On a Storyteller´s Night

The Star Fishers, by Jeanie Tomanek

"A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation. Even in silence we are living our stories."

Ben Okri (in Birds of Heaven)

You are lying in bed. You are ill with the modern illness, stress. The doctor has prescribed some pills. It is a summer night. The window is open. Outside is the garden. The curtains are moving.

You are wondering whether there might be other ways to tackle your stress.

In her book, The Four-Fold Way: Walking the Paths of the Warrior, Healer, Teacher and Visionary, Angeles Arrien writes that in many shamanic societies, if you came to a shaman or medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions.:

When did you stop dancing?

When did you stop singing?

When did you stop being enchanted by stories?

When did you stop finding comfort in the sweet territory of silence?

Where we have stopped dancing, singing, being enchanted by stories, or finding comfort in silence is where we have experienced the loss of soul.

Dancing, singing, storytelling, and silence are the four universal healing salves.

In her article, Stories are Medicine: "healing tales" in myth, folklore, and mythic arts, Terri Windling writes:

”There has long been a mythic link between storytelling and the healing arts -- so much so that in some ancient societies storytellers and healers were one and the same. Stories are valued in many indigenous cultures not only for their entertainment value but also as a means to pass on cultural teachings -- including practices intended to prevent imbalance and illness (both physical and mental), and to help overcome ordeals of disease, calamity, or trauma. In some shamanic traditions, magical tales are told in a ritual manner to facilitate specific acts of healing.”

In Women Who Run With the Wolves, psychologist, folklorist and Cantadora (The Keeper of Stories)  Clarissa Pinkola Estés, writes of the healing powers of Hispanic "trance-tellers" who enter into a trance state "between worlds" in order to "attract" a story to them. Such stories are said to contain the mythic information the listeners most need to hear. "The trance-teller calls on El Duende," says Estés, "the wind that blows soul into the faces of listeners. A trance-teller learns to be psychically double-jointed through the meditative practice of story, that is, training oneself to undo certain psychic gates and ego apertures in order to let the voice speak, the voice that is older than the stones. When this is done, the story may take any trail....The teller never knows how it will all come out, and that is at least half of the moist magic of the story."

Suddenly you have the flash of understanding, that extraordinary rapidity of insight, when the mind is very still, when thought is absent, when the mind is not burdened with its own noise.

So, the understanding of anything—of a painting, of a child, of your wife, of your neighbor, or the understanding of truth which is in all things—can only come when the mind is very still.

But such stillness can not be cultivated because if you cultivate a still mind, it is not a still mind, it is a dead mind. The more you are interested in something, the more your intention to understand, the more simple, clear, free the mind is. This is the whole idea coming from ancient philosophy, where philosophy was what the word means: love of wisdom. Anybody genuinely interested in something are philosophers, lovers of wisdom.

Then chattering ceases, and story begins.

Human thought is both concrete (particular) and abstract (universal) at the same time. When you look through binoculars, you look through both lenses at once. Because human thought is binocular, abstract philosophy and concrete storytelling naturally reinforce each other´s vision. Philosophy makes storytelling clear, storytelling makes philosophy real. Philosophy shows essences, storytelling shows existence. Philosophy shows meaning, storytelling shows life.

As the Nigerian poet and novelist, Ben Okri, writes in his little book Birds of Heaven:

Philosophy is most powerful when it resolves into story. But story is amplified in power by the presence of philosophy.

So, the mind that is chattering cannot understand truth—truth in relationship, not an abstract truth. When your mind is chattering, your reception is merely an invitation of greed. So, a mind that is caught in the net of chattering cannot understand truth.

There is no abstract truth. But truth is very subtle. It is the subtle that is difficult to follow. It is not abstract. It comes so swiftly, so darkly, it cannot be held by the mind. Like a nightingale, it comes darkly, not when you are prepared to receive it.

The return, by Jeanie Tomanek

Related fairy tale:

The Elder-tree Mother, by Hans Christian Andersen (this fairy tale is precisely a healing story in the tradition of the wise woman).

Related interview with the artist behind the above paintings:

The Restorative Magic of Jeanie Tomanek’s Multi-Layered Dreams

Other related articles:

Counseling in the Mythic Forest of Rold

Philosophy, Storytelling and Shamanic Healing

Witchcraft, Shamanism and Storytelling