The Soul and Science of Storytelling

The Soul Side:

Where do we come from? Who were our ancestors? What practices supported balance with the earth? What have we lost of their wisdom? What aspects of it do we still possess and have access to? Why, after centuries of The Age of Reason, do we still have and need music, dance, art, and storytelling even if the stories are televisions shows and movies? Why haven’t these aspects of culture–aspects that we love so much we don’t care if we don’t make any money–died out with so little encouragement, more ridicule than respect? Why do we feel better after engaging our creativity? Why does the least sentimental among us turn to music and story when sad? In a culture that banked everything on Science and its key tools of empiricism and measurement, what does it mean that Physics proves both empiricism and measurement are impossible? What does it mean that currently Creativity and Consciousness takes priority in Neuroscience and Quantum Physics studies and that Psychiatry and Pathology alike recognize Expressive Writing and Poetic Medicine as treatment?

It means our four-century pursuit of knowledge has led us back to where we began, to what we turned away from, to this eleventh hour of all we have destroyed and all whom we, the ones of the Empire, have killed. We are at the Beginning. We witness now a world hellbent on destroying emotion in favor of reason–a world of hatred, control, genocide, and ridicule of anyone who pleads for mercy, mercy for our fellow humans, mercy for the earth. And we’re sick. We have trauma layered on trauma. We don’t know how to heal our chronic illnesses. We are addicted to painkillers because the whole world pains us. We are isolated but communicate with each other around the globe while playing video games. We are running out of clean air. We’re sad.

Even while all this destruction and cruelty goes on, Science has discovered our salvation. It’s not a rocket. It’s not a bomb. It’s not even a drug. It’s our stories. It is so tempting to dismiss this. We have lived in a culture that devalues stories as Land of Make-Believe wastes of time. We have to grow up. We have to leave such foolishness behind. Over the past three decades, however, Science has generated data supporting our storytelling’s abiity to lower blood pressure, reduce pain, heal chronic illness, alleviate suffering of both body and soul. All this time. All this time, we had this all along.

It isn’t just the physiological healing, though, that makes these discoveries so monumental. It’s the implications of story’s other attributes–its playfulness, its relatability, its ability to interweave a self with a community, and a community to the earth. It’s the joy it brings us. It’s the calm it creates. It’s the realignment of our priorities that knowing our stories brings. We forgive ourselves. We accept ourselves. We develop less stringent expectations for both ourselves and each other. We grow back our humanity which was nearly entirely coopted by corporation and country. We view the world in new ways. Also, it’s the magic.

The Middle Ages were characterized by a darkness, Dark Ages, and a culture of superstition that led everyone astray until the pure light of Reason saved us all. Rationalism robbed us of our imaginations and our emotions, and it stole our knowledge of how emotion and imagination work together as a means of perceiving total reality, not just the surface. When we begin working with our stories, though, emotion and imagination surface again as these instruments of experiencing a less-predictable, more- astonishing life.

The deal was that Science would set out to understand and know everything about the Nature and in so doing dispel illusions, superstition, and shadow worlds. It has proven these are the very phenomena of a deeper reality, a reality that for four centuries, it denied and sought to destroy. 

So now, we reclaim our stories, our perceptions, our hearts, our lives.

The reality of the unreal requires our emotions and imaginations to perceive it. To reconnect with these, we engage our stories. They are locked up inside us. As we begin to explore them, we soften. We feel again. And from what we feel, we perceive. This is the way of the Story Shepherd.

Robin Young, Dr. Tara Ross PhD., Kathryn Gillespie, Laura Hope-Gill, Anne Walker, James Greer in Derry, Northern Ireland, the site of Bloody Sunday

A forthcoming documentary presents actors and bystanders of the Conflict in Northern Ireland. A British soldier, a Paramilitary soldier, an Ulster police officer, an IRA quartermaster, an English woman who was an infant when she lost her mother after a IRA bombing, an Irish woman whose brother was murdered by a British soldier, and a widow whose husband was killed inside an English military garrison each tell not just their stories but also how telling their stories renewed their lives, brought meaning to the their suffering, and understanding of those who once were their enemies and are now best friends. This is how it happens. Even from the depths of injury and tragedy, our stories draw us out into the light we may not even feel we deserve. This healing process comes with one condition. Once we have shepherded our own story, we help others shepherd their own.

If you are interested in delving deeper, please visit A Doctrine of Creative Imagination where Laura Hope-Gill draws storytelling, philosophy, spirituality, medicine, culture, history, physics, and the wonders of everyday life together in a worldview wherein life restores and renews.

Laura Hope-Gill, Story Shepherds Founder, in front of what was once her great-grandparents’ home in Belfast before they emigrated in 1916 to Canada. Photo by Tara Ross

The Science Side:

Bardic Medicine, where Narrative Medicine leads us home to.

from Laura Hope-Gill, Story Shepherd

As a Creative Writing teacher, I witness transformation all the time. I assign students 800-words each week. Any words. Whatever comes to them, whatever wants to be said or shared or shaken out. I used to “teach” writing. Now I just “allow” writing. I provide books on writing and books of writing. We talk about key craft matters.

Other than this, students find their way without trying to please a professor. They write what leads them. The difference in learning is profound. By simply allowing themselves to write, students relax, and that relaxation marks the start of their healing into their authentic selves. It’s what we need: space to just be. No judgement. No expectations. No instruction beyond support for craft and courage. Each finds their way.

