Story & the Body

Imbas Dispatch #4

A Chairde, Friends,

Years ago, while I was studying creativity and innovation at the UCD Innovation Academy in Dublin, I participated in a storytelling course, not the kind that may spring to mind, around the fire with a storyteller in full-bodied regale of a folk or fairytale, it was about the science behind storytelling. This experience showed me how modern science has only caught up thousands of years later with what our ancestors, the Áes Dána, the ‘People of the Arts’, knew—that we, you and I—are wired for stories. Research shows us that:

• Stories stimulate parts of our brains that amplify our intuition, helping us intuit other people’s thoughts and emotions, stimulating empathy

• When we resonate with a character in a story, our brain produces the neuropeptide oxytocin, the ‘love hormone’ that fosters human bonding and togetherness

• Storytelling lights up neurological pathways in the brain that incite us to take action in our lives

• The emotive feeling of a story in our bodies releases dopamine to help us remember the experience (and its teaching)

Art by Kay Nielsen

Stories transform the physiology of our bodies and can transform our lives in the process. In this way, story is not passive, it is active. As an anthropologist, having spent time studying stories and storytellers cross-culturally, I see how stories can be a form of activism in that they can stir our soul to live in service to our life’s Calling, our community, and our wider world. Stories educate us on how to be in this world. For many cultures, as with Irish culture where our mythology goes to great lengths to emphasise the lore of place, this is mirrored back to us by the land, who is also a storyteller, perhaps the greatest storyteller of all time.

‘The land is always stalking people. The land makes people live right. The land looks after us. The land looks after people.’

- Annie Peaches in Wisdom Sits in Places

‘It is no coincidence that there are hardly any places in Ireland where you are not in close proximity to a site associated with a particular deity or hero and the stories connected with them. The reach of folklore is more extensive than broadband or mobile phone coverage in many parts. It forms a carefully constructed web of stories whose aim is to communicate old knowledge to future generations.’

Manchán Magan, Listen to the Land Speak

Storied by Life

In this active way, we too are storied by life. Often when something happens to us, a story aids us in making sense of it. It helps us to grapple with the archetypal pattern or image playing out in real-time in our own life story. Not long after the time I was studying at UCD, I fell pregnant with my second son. Following a couple of scary episodes in the maternity A & E, it was discovered early on that I had a pre-cancerous lump that was feeding off my pregnancy hormones. There wasn’t much (bar multiple colposcopies) that could be done with the little man in utero, but as soon as he was born safely, I had part of my cervix removed. It was rare to see this in pregnancy so I was asked if the story of this part of my body could become a story of medical research, which could help the stories of other women in the future. This experience changed me and shortly after this, I left my 14-year-long career in the humanitarian sector and began walking the path to where I am now as a creative entrepreneur. 

A tale that encapsulates this time in my life is ‘The Handless Maiden’ or ‘The Girl Without Hands’, who in brief, has her hands chopped off as a result of her miller father’s foolish bargain with the devil (ahem patriarchy), she then chooses to leave home handless, ventures into the forest and is fed by a generous pear-tree, meets a loving king who fashions her silver hands (akin to the tale of Nuada’s silver hand in Irish mythology), which do for a time but can’t sustain her. The maiden then becomes a mother birthing a son but is forced once more to leave her comforts. Guided by an angel, she retreats with her boy to a hut in the woods where eventually she grows new fleshy hands.

Silver Hands by Jeanie Tomanek

‘So, the handless maiden is waiting to have a child, a new little wild self. The body in pregnancy does what it wants and knows to do. The new life latches on, divides, swells. A woman at this stage of the psychic process may enter another enantiodromia, the psychic state in which all that was once held valuable is now not so valuable anymore, and further, may be replaced by new and extreme cravings for odd and unusual sights, experiences, endeavors.’

Clarissa Pinkola Estés Réyes, Women Who Run With the Wolves

I’ll leave the fullness of my story for now, but this archetypal image of the handless maiden helped me (and still does) navigate that time in my life. She’s not gone. A year or so ago, I had a dream of a young woman saying to me in earnest, “Tell me the tale of The Handless Maiden”, and I thought to myself “Oh Jaysus, here we go again!” Some stories keep cycling back with new intelligence to share. We get re-storied in our lives over and over again. 

I’m also fascinated by how the body and dreamworld (as in our night dreams), two fields I work closely with, communicate in similar ways. I see this time again in my work with clients. Both exist below consciousness. The body holds the subconscious mind as the dreams do with the personal unconscious but also, our night dreams provide a direct road to the collective unconscious. Body and dreams are soma and psyche in motion speaking to us through symbol and image, and sometimes metaphor. They exist beyond logos and the linear mind, and force us to ‘do the work’ by spending time tending to the bewilderment of their meaning. In ways, what they try to tell us is not unlike that of a protagonist in a myth or folk or fairytale. That’s why we love story because it ushers us to those seemingly faraway places, distant kingdoms and lands, that are but a breath away in our bodies and night dreams. They are already alive within us.

Moving with Story

‘Our bodies were designed to move, roam, hunt, gather, and do physical work. When the body does not move enough, we get stuck, not only physically, but emotionally and mentally.’

Michaela Boehm, The Wild Woman’s Way

I love to move with a story in my body and have created several practices around this like moving with the selkie to reclaim our feminine sealskin, or moving as the Sovereignty Goddess and King to access healthy images of the feminine and masculine principles in our bodies, or moving with airgead (money or silver in Irish) as energy to separate ourselves and our bodies from the myriad of toxic money nonsense we are told. I’ve been reflecting lately on how to engage in life as a creative can require so much of us. It is an absolute wonder and I feel deeply the privilege that I can craft from my creativity, but it also comes with grief and an ebbtide of thoughts, emotions and sensations that can pull me away from the shores of my Calling. A practice that helps me to release and reorientate my body back to my creative scape is the Non-linear Movement Method, a modality I trained in some years ago with Michaela Boehm who wrote The Wild Woman’s Way. I use this practice regularly with clients who are usually surprised (as I continuously am) at its simplicity yet effectiveness.

Air Castles by Franklin Booth

Non-Linear Movement Method Class for Your Inner-Artist 

‘No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.’

Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

I have decided to run two live online Non-Linear Movement Method classes in late June for you to tend to your inner artist or creative, remembering the scope of that word, as Julia Cameron says, we are all artists. We are made of nature and nature is the ultimate artist. This will be an hour-long class where you will be moving eyes closed tending to your inner landscape releasing through your body’s movements old stories—without needing to know what they are or even why—and inviting in fresh energy and new stories to be lived.

For members here on Substack, this is free for you and I will send you a separate link with the details tomorrow.

For anyone else who feels called, you can learn more and book directly here (there are two date/time options to accommodate multiple time zones), or join the membership for €10 per month, come along to this class and also get access to a trove of mythical treasures. I hope to see you there.

For now, I’ll end with some more lyrical soul food from Dr Estés Réyes…

‘I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories from your life—your life—not someone else’s life—water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom. That is the work. The only work.’

Croí isteach,

Jen x

Sources:

IDEO

Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache by Keith Basso

Listen to the Land Speak: A Journey into the wisdom that lies beneath us by Manchán Magan

Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés Réyes

The Wild Woman’s Way: Unlock Your Full Potential for Pleasure, Power, and Fulfillment by Michaela Boehm

The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron