least not yet! These were their dreams for themselves; they wanted to sing and write and they had recently begun to do it in their spare time. We in the group did not judge; we met these women as they were, on a journey toward a new—yet original—self.
Poet, psychoanalyst, and post-trauma specialist Clarissa Pinkola Estés celebrates the power of working with stories so that they don’t just define us, but that we speak back to them and make something from them. “I hope you will go out and let stories, that is, life, happen to you,” Estés writes, “and that you will work with these stories . . . water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.”10 My soul sings stories in this way. This is the creative potential of storytelling: a full-bodied experience, like kneading dough or dancing in the rain, in which we give birth to new versions of ourselves.
Story as Medicine
The power of storytelling is indeed full-bodied. It not only nurtures our souls, it also heals the body: many health professionals proclaim the health benefits of telling, and listening to, stories. “Telling your story—while being witnessed with loving attention by others who care—may be the most powerful medicine on earth,” says doctor and bestselling author Lissa Rankin.11 “Each of us is a constantly unfolding narrative,” she continues, “a hero in a novel no one else can write. And yet so many of us leave our stories untold, our songs unsung—and when this happens, we wind up feeling lonely, listless, out of touch with our life’s purpose, plagued with a chronic sense that something is out of alignment. We may even wind up feeling unworthy, unloved, or sick.”12 Storytelling can be a mighty salve for our bodies, minds, and spirits. If we are brave enough to dive into creativity and voice, we can heal.
Telling our stories is an antidote to the chronic misalignment, or sickness, that we experience in a world full of silences. When we fill those silences with our voices and speak our fullness, we heal body and soul. As Rankin puts it:
Every time you tell your story and someone else who cares bears witness to it, you turn off the body’s stress responses, flipping off toxic stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine and flipping on relaxation responses that release healing hormones like oxytocin, dopamine, nitric oxide, and endorphins. Not only does this turn on the body’s innate self-repair mechanisms and function as preventative medicine—or treatment if you’re sick. It also relaxes your nervous system and helps heal your mind of depression, anxiety, fear, anger, and feelings of disconnection.13
Our lives are measured by the stories we tell; we need to be witnessed and embraced, not through our silences, but through making ourselves heard. When this happens, the soul sings and the body flows in harmony, free from strain and defensiveness.
Research supports this notion that telling stories is good for your health. A study reported in the January 2011 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine found that “storytelling is emerging as a powerful tool for health promotion,” especially in populations that are considered vulnerable. In one study, researchers monitored the blood pressure of nearly three hundred individuals who lived in urban areas and were known to have hypertension. The patients were divided into two groups; the first group was given videos to watch of patients telling stories about their own experiences with blood pressure, while the second group viewed videos of more generic and impersonal health issues on topics like dealing with stress. The results were impressive: the study indicated that all the patients listening to the personal stories had a reduction in their blood pressure readings and were better able to manage the condition without medication. The researchers concluded that “storytelling intervention produced substantial and significant improvements.”14
In fact, the US medical system is on the verge of quite a transformational period, with storytelling as the catalyst for change. Patients are often understood as a collection of data about our physical states, and doctors learn our “stories” through answers we fill out on an intake form and information they take from us: our blood pressure and our lab samples, for example. Some physicians are starting to harness the power of storytelling to cultivate stronger relationships between themselves and their patients, and what they are finding helps us understand how powerful storytelling can be in our lives.
“Telling and listening to stories is the way we make sense of our lives,” writes Dr. Thomas K. Houston, lead author of another study on the power of storytelling on health. According to Dr. Houston, storytelling could be an effective way to improve health outcomes without the side effects of medication.
