Hello everyone and welcome to module 8, our final module of finding ourselves in fairy tales. It's been such a wonderful opportunity to work with you all during this program and I'm looking forward today to tying it all together and offering you some new techniques and new ways of working with fairy tales. As always, I will just get my screen set up and then we can begin.
Okay, so here we are and off we go. Module 8, the usual copyright notice, other ways of working with fairy tales, and that's precisely what we are going to focus on today. We're going to look at a range of options that fall outside the straightforward narrative approaches that we've been working with up until now.
So we'll look at creating our own inner imaginarium. We'll explore active imagination practices and other forms of written practices to work with fairy tales. And we'll finish up by thinking about how to tell stories and how to work with story circles.
So our learning objectives for this module are to draw up a plan for using these techniques to deepen your understanding of your life story. and to acquire techniques for telling stories in informal settings. So here are again the main methods that we're going to be working with.
Written practices, creating your own inner imaginarium, active imagination and related techniques, and telling stories. If we begin with the written practices, these are complementary. to some of the ways that we've been working with, and particularly in the context of writing your own life as a fairy tale and working with your own story. These are techniques that can be kind of added on that will enable you to go a little bit deeper into this work. The first that I want to talk about.
or just mentioned briefly really, is letter writing, because some of it's fairly obvious. And this is writing a letter to a character in your story, or sometimes to yourself. And it can be always quite illuminating to write a letter to yourself as a character in your own life.
That kind of exchange of dialogue can be very illuminating. It's also interesting to write letters to other characters in your story. Journaling, we've talked about a lot all the way through, so I'm not going to dwell on that at all, really.
That's just a practice of reflection on what you're thinking, on what you're learning, on what is coming up for you as you work through this material. And really, for me, that is something that is an ongoing thing as we continue to work with fairy tales. As we continue to broaden and deepen our stories and work with the images that are in our stories, it's always, always, always a good idea to write down what you're thinking or what you're feeling, because it's gone so quickly if you don't.
Poetry based on fairy tales is a way, a technique that a lot of people like to use if you're given to writing poetry. Then exploring. fairy tales in this way, exploring your own story in this way is a particularly interesting thing to do.
There are a number of authors that have written poetry based on fairy tales. The one that I would really recommend, not because I think that many of us can achieve her level of skill, but because she has such a wonderful way of taking fairy tales and bringing them into the contemporary world through poems. And that's Anne Sexton, the American poet who was contemporary of Sylvia Plath's and particularly her collection Transformations, where she's specifically bringing fairy tales into the modern age.
That might give you some inspiration for working with your own poetry if that's something that you do. It can be incredibly interesting to take like a prose story, a story that you've written in prose as a normal story would be, and work with it as a kind of script, seeing it as a play and giving the characters lines. And that's because often when we're working with stories and writing our lives as fairy tales, we tend towards the plot-driven techniques. We tend to say, and this happened, and then she, and so on. And we don't really have very much dialogue in it.
You may be a person who's put a lot of dialogue into your own fairy tale, into your own life story, but I have almost never seen it. And part of that, I think, is because people are often covering big chunks of time when they're working with their own particular fairy tale. But I think a lot of it is just that people...
Unless they are professional writers, they're very uncomfortable with dialogue and it feels very stilted to them and they're not entirely sure how to weave it in, in a story setting. So one way to get around that and to really focus on what characters could say to each other and explore the ways in which that illuminates a situation is to see it as a play. to write it effectively as pure dialogue.
This can work better, obviously, with a particular life issue rather than the broad span of a life. But you can also take a particular situation in your life and write it fairly true to how it actually went and then rewrite the lines to see how it might have gone better. If character X had said something different, how would that story have evolved? How would that scene have evolved? So this is really a bit of a playful thing.
It's about playing with dialogue, playing with conversation to really explore the ways in which stories are often dependent on what one character says to another and how that can be better understood, predicted and improved. It can also be interesting to take a character in your story, either in your life story or just in any fairy tale that is holding you right now, to write about what a character in that story is thinking at a particular moment. So kind of like a monologue, if you like, a soliloquy from a character to just write in their voice what they're thinking at a particular moment in a story.
And again, this can be very illuminating because particularly if it's a character that you struggle with a little bit, a character who's played an ambiguous role in your story or a character who's played a malevolent role in your story, it can be really interesting to imagine what they might be thinking and to write that out. So that's something that I do strongly recommend to deepen this work. You can similarly write it. diary entry for a particular character. That can be a fun thing to do and equally illuminating and sometimes a little bit less intimidating than the idea of writing an entire monologue.
You can conduct an interview with a character from the story. Again, you can do this with your own life story, with a character in your own life story, your own fairy tale, or you can do that with a character from any fairy tale that is grabbing you. Just...
just ask them some questions and imagine their answers. You can also write about, kind of expand your knowledge of a character by wondering what they're doing when they've just left the story or when they've just left the scene. What happens now?
What's their ongoing story? And some of this is interesting to do. even if this doesn't have kind of, you know, therapeutic utility for you or for the client that you're working with, just to really deepen your ways of working with story and to make you more comfortable about working in narrative settings. It's about expanding and deepening the imagination in general. How does story work?
And it gives you a better sense of the characters being multi-dimensional rather than just unidimensional. They have lives beyond their particular part in this story, and that can be useful to imagine. You can work with things like writing the script of a telephone call or writing an email exchange between two characters, a little bit like writing dialogue, but maybe, well, email is a different thing, isn't it? From an actual real life conversation, different things are possible, different things are likely. So that could be a useful technique as well.
You can also think of, particularly when it's your own life story and you're kind of struggling to see themes, you can try writing the blurb for the story. You can try writing the kind of back of book description, that couple of paragraphs, which is really intended to hook the reader in. Writing blurbs at the best of times is incredibly difficult.
As a writer, I find it almost impossible. It's as much a marketing exercise as anything. But nevertheless, the process of doing it can be incredibly revealing and can really shift your perspective on a story and what it might actually mean.
So again, these are some of the written practices which take us out of the actual narrative itself, but allow us to go more deeply into certain aspects of the characters or certain aspects of the plot. that we are working with in a way that we can't really do within the confines of a story if we want that story to hang together in a coherent way. Now, your inner imaginarium, what am I talking about here? Well, this is a phrase that I coined for the following process, based on the idea that we are each haunted by different images.
We each resonate with different myths or fairy tales and with different archetypal characters within them. And each of us identifies probably with different archetypal characters and patterns and stories at different times in our own lives. So my question whenever I work with the mythic imagination is to wonder how we uncover those patterns.
how we bring those images to life and how we let them work their magic on us. Now the practice of mythic imagination, and this is kind of what I, the umbrella term that I put this work into, practice of mythic imagination is about being open to and about actively contemplating the images which either arise unbidden in our dreams, which arise in stories and hook their claws into us and don't let us go. And the images in poems and art, most importantly, and yet again, to stress this as I always do, it's not about striving to interpret those images.
Again, an image is like a kiss. Once we begin to dissect it, the magic is completely gone. So it's simply about staying with, being with those images that call to us.
It's about believing that these images hold wisdom and it's about letting them reveal themselves to us. So this way of working with the mythic imagination does, at least in my worldview, open us up to the possibility that there might be an order of reality which lies beyond that that we can experience through our physical senses, an order of reality that we can access through the practice of the imagination by working with images, because to contemplate the imaginal is really to put ourselves, I believe, directly in touch with the sacred. So that's how I look at images.
That's how I look at the imagination. That's why I work with the mythic imagination. And there are a number of things that you can do here. You can start by making a collection, a physical collection of your images. You can collect them in a box.
You can paste them into a journal. Journaling is always a key way to work, isn't it? And, you know, I have made kind of story boxes in the past when I was working particularly deeply with...
an image and this is just literally a box, any box that I have gathered and tried to make beautiful, even if it was a kind of paper or cardboard box, I've collected. together. Postcards or cut bits out of magazines or collected objects, perhaps found objects in the world or other objects which seem to me to have something to do with this story.
I've written fragments of lines, poetry, handwritten and put them in the box. And it's kind of a little magical box. It's a magical story box that somehow holds together the key aspects of the story. And when you're working with images and you begin to collect together, even if you're not working with a specific story, but looking more generally at images from stories that appeal to you, it's important to wonder whether you're noticing any repeating patterns. So are there particular themes in the story, particular characters?
particular visual images, particular moods that are occurring often in the stories that seem to haunt you. If there are, then do make a particular note of those recurrences because these are the images and the ideas that you'll want to spend a good deal of time with, hoping that at some point they will reveal something to you that you would like to know or that you need to learn. And it's very much also about engaging with the images.
