The Spiritual Dimension Of Story Telling
Over the last ten years, storytelling has become my heart's passion, my path, my practice, and the lens through which I view and experience this magical and mysterious existence we share as human beings.
For some years I had intuitively been sensing the deep spiritual potential that the art of storytelling embodies, and yet it was only when arriving at Emerson College's School of Storytelling, for the first time in my life I experienced storytelling being taught not only as a craft and an art, but as a spiritual practice; a practice of love.
Arriving At Emerson College
In January 2008, I arrived at Emerson College, an anthroposophy college situated in East Sussex England, to partake in a ten week course called The Now of Storytelling. As a long-term storyteller I was dubious as to what I could learn in a course that was by no means termed "course for experienced tellers" and yet something had drawn me to Emerson's.
It took me about an unpleasant week of grappling with my professional ego to realize that perhaps my reason for being at Emerson was to drop this idea of myself as ‘experienced teller,' (and my wish of being acknowledged as such,) so as to remember the essence of storytelling.
In the beginning, while working on our first stories, Roi Gal-Or, one of the course teachers said, "When telling our stories we are offering gifts to our listeners. We are sharing our humanity and practicing connection on the deepest possible level. Storytelling is a practice of Love."
A Practice Of Love
There are many aspects of practising love, the most obvious perhaps being love towards ones fellow human beings, or as the familiar biblical phrase goes: "love thy neighbor as thyself."
'Love is the answer' is an idea we are all familiar with - we all want to love, we all want to be loved, and whether we are aware of it or not, I believe we all want to know that tremulous, core spring of being, that is love's essence.
During the weeks of the course, working intensively from morning to evening, I began to understand what it might mean to practice loving while telling stories. In fact it began to dawn on me that storytelling might be one of the more powerful forms of love practice.
I began realizing, what in all my former years of professional experience had never really come home to me before: that to tell stories is a moment by moment practice of being present to our listeners; standing before them in all our bare vulnerability, allowing masks to drop, allowing ourselves to touch and be touched by mutual presence, allowing for something to take place of its own accord within the space of that meeting place.
It is not at all easy to bring full presence into one's body and heart in the face of many gazing eyes. To "see seeing," as Liz Turkel one of the teachers termed it. To enable oneself to surrender into the deep intimacy of shared space, shared breath, and shared heart; soft and tender, unpolished, imperfect and yet so beautifully perfect in its immaculate imperfection.
Finding Authenticity And Truth
It is not easy, and yet I was discovering that if I couldn't bring myself into that place when telling stories, if I was standing before my listeners concealed by invisible layers of defense, if I was holding a personal agenda, wanting to make an impression or make something happen, instead of nakedly standing in the soft presence of that shared pulse, there didn't seem to be much point.
I began realizing that it was only when I could truly love the beating pulsing heart throb of each and every person before me that stories could come through me with authenticity and truth.
And yet what does it mean to love the beating pulsing heart throb of each and every person? Is it possible to love everybody?
We are so used to love being strictly personalized - "You love me and therefore I love you. I love this person but I don't really like that one. "
This personalized motion of love within the human psyche is so common, and yet there are times when we sense something vast and universal flowing through us all as human-beings, wrapping us in a shared caress, infiltrating our common blood, our common breath.
When asking Ashley Ramsden, master storyteller and founder of the Emerson School of Storytelling, why he loves storytelling, he quoted Hafiz, 12th century Sufi poet, who said: "most speaking just says I am hungry to know you."
We speak because we are hungry to know this shared heart throb, this deep mysterious pulsing of life that runs through us all.
We tell stories because we are hungry to know this core spring of being that glimmers through the darkest depths and loftiest heights of our human being-ness.
We tell stories because we are hungry to know you who shine through every face form and facet of this multicolored rambling range of existence, whispering (as Sufi poet Rumi says) of a secret we sometimes know and sometimes not.
We tell stories not for personal fame or gain, not for what we may or may not attain. We tell stories because whether we know the secret or not…we are hungry to know love.
Ashley Ramsden tells us of his grandmother who used to say: "the main thing is to keep the Main Thing, the main thing!"
The class smiles at this cute play of words.
"And what is the main thing?" Roi asks us.
He looks around the class. Prompted by silence Roi answers his own question saying: "Now, as when first hearing this sentence, my answer is the same. I then believed…and I still do…that The Main Thing…is..Love."