Focusing on narratives in addition to physical health data would also connect and forge
better relationships between doctors and patients, because telling and listening to stories allows better trust in the doctor-patient relationship. “We would never graduate someone from medical school who didn’t know their pharmacology,” writes Dr. Sayantani DasGupta.15 “We also shouldn’t graduate someone who doesn’t know how to listen to a story.”16 Dr. DasGupta talks about “transforming medicine into the kind of collaborative endeavor” wherein doctors learn to listen to patients better, and are taught that medicine is less quantitative than was once believed.17 Indeed, measurable bodily data is in a dynamic relationship with patients’ narratives about their experiences—and both are more fluid than static. What doctors need to learn is to see patients as active agents in their own lives, not just as victims to their bodily circumstances.
She writes: “Stories are the way that we all understand the world and the way all of our professions operate and thrive. They keep us self-critical, engaged. We’re all trying to figure out what it means to be present for stories, to receive them in meaningful ways, to co-create the stories of our lives and our world together.”18
Storytelling, then, is a powerful source of “lived evidence.” There’s your GPA, there’s your annual income, there’s your height and weight. But that’s not who you are; in fact, you can’t really quantify the fullness of who you are. That’s where telling stories comes in. The medical field is increasingly becoming aware of the healing power of storytelling on the body and on relationships between the teller and witness.
Storytelling is good for your health, because as social beings we need to make meaning for our lives through narrative. We need to be heard. And to do so in a culture that often prefers our silences means being bold enough to speak our stories, and vulnerable enough to ask others to witness them. This is a pathway to wholeness and healing.
Be the Heroine of Your Own Story
When Black feminist lesbian mother poet warrior Audre Lorde (this is how she prefers to name herself, so who am I to silence or edit her?) was first faced with a tumor on her breast, she had an intense wakeup call. She writes, “In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences.”19
Thus begins a gorgeous meditation on the weight of our silences and the power of transforming silence into language and action. Lorde even invented her own kind of writing in order to tell her story in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: she called it “biomythography.”
A biomythography is a kind of melding of myth, history, and biography: a way of writing one’s life that intertwines myth and history and self. It uses imaginative thinking to write the self not so much by chronological life events, but by theme, sound, and image, allowing the writer to define the self on her own terms rather than by strict historical facts. In other words, it plays with that often thin line between fact and fiction, emphasizing perception and lived experience as well as personal empowerment and self-definition.
In fact, Lorde was joining a long line of women who have invented their own forms of self-expression when the social narratives available to women were less than ideal. Women in China who used a script called nushu, or female writing, are also part of this lineage.20 Denied an education for centuries in China, women of the Jiangyong Prefecture in the southern Hunan Province created and used this script to share fears and anxieties about arranged marriages, to record songs and poems, and to share love and intimacy with one another. Forbidden to use this language, the women would embroider it on handkerchiefs and write it on fans.
As Douglas Martin reports in his 2004 New York Times article on the death of Yang Huanyi, the last woman to communicate with other women in nushu under this oath of secrecy: “popular writers have called nushu ‘the witch’s script’ and the ‘first language of women’s liberation.’ ”21 I confess that I adore both phrases, as they reflect the rebellious nature of women who dared to speak and to the liberating potential of such speech acts.
My grandmother and mother are also part of this lineage, for they also spoke in the language of women’s liberation, because in their storytelling they told the fullness of their lives, claimed their wisdom and intelligence, and asserted their value. They were sarungano,22 “owners of the stories,” highly imaginative female artists, masters of imagery, wisdom, and creation. Their bodies swayed, interpreted, and personified humans and animals alike as they imparted worlds of possibility and information to us.
I call upon this matrilineage to inspire you to become the heroine of your own story. Write on napkins. Sing in the shower. Organize a poetry reading. Reconnect with a friend and listen to old stories and make up new ones. If there is no name for the kind of storytelling you want to do; if no outlets, no languages, allow you to speak the fullness of yourself, then invent one. Know that you do so not in isolation, but in a rich and far-reaching ancestry of women storytellers who have done the same: women who spoke—in secret handwriting, in deserts, with fearful diagnoses, on handkerchiefs, over campfires, with fear and delight and a little wildness in their voices—they spoke. And so can you.