And I'm going to talk about them in a moment. One of the things you can do really is to use, we've talked about written practices. And the other thing that you can do is to use expressive arts techniques to work with the images and the characters in your story.
So pick an archetypal character which particularly resonates with you, whether it's human, animal or plant from one of your stories, as well as the written practices work with it creatively, depending on the things that you love to do. Paint it, sew it in whatever ways work for you, because these are contemplative practices that help you engage. It kind of takes you out of the purely verbal, takes you out of the purely intellectual and...
really takes away that tendency we have to want to interpret and over-rationalize. And it helps you engage in a more contemplative way that allows the image to do that work. So it's about creating collages. If you're not very good at painting or drawing or sewing, whatever it is, there must be something I think for everyone that they're able to do creatively. Finding Also finding other representations of that character in other stories, in poems, in films, in movies, in paintings, making a collection, storing it in a box or pasting it into a journal, exploring, contemplating, waiting for the character or the image as a consequence of all this contemplation to make itself known to you.
So that kind of collection of images, that collection of archetypal characters that stay with us, the stories that haunt us, that's what I call our inner imaginarium. And it's different for every one of us. I think of it as a kind of locked room somewhere in my psyche where all of the treasures lay hidden that are specifically mine. I'm sorry, I should have offered you that slide that's got precisely the things that I have said on it. I completely forgot that it was there.
So moving on now to active imagination and particular technique that I developed based on Jung's active imagination, which I'll talk about in a moment. brought into play some of my own particular trainings, which I call Dreamweaving. And there will be an audio, a link to an audio recording of a journey that I call a Dreamweaving journey, which is a kind of personal, unique to me, active imagination journey that you can use to explore your stories and your characters, which will make more sense to you.
after I've just given you this explanation of the kinds of techniques I'm talking about. So after Losing his mentor and father figure in a professional split with Sigmund Freud, Jung, as many of you will know, suffered a major psychological crisis. This was in his late 30s and much of his energy, as he described it, was withdrawn from the outer world and redirected to his inner life.
Now, before this inner kind of underworld, journey that he undertook, Jung had, he wrote, accomplished everything that he had ever set out to do in the outer world. He had pretty much everything that he had ever wanted. He had professional success. He had a marriage and children.
He had wealth and prestige and was gaining renown. He was becoming quite well known. But really, as he came to this critical period in his life, and after what happened between him and Freud, he was forced to recognize that none of this outer achievement was enough for him. And somehow, as he explained it, he had lost some part of his soul. And of course, the Red Book, again, as most of you will know, is a record over a period of around 16 years of Jung's complicated, and quite lengthy quest to uncover his soul, to uncover those aspects of his psyche which were hidden to him, and to undergo the journey of growth.
So the Red Book is Jung's journal, and in essence it contains his inner dialogue with his unconscious, his complexes, a number of kind of guardian spirits, if you like, I suppose we could think of them, and what he called the spirit of the depths. And the Red Book depicts his dreams, his waking visions, and other vivid images which came to him. That process that he underwent during that time also led to Jung encouraging his patients to work in this way, to draw, paint, explore images from their own dreams and visions.
But the... particular technique that he employed in those kind of inner dialogues or those dialogues, they weren't just inner dialogues, those dialogues was a therapeutic technique, which we now call active imagination. It stems directly from Jung's experiences of dialoguing with his fantasy, imaginal and dream images as if they existed in the day world.
So Jung's concept of active imagination originally really embraced all forms of interaction with an image, kind of dramatic forms, visual forms, acoustic, or in the form of painting, drawing, sculpting, writing, dancing, whatever he might have wanted to do to engage with the images. But I'm going to focus specifically now on dialoguing, on how we dialogue with characters and images. from fairy tales, again, either our own or the fairy tales that we are particularly drawn to at any particular time. Now, in Jung's work, there are two stages of active imagination. One can be thought of as inspection and the other as confrontation.
In inspection, what you do is you begin. You sit and you bring to mind, you focus on a visual image. You just bring a visual image into your mind from a dream, a vision, or as we're talking about in this course, a story. And you try to bring it in your mind until it becomes alive. Now, in order for it to feel alive, it doesn't have to be perfectly outlined.
