Story Medicine
Everything has a story…
There are no truths, only stories.
— Thomas King
Cecilia, in her innocent curiosity, stood before my altar spellbound. She wanted to know what it all meant. Why are the little glasses filled with water circling a candle? What bird did the feathers belong to? Why did I burn the herb bundle? She didn’t know each object had an elemental correspondence, a spirit, and its own story.
Cecilia is Linda’s sweet young daughter. I made a new friend in Linda and invited her to my house for lunch. I enjoy feeding people. Having them over to my house and sanctuary is a good way for us to get to know each other.
I answered Cecilia’s questions by telling her the story behind each object of her curiosity. Everything has a story. Including who carried or loved and cared for it. Or who bequeathed, sold, or gave it away. The story is what makes it rich and assigns value and meaning.
I cherish my possessions because of their stories. A story exists behind who made each object and what materials they used to construct it. There is subtlety, texture, color, energy, and feel to consider, as well as its age and provenance. Sacred objects and their stories connect me to visions of beauty. And to those whose eyes have also seen and shared their beauty.
Beauty is my religion. I believe that when we walk in beauty, then beauty is what we pay forward. I learned about the Beauty Way from the Navajo (Diné) people of Northern Arizona during my time spent there. Most religions include creation stories or myths, where the gods create beautiful things, some filled with light and life-giving, others dark and destructive. Inherent in the power to bring something into existence is also the ability to destroy it, and everything is beautiful in the eyes of the Creator.
I will tell you a story told to me on my journeys in the Pacific Northwest to illustrate my point. In the storytelling tradition, this is my version of one of many Raven medicine stories told by Native peoples. It is the story of White Raven.
In the beginning was Raven, and Raven was as white as the light that filled her soul.
— Northwest Athabascan
Once upon a time -- in a mystical land by the edge of the sea, there lived a Raven who has always been and will always be. Not only did she possess magical powers, but she was also a beautiful and intelligent creature. Some people say that Great Spirit created us in the image of Raven, and it is the land of Raven that we long for to return. A land where emerald forests spread across ancient mountains rising from the salty, deep. A place where we are lovingly cared for and abundantly fed. But that was in the long-ago-before-time, before the time of man, when Raven and her sister shone as white as the blanketing snow, as white as the drifting clouds, and as white as the Spirit Bear whose forest Raven shares.
Raven and her younger sister were artists who loved to create new things. Raven loved life and painted rainbows. She danced with joy at the sight of all her creations.
The younger sister loved to make believe and created fantasies in the sand or the snow. Sometimes she would smash her creations for the fun of it. She also had a different sense of humor and did not possess the patience of her older sister. And most of the time, in all honesty, she lived in her sister’s shadow.
Raven loved her younger sibling and thought her brilliant white plumage beautiful and divine. She didn’t understand the delight her sister found in destroying her creations. So, when the younger sister snuck up and knocked Raven’s paints over on purpose, Raven forgave her even though she had wrecked Raven’s most beautiful rainbow and then laughed until she cried. Raven tried to see the humor and knew not all creations are perfect.
Raven continued creating until one day, while she worked on her most adventurous masterpiece, the younger sister became very jealous. Raven created a beautiful creature with four long legs, a long silky tail, and hair that flowed from its neck. The younger sister felt jealous of the creations and her sister’s talent for bringing these things to life. Raven knew the right colors to paint them, the best forms to give them, and the perfect moment to breathe life into them. That angered the younger sister, and she threw an outright tantrum, squawking loudly at Raven that her creations were hideous, ugly, and deformed and needed to be destroyed. And with that, she ran at Raven’s newly made horse, flapping her long white wings to cause it to run away in fright.
Enraged beyond anything Raven had known, she grabbed her knife, which previously had only been used for carving beauty and buried it deep into her sister’s heart. Raven, full of love for life and the desire to create, stood watching as her sister’s blood covered the land and became horrified that she had been capable of murdering her own sister.
As she held her dying sibling, enfolding her in shining white wings, she wondered what could become of her now that she had destroyed a life. And as she wept, the dark stain of blood seeped across her body until she became clothed in feathers of black. From this act, Raven would be forever changed.
The moral of the story…
Through Raven’s ability to create and destroy, she became god-like. She is both the bird we know today and a supernatural being. We know her as mostly good-natured but sometimes dark and brooding, sometimes generous and at other times greedy. Where there had been joy, now is also cunning and mischief. Raven is as black as the darkest moonless night, as black as the void from which her creations take their birth, and as black as her own murderous heart. She carries her white sister’s soul in her black body and has learned to accept the way of it — the good and evil, the beautiful and ugly, the ignorant and wise. The light of the moon, the sun, and the stars reflect in her blue-black wings, and she accepts that this is the nature of things. And though we may fall from grace, there will always be grace. And where there is darkness, there will also be light.