Soon they are wide open with words, able to use the tools–tools their own writing taught them–to approach any topic or experience, unafraid. When I heard the Northern Irish Peacebuilders tell their experience of healing from the Conflict, how telling renews their lives, I saw the depth of storytelling’s power to heal. Nothing escapes it. It is the water of life.A 10-minute preview of a documentary I am producing with Centreity.com

When Narrative Medicine appeared in 2006 (Dr. Rita Charon, M.D. PhD.) and 2007 (Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona M.D.), I saw where things were heading: Medicine was about to return to and integrate its roots in Storytelling. Since 1910 Western Medicine focused only on the science. Over the course of the century, a number of humanist healers within the medical field made the case for the necessity of “narrative,” or storytelling in the healing process. Psychiatrist and professor of Medical Anthropology, Dr. Arthur Kleinman, M.D., made very clear the connection between storytelling and the treatment of chronic illness in The Illness Narratives published in 1988. Author of the groundbreaking What Doctors Feel, Dr. Danielle Ofri, M.D., consistently over the course of decades penned books, essays, and op-ed’s addressing the consequences of a science-only medical field, in addition to editing the excellent Bellevue Literary Review. Dr. Rita Charon’s Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness crystalized the call of a century for a humanities-informed educational tool for third-year medical students. Today, Narrative Medicine is a recognized, evidence-based discipline.

Narrative Medicine has also reached far beyond its origins in clinical practice. It was clear from the start that the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia University Faculty was modeling a multi-disciplinary approach to Clinical Medicine. It was doing so, though, while centering the Western model. One could see that the no-less worthy fields of Philosophy, Poetry, Literature, Film, and Storytelling were now being invited to inform Medicine. What was missing is the fact that these “softer” disciplines heal as well. Close-reading and reflective writing, both staples of the Literature and Religion Departments, are the cornerstones of the Columbia model of Narrative Medicine. Again, Literature was being welcomed to serve Medicine. The movement was not limited to clinical Medicine. Psychology was transforming, too, driven by a different modality, but still a modality known to centuries of poets and writers, that of writing your traumas and turning them into art.

Dr. James Pennebaker launched Expressive Writing in the 1980s. Thousands of studies have since amazed the medical field. The four-step practice of writing our trauma in brief sessions four days in a row for 15 minutes reduces the intensity, the invasiveness, and the paralysis trauma causes. Patients report reduction of anxiety and depression. Pain decreased. The side-effects of chemo lessened. People got their lives back from the one event or series events that they thought had broken them. As a writer and poet who was expected to follow the family footsteps into medicine, I watched the data accrue with much interest. I was watching Medicine heal itself with its own lost story.

I have many times uttered under my breath while reading a study in the AMA or NIH carefully analyzing the data around improved outcomes from story-based healing, “Say it. Say it. Say that Creativity is Medicine.” We know that Science has to be careful. We also know that the deal of the entire Age of Reason was that once Science proves an idea in repeated studies it would accept it as truth and fact. We are at that point now. Scientific evidence proves that healing requires more than Science. This is where we are now. The term Narrative Medicine has been stretched far afield of what Dr. Charon proposed. Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona’s “Coyote Medicine,” has held more space for expansion, establishing roots in both Cherokee and Gaelic story-hearling traditions. Columbia clung to Narrative Theory until it became clear that the healing was not in the theory of story but in the storytelling, the stripped down, ancient, earth-bound. practice of sharing stories. Creative Writing and Creativity are now proven treatments within medical context.

Here, though, we have to be honest. Narrative Medicine is not the term for what we are talking about now. Nor are Poetry, Stories, and Storytelling handmaidens to the clinical. These are their own fields of medicine and healing with ancient roots long tended by practitioners and scholars for generations. Nor is this new. Up until the 1800’s in Ireland and elsewhare Bardic Schools (Griot for African cultures) trained poets, storytellers, and doctors together, a unified field of healing. This practice of healing by delving into our own stories for the medicine we need, a medicine scripted only for us as individuals is Bardic Healing. It is proven to save and change lives. It is proven to save and change worlds as well.

Storytelling is an archaic healing technique that goes far beyond letting our thoughts flow onto paper. This practice connects us through more than communication and sharing. There are wonders and tools within us for working with this, and when we find how our stories function, we find our way into wisdom. For that, we need poets and storytellers as guides for they know how this side of medicine behaves within. Fortunately, we’re still here. Many of us are even doctors. After all, these trees grow from one root.

Our vision

Story Shepherds draws our attention to the ancient gift of storytelling within us, between us, among us. Backed by both Indigenous wisdom and clinical medicine, storytelling is the answer to every ailment, every conflict. It is the miracle we are waiting for, and it is waiting for us.

“I used to be a freedom fighter. I told my story. Now I’m free.”

— Anne Walker, Peace Builder in Northern Ireland, former IRA combatant, Story Shepherd

Begin.

The Story Shepherds will host Story Shepherd Sessions as well as offer listenings one-on-one and in small groups. Subscribe (free) to this website to receive announcements and be apprised of Shepherd events. We know how powerful this is–how needed. We are happy you know now, too. 

Welcome to Story Shepherds. Let your Story speak.

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