Many people find it very, very difficult to form. detailed images in their kind of mind's eye. But everybody, I think, can have a sense that an image or a character has become present, even if you can't see it very, very clearly at first.
You have an outline of it, you have maybe an emotional sense of it, and that is absolutely fine. It doesn't have to be a really detailed visual image that we're looking at. So that's inspection. You're sitting, you're kind of bringing to mind.
a visual image of a character or an image, and you are literally inspecting it until the point at which you begin to feel that it is alive. It's not a passive thing. It's not even maybe a two-dimensional thing, but it has some quality of life that you can engage with.
In confrontation, you approach it. You approach this image that is now alive, this image that is now alive. imagined being character and you begin to talk to it.
You can begin, for example, by questioning it. Who are you? Why are you here? What are you doing? What is your question for me?
Do you have something to tell me? May I ask you a question? These are all the kinds of starting points for engaging with a character or an image.
So if there were to be a character, that you are particularly drawn to in a fairy tale, this would be a good way of beginning to engage with it. Or if there is a particular image, even if it appears to be a non-animate image, like a pair of red shoes, you can still try to talk to it and see what happens. The important thing to understand about act of imagination and act of imagination journeys is it... very, very different technique from processes like guided imagination journeys or shamanic journeying for those of you that have ever done that. The point really is not to manage the imaginal world.
It's not to manage the characters or the images. It's to allow them to kind of come to you and show themselves to you. There's no way you have to get to during this process like you do on guided imagination journeys.
There are no prescribed images that are supposed to appear like guides of any particular kind. The aim is to allow whatever image comes to you and it might be a different one from the one that you begin with. So you might be going into this process thinking, oh, I think I'll have a chat with Baba Yaga and a completely different character shows up.
And that is in itself revealing. And it's important, again, not to manage this process, but just to let whatever comes, comes. And to open yourself to it, whether it's visual imagery or auditory or arriving through the senses of touch or taste or smell, because that is also possible in active imagination.
I always tend to focus on the visual because I'm an intensely visual person. but it does very much go beyond the visual if that is not your key modality for journeying. So here are a couple of slides that just offer some things that Jung said about the process of active imagination in the hope of clarifying what it is like.
He said, you choose an image and concentrate on it. simply by catching hold of it and looking at it. You then fix this image in the mind by concentrating your attention.
It sounds easy, doesn't it? It isn't always, but it's possible with practice. Usually, he said, it will alter as the mere fact of contemplating it animates it. A chain of fantasy ideas develops and gradually takes on a dramatic character.
The passive process becomes an action. At first, it consists of projected figures, and these images are observed like scenes in the theatre. In other words, you dream with open eyes. And that is exactly what it is like.
It's like dreaming awake. If you allow the imaginal journey to happen, the experience, the conversation to happen, it can be almost as if... you are dreaming, but of course you do have a little bit more control because you're in a waking state, not a sleep state.
But in many ways, it can feel like a very, very similar process. He said, step into the picture yourself. And if it is a speaking figure at all, then say what you have to say to that figure and listen to what he or she has to say.
Make use of the opportunity, start some dialogue, say something. You must talk to this person to see what she is about and learn what her thoughts and her character are. So, We can use this technique, again, just to stress, we can use this technique to explore landscapes and fairy tales or to engage with characters in them or to explore and engage with imagery in them.
Again, as always, I'm looking at fairy tales as representations in of the imaginal world, not the inside of our own heads, not the inside of our own psyche. Corbin, who I spoke about when I talked about the Sufi concept of the imaginal world, wrote that recent Western philosophy has denied us the active divine intelligence which manifests itself through personal revelatory knowledge or gnosis. And what he meant by that is that we lost ourselves when we decided that we needed priests and buildings to be intermediaries between ourselves and the divine. And what Corbin believed is when we engaged in this way, in imaginal work of the kind that Jung was speaking about, when we put ourselves in the imaginal world and we talk to it, we engage with it, we are in a sense talking to the divine. We are rejecting imposed dogma about the ways in which we should be allowed to approach the sacred, and we're taking responsibility.
for our own personal gnosis. And we only really, we only can perceive the imaginal world through the imagination, through acts of imagining. And the kinds of imagining that we can do using Jung's act of imagination technique and iterations of it is absolutely designed.
to take us into the imaginal world, to allow us to approach what we might think of as the divine or the sacred. So my version of Jung's active imagination technique, as I mentioned, I call dream weaving for no good reason, except that's what I call it. And Jung used to be able, it seems, to very quickly just kind of... either close his eyes or keep his eyes open and imagine himself very vividly in an imaginal setting.