Stories have power. They bypass the rational reductionist mind and speak in the language of archetypes and metaphors. Their images inform our questioning and expand our conscious awareness. Stories enable vision and stimulate the imagination. The images associated with words and crafted into a narrative come from a storehouse of experience within the individual psyche. Stories speak differently to each individual.
As long-term memory develops in childhood and ties the flow of events together, we begin to experience our life as a story. That is when our sense of self is born. Having script control over our life story may enable us to have a more successful life. The storyline may shift when we experience stressful times and mobilize internal resources to cope. That rewriting alters our perception of ourselves, and we change.
In Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona’s book, Remapping Your Mind: The Neuroscience of Self-Transformation through Story, he details how shared stories form culture and how narrative therapy can heal us, our relationships, and the planet. He reveals how our brains have coevolved with our narrative abilities.
We need to understand story, because story is our default mode: it is intrinsic to who we are. Story is what we use to explain our world. Story is what we use to create identity. More than that, increasingly it seems apparent that the stories we tell ourselves literally impact our health. — Lewis Mehl-Madrona
Western medicine’s current nightmare is that today’s physicians no longer take the time to listen to their patient’s stories. Our healthcare system loses time, energy, and money by not appreciating the impact that story has on our health. Clinical stories, or what we know as case studies, can teach us how the lives and stories of people suffering from illness are inseparable from the illness. Approaches to healing become more effective when we identify the beliefs that guide behavior and perception, then find the stories that led to those beliefs. Illness unfolds in the context of these stories.
Stories are transformative. But when science replaced religion as the state-sanctioned belief system, we lost the key to the magic of transformation.
The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.
— William H. Gass
The Lakota speak of these stories as our nagi, or “swarm of stories,” that surround us and make us who we are. Nagi includes both the stories and their tellers and becomes our legacy.
We are drawn to stories. Perhaps that is why Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion became hugely successful. Story is the thread that weaves our lives together across boundaries of space and time. While it may seem that the threads are linear, the weave is multi-dimensional. The ancestors knew this. The stories we receive teach us about their creators and about our own story. We learn how the thread we hold in the great weave of life connects us to the rest of the weave. That is how we evolve. When we lose our reference points, we become fragmented. A fragmented psyche cannot perceive the interconnectedness of life. Vision becomes distorted. Questions go unanswered. Images don’t connect. Tell a person a story if you want them to remember who they are.
Listen to the beauty of objects. Everything has a voice and a vibration. Seek it out, and it will speak to you. When a person crafts words and takes the time to communicate them to you, take the time to listen. Listening happens in real time. Receive the story in the manner told. Treasure those words born on the wings of experience. Open your ears as you open your eyes.
There is danger in being force-fed images and narratives through the mainstream media. It homogenizes us. Reference points no longer find their basis in third-dimensional reality. Images projected in this manner exist on a two-dimensional, flatscreen. Regression and confusion result within the collective psyche that seeks to understand where we came from and why we are here. When we no longer know who we are, we become like sheep, easily led.
A box that speaks and projects an image is nothing more than that. Life also projects images as it unfolds around you, like a calendula flower opening and turning its face toward the sun. Take those images in. Receive them from your own direct experience of life. How often have you overheard a casual conversation with the reference points for discussion relating to scenes from a movie? A movie projects its images into your unconscious and is a form of hypnosis. Whose movie are you in? Have you watched a music video and been robbed of your own interpretation and translation? And everyone else who watched that music video will see the same thing the next time they hear that song. What song will you sing? What stories will you tell?
Choose your stories carefully. Honor their source and their keepers. We are enriched by those who have told their stories. Stories have the power to change lives. Read them to your children. Listen to the story in a song or a conch shell. Don’t tell war stories. Don’t tell lies. Collect good stories and pass them along.
Psychotherapy is the art of replacing bad stories with good stories.
— Milton Erikson
References & Resources
Glauberman, L. The Transformational Power of Storytelling. Huffington Post; 2013
Mehl-Madrona, L. Changing Your Life Your Story. TRANSFORMED podcast interview with Britta Bushnell; 2020
Walk in Beauty prayer and video with Navajo historian, Wally Brown.
Singletary, P. Artist Preston Singletary Sheds New Light on the Tlingit Raven Tale. Smithsonian Magazine; 2022.
National Museum of the American Indian, conversation with artist Preston Singletary.
The art of Preston Singletary has become synonymous with the relationship between European glass blowing traditions and Northwest Native art. His artworks feature themes of transformation, animal spirits, and shamanism through elegant blown glass forms and mystical sand-carved Tlingit designs.
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