Speak the Self, Heal Nations
Our stories have magic—they give shape and purpose to communities and even nations. Storytelling has depth that brings collective empathy, reminding us of the essence of our humanity, the ubuntu, the humanness, that makes us human beings. When I heard my grandmother tell of her pain as well as her expertise, she showed me that a woman can be vulnerable and strong. I saw her humor and her sadness, her frustration at the cultural limits for women and her longing for something more, feelings that were both personal and cultural. I intuitively understood myself as capable of asking those same questions and seeking to fill in the blanks her story created. When a mother in the US hears in a Syrian mother’s own voice how she carried her two-year-old on her back, drugged so he would not cry and alert the heavily armed border patrol, across hundreds of miles in the damp and rain to a refugee camp, the distance between these women collapses—as do geographical, political, and cultural borders that may divide them. Our stories have power because through them we embrace our collective vulnerability and worthiness—when you share your pain and resilience, and I share mine, we become one.
We might say that the world oppresses women by silencing our voices, but the inverse is also true: the world suffers (in many cases without knowing or acknowledging it) without women’s voices. Sacred sisters, that is the power we have—to tell stories that deepen and extend human consciousness, that heal our souls, and that can bring a global spiritual and physical healing. When we tell our stories, when we embrace creativity and imagination to not only tell ourselves as we really are but also to imagine ourselves beyond our current realities, that act echoes beyond the self in powerful ways.
Our stories need to be told, and there is richness in our diversity because we are not monolithic; rather, it is the beauty of our differences that will bring a cross-pollination of great lessons to be learned that will strengthen not just ourselves but also the world around us. Let us not forget that we have the power in our hands to tell our stories, stories that heal not only our sisterhood, but nations as well.
SACRED RITUAL TO AWAKEN AND INSPIRE YOUR STORYTELLING
Beloved sisters, my hope for you is that you will hear the call of the ancients and the women who’ve gone before you, and know that they were storytellers. They told stories not only to survive but to flourish. They told stories to find each other, even when the words were forbidden for them to speak or write. They told stories to claim the truth of their lives, to share their hurt and joy, to know themselves through the mirror of the listeners.
They told each other stories in order to create themselves. They told stories to imagine themselves differently, even when they were afraid of past mistakes, or that they would be mocked for desiring something more. They are asking you to add your voice to the telling, to be
part of the continuum of storytelling that has no beginning and no end. Will you answer their call?
We have been doing a lot of writing and reflection. Now it is time to go public with your dreams. After all, a storyteller is nothing without the ability to incite the listener to embody the experience of the tale and to invoke action. With the vision of your planted dreams firmly in your mind, practice being a storyteller.
First, practice telling yourself the story of your own dreams with confidence. Then set an intention that this week you will be bold enough to tell it to someone else. Identify a safe person or group to whom you can share your story. Perhaps, like Ana, you feel most comfortable telling someone you don’t know at the start, because the interpersonal distance is comforting. Or you may want to tell a therapist, coach, or mentor. Protect yourself and your dreams by avoiding telling family members or friends who may have their own reasons for doubting you.
You may find though that what you thought was a supportive environment or person turns out to be judgmental or critical. If someone reacts negatively to your story, I encourage you to take this opportunity to cultivate your tinogona—it is achievable!—spirit. Tinogona spirit is your inner spirit of resilience driven by determination in a graceful and compassionate manner, knowing you can achieve anything. You strengthen it by remembering your buried dreams.
Your groundedness is strong enough to transcend the unpredictable and changing world without pushing you off course. Say to yourself: “I am not telling my story, my dreams, in order to elicit a particular response from a listener. I cannot make someone respond the way I hope they will. I tell my story because I need to speak it; I need to feel the words take shape in my mouth and hang in the air. I tell it to exercise my creativity and imagination. I tell it because it is my Great Hunger that must be expressed.”
The Awakened Woman Page 9