I have never been able to do that. I always need to be very much more relaxed and very much more focused in. And so I developed a technique which incorporates really, incorporates a couple of different stages. It's a, it's, It involves a state of deep physical relaxation, and it involves a state of highly focused, crystal clear attention to accompany the physical relaxation. That's how it differs from just closing your eyes and hoping that an image will come.
So we are... audio journey, I'm sorry, I lost my place there for a moment in my notes. If you will just forgive me, I'll catch up with myself. The audio journey that you will have access to is designed to lead you into a light state of self-hypnosis.
So this is a technique that I developed when I was working with clinical hypnotherapy. And the constituents of that state of self-hypnosis are these two aspects. Your aim is to achieve both physical relaxation.
and mental clarity so that you're not sleepy, you're deeply relaxed, but you're actually highly alert and highly focused. And that will allow you to engage more easily with the imaginal world because it will help you cut out the clutter of the everyday and it will give you time to kind of move into that different awareness. So in the audio journey that you will have, you will be given a link to, you'll find me talking you through a process of progressive physical relaxation.
And after that, once I've got you fully physically relaxed, so that you're not really focused on your body, it's just kind of, it's there, but it's not really intruding in any way. After that, I'll ask you to imagine that you find yourself on top of a high mountain. And the reason for that is when we think of really high mountains, we tend to think of very crisp, kind of clear air. And that allows you to find or to imagine yourself in a state of very clear, focused, alert attention. You're on the top of a mountain.
It's that clarity of the air, that crispness, that sense of alertness. And after that, I'll ask you to imagine yourself walking down the mountain and passing through a veil of light mist. On the other side of the veil, You'll find yourself in the imaginal world or the other world if you prefer to think of it like that.
Then you find that I am quiet for 10 minutes while you explore the place. The idea is that you imagine yourself once you've passed across this kind of misty veil in a safe space in which you can imagine yourself protected. And it's a good... a plan to find yourself initially in a place that you know and feel comfortable in. If you're nervous, imagine that you have a companion with you.
I often take a little, take a nice big wolf with me, a wolf walking by my side. Or you can imagine yourself in a protective bubble while you're doing it if you're a little bit nervous about doing this. So this is where you can, in your safe space, in a place that you feel very comfortable, you can invite a a fairy tale character in into dialogue with you. Again, as Jung suggested, you can very, very slowly bring that character to mind. Let it kind of resolve.
Let it reveal itself. Kind of wait until you feel it's alive. Wait for something to move.
Wait till you feel it's alive. Treat it always with respect. If you're inviting a character in, it's a character. You don't own it.
It doesn't come out of your head. It's important in working with the imaginal world to imagine that it has an independent existence and to treat it as you would any other character that you might meet in the everyday, what we might think of as the real world. You can, from all alternatively, You can, from that safe space, imagine yourself taking a step and walking into a fairytale landscape. Or you can go straight into the fairytale landscape from the mist.
It's whatever feels easy and more comfortable to you. There's no right or wrong way of doing this particular part of it. And you can imagine yourself in a fairytale landscape, a landscape from a particular story that you want to explore. Again, wait for something to move. Don't manage it.
Just wait for something to move. Wait for something to call your attention to it, or for an animal or a person to appear. Wait for an image to present itself to you until you're drawn to some aspect of the scene. Let the image or the animal or the character, whatever it is, let it speak.
Let it move. Engage with it. Ask it what it has to teach you. Whatever comes in these journeys, allow it. and receive it.
Don't second guess it. If the image or the being moves away, see if it feels right to follow it. It might not. Always use your judgment and discernment and remember that you do have control. If you feel uncomfortable, you can simply turn around and walk away from a particular situation.
And the journey will offer you a technique for working your way back up. the mountain in effect and finding yourself in the everyday world again. I should say that this process can sometimes require practice.
I've worked with a lot of people who just can't do it the first couple of times. And I think that's okay because it's a really powerful technique and it's worth spending time on. To me, at least, I find it incredibly rich and nourishing and revealing. It's a wonderful technique.
