Story Medicine Quest: A Wisdom Seeking Journey
Stories are medicine and our indigenous stories hold essential wisdom and relevance for our lives today. Our ancestors recognized that stories are not just entertainment, historical artifacts, or distraction, but powerful tools for healing, growth, insight, and connection to the land, manitous, and our ancestors.
When we come into deep relationship with indigenous stories we enter another portal, we step out of time, we discover resources.
By recognizing the power of stories and engaging with them in traditional ways, we can tap into a vast resource. If we can remember how to approach them in a respectful and sacred manner, we can access their power and wisdom, and use them to activate our personal growth and healing, and the well-being of our communities and the planet.
The Story Medicine process is an 8-week program that is aimed at helping people discover the wisdom and relevance of stories in their lives today in order to activate growth and healing. The program utilizes a range of experiential processes, including embodied mindfulness, expressive arts, writing, and active imagination journeys. Participants are encouraged to engage with the stories in a personal and reflective manner, to gain insights and understanding that can be applied to their current life situations and the world.
Here’s a breakdown of each week:
Week 1: Orientation. The first week is focused on orienting to the land of stories, childhood and adult heroes, and an introduction to the power of storytelling. It’s about remembering how to play. Did you know that in humans pretend play has been tied to increased cognitive flexibility and social responsivity, as well as improved emotion regulation? It’s opens neural pathways needed for this journey we’re embarking on to awaken something needed. In beginning there is nothing except possibility. Connect with the water element. Drink lots of water this month, clearing away what’s no longer needed.
Week 2: The Asking and Archetypes. The second week will continue the hero work, focus on setting personal intentions for the journey, and seeking archetypes through different forms of engagement with a traditional story (expressive arts, pretext, and playback). The group will expand on using experiential exercises to help them explore traditional story elements that are important to their growth and healing journey. The focus is on recognizing key archetypal energies working in our lives, and how they can inform and support our journey. It is here that we can discover something essential to our authentic self.Did you know that an archetype is an original imprint or original patterning. In that patterning is the essence of something that determines what it is? Connect with the air element this month. Breath in that which is essential to your being.
Week 3. Traditional Story Wisdom. The third week will focus on meeting and spending time experientially with one traditional story to help us remember where we come from and how to have a good mind on the journey to where we’re going. Have you heard Native writer Tommy Orange’s quote, “And so what we could do had everything to do with being able to understand where we came from, what happened to our people, and how to honor them by living right, by telling our stories. She told me the world was made of stories, nothing else, just stories, and stories about stories.” Connect with the earth element this month. Walk and feel into the solidity of the earth to support your good mind.
Week 4: Seeking a Traditional Story. In the fourth week, the group will explore their own traditional stories connected to place and manitou. The focus will be on coming into relationship with the story, using a creative process to bring to life particular aspects of the story that resonate with them, deepening their understanding and personal connection to them using various expressive arts mediums such as drawing, painting, mask making, or collage. Did you know Nigerien Storyteller, Ben Okri said, “When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you’re suffering in.” Connect with the element of fire this month. Feel the warmth in your body to ignite something new.
Week 5: Extracting essence. In the fifth week, the group will share creations and connections to story and learning through synchronicity and essential elements. The group will reflect on how others’ stories impact them and what synchronicities arise from sharing their stories and how this relates to the call to action. Have you heard, Native writer N. Scott Momaday, say, “Anything is bearable if you can make a story out of it?” Choose an element to connect with this month, that you need to bring more into your life for balance.
Week 6: Ancestral Treasure Hunting. In the sixth week, we will connect with ancestral strengths. Ancestral work can be deep and complicated to traverse. We are journeying to the past with a lens for strengths. Did you know that epigenetic research has shown that we can carry the long ago past within us? There is a long line of ancestors that we have come from and there is a wealth of strength and gifts within that line. Let’s find it! This month you will integrate all elements, water, air, earth, and fire to support you in your journey forward.
Week 7: Resource Building. In week seven, we will create something new. Integrating the work we have been doing into a whole. We will create and essential guide pulling from the childhood or adult hero, traditional story findings, story mask and element, and ancestral root, lands and manitous that can serve as a resource in our lives. Do you know the words of Native poet Joy Harjo? “…The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.”
Week 8: Story Medicine Circle. In week eight we complete part one of the Story Medicine Quest. We will sit in Circle with our guide spiraling deeper in the asking for what’s next. A vision is the ability to envision, to see what’s possible. Do you know what muscrat did for Skywoman?” Elders stories say, “At the end of the day it was only the little muskrat who hadn’t given it a try. Not because he didn’t want to help, but because everyone knew that muskrats don’t really dive deep. Muskrats live in the shallow places. They never swim in the deep water. But if you look at your own life, you’ll see that there are times when you just have to give up your old story about what you can or cannot do. Sometimes in your life you have to burst from the confines of your story and grow into a more capable person.That day, long ago, the muskrat decided that with no one else available to help it was up to him to do the job and so he did.”
Explore EMBODIED MINDFULNESS AND STORY MEDICINE JOURNEYS
Anxiety is overwhelming and it can hijack your life, leaving you overwhelmed, indecisive, paralyzed. Avoiding life instead of living it. I know change can be terrifying. Especially change that rocks you to your core. Whether you are seeking wisdom, have lost your way, or simply need better coping skills, I offer a unique approach based on cultivating skills & strengths, and building confidence and excitement for a life that lights you up!
Coaching, Not Therapy: A Collaborative (Powerful approach) to living a life.
Live the truest most beautiful life you can imagine.
I offer a unique, strength based, process that is not your typical growth and change model.
You only have one life. Make it count.
My model is based on my Turtle Mountain Chippewa heritage, and work in
Mindfulness (based on my training at UCLA, Stanford, and with Zen master Thich Naht Hahn),
Somatic Experiencing (body focused work based on my work with Peter Levine), and
Story Medicine (training in drama therapy and expressive arts, Stanford applied compassion training, and creative writing through the Institute of American Indian Arts).
My approach combines direct skills with creativity and instinctual awareness drawing wisdom from your inner life, which then affects what happens in your outer life. Through a creative, holistic approach you learn embodied mindfulness practices—practical, accessible skills – for greater coping, peace, ease, and alignment.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Story Medicine allows you to connect with something more authentic, working with imagination in story form to gain allies, tools, and resources to apply to your journey of manifesting the life you want. Did you know that Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge and that neuroscience has discovered that creative spaces bring in more neural (brain) vision and bigger vision.
A Story Medicine Quest involves being more intentional about the story you are living which can change everything. Walk with me on a collaborative journey to opening the portal to the story you were born to live.
Packages and Quests are tailored to fit your busy life. Sessions are online and scheduled to easily fit within your week.
Mindful Practice 