And I think it's okay if you have to have a go a few times before you really start to feel comfortable and get the hang of it. You can do it repeatedly for several days. Sometimes you can just pick up if you want to from the place where you left off the last time. You don't have to start at the beginning, particularly if you were trying to have a conversation, you can pick up where you left off.
If you do it for a few weeks, the chances are that you'll find yourself feeling perfectly natural. about using this technique. And particularly if you're working with fairy tale characters or animals, you can develop using this technique a kind of range of beings who you can talk to, who you can ask for advice, for example. And it's really quite a special technique. It seems to me that by doing this, And we can kind of create a home for ourselves in the imaginal world.
It's a kind of sanctuary from which we can explore its offerings, from which we can explore the many, many riches of fairy tales in a different kind of way. And I like to think of the imaginal world as a world where real things happen. And one of the things which happens is that we open ourselves to relationship.
with and to the guidance of the beings that inhabit it. And in this context, again, I'm going back to Henri Corbin's conceptualization that I talked about earlier in the program of the imaginal world as an absolutely real world situated between the physical world and the world of the intellect, where the stories live and have an independent existence, where characters and archetypes live and have an independent existence, and where if we're lucky, we can go in and they will happen to us. So we're looking, again, if you look at it from the concept of, say, Celtic folklore, you're looking to pierce the veil into the other world and to explore and to look for guidance and insights from the characters who inhabit it.
And this is a place where the great archetypal themes and mythic patterns live and where we can come to explore and better understand them. And it really is a very, very profound and powerful form of soul making. So I hope that you have a chance to explore the technique, maybe even before we get to our discussion period and we can talk through any issues that you might be facing or any more advice that you'd like to have on working with the technique.
But do, as I say. Work through the audio journey a few times and see where it takes you. And always, always, the only real rule is not to try to manage it and always to treat whatever you encounter there with respect as having an independent existence outside of you. So I hope you find that journey nourishing. And then...
Moving on, finally, to storytelling and how we can work with stories in yet another kind of setting. Telling the stories. And storytelling can, of course, be a skilled performance art, but in encouraging you all to tell your favourite fairy tales, I'm not suggesting that you should become professional storytellers. And I'm not suggesting that you should engage in kind of like performance storytelling, although if you would like to, then there are courses that will equip you with the basic tools of the trade.
But there are ways of sharing stories that are much less formal. I mean, in many senses, we do it every day when we tell some people a little something about ourselves or the story of our life or... something about what happened to us today, an encounter that we had, for example.
And to tell a story to friends around the kitchen table or around a campfire similarly requires very little in the way of training and craft. It doesn't require acting ability or special clothes or a repertoire of flourishes and flounces. What it really requires is just an ability to remember the... bones of the story that you'd like to tell and to be able to talk about why it matters to you. And so I really am thinking about kind of informal social situations.
When we lived, as we did for about six years, on the west coast of Ireland in the Geltach, the Irish-speaking areas, and also before that when we lived on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, there was still still very much a kind of Cayley tradition, a sort of storytelling tradition, where you'd find yourself in somebody's house one evening and, you know, somebody would say, anybody got a song or... anybody got a flute that they could pull out or anybody got a story. And it was just kind of part of, part of what went on between friends or sometimes in families.
And we developed that, we developed that same process ourselves. If we had people around for dinner, we'd kind of, you know, we'd just say to them, have you got a story? Or here's a poem.
Or I heard a lovely story the other day. Here's a song that I heard. on the radio or here's a song that I've long loved or whatever. And it became one of those things that was just perfectly natural.
There was no pressure. It was all very informal, very friendly. If somebody didn't have anything that day, they might have the next time. So I'm talking about telling stories in these kinds of contexts, just naturally sharing them in normal social situations where they arise.
Of course, it's lovely also to tell them in more formal or work settings. But I think it's kind of nice to begin, if you're not used to doing this, it's kind of nice to begin in those less formal, more friendly situations. So begin always by choosing a story that conveys a theme or an idea that is important to you, because then you're more likely to remember it and more likely to really want to share it.
Ideally, it could be one that reflects some aspect of your own character and experience or which helps you to see how you might grow into the person you'd like to become. And so it's good to have one up your sleeve is what I'm suggesting, that you choose a story now to work with, that you spend some time thinking about that key aspect of this story which is pulling at you. And think about how you would describe that aspect in your own words.
Then make a short list of the key things that happen in the story. And I want to give you an example. This is an example of a lovely little story, short story from the north of England, which I collected in Wise Women. And it's a story called The Headly Cow.
And it's about an old woman who is walking home from work one day. finds a pot of gold. By the time she gets it home, it's not a pot of gold anymore.
And yeah, let me just show you the bones of the story. Those of you who've read Wise Women, I hope will remember it. But here is the outline of the story. And it's the kind of outline that I am suggesting that you produce for the story that you would want to work with.
You'll see here that I've got nine key points. That's probably as many as you should have. Seven to nine, six to nine is a good number.
If it gets too many, you'll forget, particularly the first couple of times that you tell the story. So here are my nine points, what happens, the plot points in this story. An old woman comes across a big black pot full of gold pieces when she's walking home from work.
work one day. She is delighted, but she can't decide what to do with it. She begins to drag it home. She stops to rest.
She turns back. Instead of gold pieces, there's now a lump of silver in the pot. She's even more delighted because the silver will be less of a worry than a pot of gold would have been. She carries on again, stops to rest.
Instead of silver, now the pot is full of iron. She's delighted. It's more convenient and she can easily sell it. She carries on. Now the pot.
turns to stone, she's delighted. It'll make a very good doorstop. And that's exactly what she's been needing. The pot then turns into the Hedley cow. As an aside, this is a kind of goblin type figure, a very mischievous tricksterish goblin type figure, which was known to haunt this village of Hedley on the Hill in Northumberland.
And it had a habit of tricking people. And then when they'd fallen for its trick, the goblin would show itself as a cow, click its back heels together. cackle loudly and vanish.
And this is what happens to this old woman. The old woman thinks she's the luckiest person alive because not only has she seen the headly cow, but she's had the headly cow all to herself. Though she's lost the pot of gold, it doesn't matter because she's seen the headly cow. And this is a beautiful story. To me, the theme of this story is about being happy with what you have, of knowing when enough is enough, of...
not always wanting more, more, more of everything, but taking delight in whatever the world offers you and all of its tricks and changes. And it's beautiful, although it seems like a funny little story, it's a beautiful one in many ways. So I chose that because of that theme, it's quite important to me.
And these are... the ways that I would break that story down into its key constituent parts. When you have memorized this list and you know how the story goes, you know the plot, if you like, if there's a particular image or a form of words or a fragment of dialogue in the original story, then you can begin to memorize that too, but don't make it too complicated. To help the telling come to you more easily and fluidly, work on a simple opening and an ending that you're confident that you'll remember, just a sentence or two at the beginning and the end. And then really, it's as simple as that.
Off you go. Again, you're not trying to put on an entire performance. You're just trying to tell a story and then explain why you're passionate about it.
Don't worry about being wordy. perfect, you're not on a stage, then once the story is told, tell your friendly audience why it matters to you. What does it say that is useful or inspiring to you?
And, you know, finally encourage them to tell stories of their own. There is another interesting and kind of increasingly popular thing that's happening certainly in the UK, and that is the emergence of story circles. And this has begun to happen as storytelling has had something of a revival in this part of the world. And a storytelling circle just simply consists of a small number of individuals, usually small, who sit together.
and share stories that focus on a common theme. And this can be a really rewarding thing to do, not just keeping the stories alive, but also inspiring participants to kind of reimagine their life journeys and aspects of their lives in fun and functional ways. And ultimately, by using these stories to work on themselves, but also sometimes to create kind of positive and much needed change in the world around them, depending obviously on the nature of the stories that you're working with.
And there are so many different kinds of storytelling circles that it's hard to say, you know, this is the right way to do it. There are many stories, for example, many circles, for example, that focus on what we might think of as true stories, true life stories, helping people to tell stories from their own life experience. But others, and certainly the ones that I have been more interested in, are the ones that focus on the telling of traditional folk and fairy tales. And, you know, a combination of these two approaches offers a really good blend of... depth and richness and sharing.
So it's entirely possible, for example, to have someone tell a story, a traditional folk and fairy tale, and then link that to a story in their own lives, so that you get kind of the best of both of these worlds. You get the rich traditional story, but you get it directly linked to an experience that the person has. And Any story is suitable for this, any story at all that you feel passionate about.
One of the things that I have tried to encourage over the past few years, for example, as I've worked with the stories of older women in Haggitude and Wise Women, my two books on that, is to encourage older women to create older woman storytelling circles so that they can work with the stories in those books and look at the ways in which it might allow them to reimagine their journey into elderhood, which can, of course, be challenging. So if you were to do that and to talk about the stories in the book and then any other kind of folk tales involving older women that you might come across, and if you were to combine that with space for the women in the group, in the story circle, to tell their own stories and to share their experiences of growing older, then you have a very beautiful kind of sharing circle. which has a lot of depth to it because it has these different threads.
It has the traditional fairy tale thread, and then it has the working with your own story thread to bring it down to kind of back to reality, if you like, back to your own life. So in such circles, when you do that kind of sharing, there are always stories of disempowerment, but there are also stories of empowerment and the ways in which the old stories can... help us. Whatever their primary focus, storytelling circles, the sessions can be structured in several different ways.
You might, for example, prefer to have a completely open approach so that no one knows exactly what will happen until the session begins and people feel inspired to speak and to share a story. Or you might prefer more structured. sessions, arranging in advance for a couple of people to tell stories, perhaps just at the beginning to get it going and then followed by a more kind of open floor session.
So lots of different ways of structuring them, no rights and wrongs really. But one thing that is important is that a good storytelling circle does need to be skillfully facilitated. It needs to have someone who is kind of...
just moderating and making sure that everybody is safe and taken care of and okay, particularly during the times when personal stories are shared. And what I wanted to do kind of finally for Story Circles is just to share some of the questions that you might ask or that might be offered at the beginning of a story session to encourage participants. to share their own stories and both general and specific. The example that I'm using here again for you is storytelling circles around growing older, because that's what I've been focusing on for a good while. Kinds of questions you can ask as prompts for sharing.
What are you holding in your heart right now as we've gathered here today to talk about growing older? or whatever theme you're working with. What is the story you want to share today? And then you can kind of broaden it out.
When did you realize that life was different for you? Now that you're an older woman, or now that you're approaching menopause, or fill in the gap, tell us something about what happened to you that illustrates that. So you're inviting here a story from someone's own life, a personal experience.
Have you found yourself silenced or ignored just because you're middle-aged or older? Has there been a time when you did or said something that you wouldn't have been able to when you were younger, which led to a positive outcome? So always trying to look at all angles, positive as well as negative. And have you ever been valued specifically for your age and wisdom?
So these are just... You should always, if you are running a storytelling circle or involved in the organization of it, you should always have some questions like that up your sleeve at the beginning because it can be quite difficult to get people to share personal stuff. I would always, in a storytelling circle of this kind, always open with at least one kind of old story again so that people get into the mood and begin to relax before you start going into the more...
personal and the more personal sharings with questions like these. And there are also questions that you can ask afterwards towards the end of a session that help participants to think about what they felt and experienced during the session and that will help also just in the practice of running future sessions. How did you feel when you were sharing your story? Do you think that both the teller and the listeners felt safe and supported?
How did you, i.e. the participants who were listening, feel when that story was shared? Were you moved? If so, how? Did you feel angry or challenged?
Have you had similar experiences and what would you like to have heard more of? So again, very simple questions for kind of winding up. a storytelling circle and trying to kind of summarise in a sense what people might have taken away from it.
So I really hope that some of you will be in situations in life or work situations where these forms of telling can somehow be incorporated. And from my perspective, as I look back, on this program, I hope you'll find that there are a range of different ways of working with story, with fairy tales, and that at least one of them will really appeal to you. But the perfect situation is when you find yourself able not only to work with the narrative elements of a particular story, but also to incorporate some of the other forms of written exploration that I talked about at the beginning of this particular lecture, and to work with the stories or elements of the stories, characters and the stories in the imaginal world, and to tell the stories in real life, or even perhaps to organise your own storytelling circle amongst a group of friends and or family. So I'm looking forward to the final session where we can explore anything that has not been covered so far or anything that you would like more information on and also to share any ways that you might have of working with story that I haven't thought about or that I haven't covered here.
And so finally, as always, the question to explore in the forum for this module and that we can come back to. In the live sessions, how will you use these techniques to deepen your understanding of your own life story? Or you could substitute that with, if you're using this in therapeutic settings, how will you use these techniques to deepen your work in therapeutic settings?
So thank you all again, and I am very much looking forward to our final conversations.