Storytelling is a dance of multiple flavors

It’s a manipulation. Using my hands to make a vision of reality. Or to make reality from vision. To create a something. It feels serious, like a heavy thing. Storytelling is an existence of its own. But I’ve found that it doesn’t exist among the jobs or the lives I eventually left, at different points in my life journey, because those lives never left enough room for storytelling. For creation. And my hands have always been in something. Manipulating something. I’m proud I can say I’ve created something with this body, already. Many things. Through this body, I have brought energy from some other place and into the space before my physical senses. And whatever it is is for everyone to be with.

But this is an inquiry, actively.

So, is storytelling not a particular way of choosing to exist? I often question this to myself. I often feel the act of story along the small of my back, starting a wiggle. A shimmy. A shift from the nether spaces through my body and out into the space before my very human senses. A birth. What is a story but a compilation of energy that appreciates itself for what it is and never considers what it is not? Each story I hold within me is so distinct unto itself. My stories hold their own vibrations, and my hands know these vibrations well. My hands are the ones that open the portals for me to enter these stories, these narratives of being, through written word. My body through its movement with life. My heart to my hands to my nipples to my toes, I follow the fire that emanates. And it’s a fire I’ve never felt in any other being. If I had, I would know. I would know I was looking at myself. Feeling and sensing myself. And I would open my eyes wide and sigh in relief. I finally know who I am.

…

Today, my heart spoke to me with an authority I’d never heard before. It spoke of forced silence and the ways it needed to conform to silence just to stay alive. From this perspective, from the sacred perspective of my heart, I newly began to appreciate the idea that we must conform or die. And… And I see very clearly that this effort to stay alive, my heart searching for pockets of peace inside every storm, was not to float in limbo — in the existence of unreachable potential, dreams for dreaming sake, knowing the truth and letting the energy go stale. That was unsustainable and undesirable. I know because I tried to sustain living in limbo when I didn’t realize how to manipulate my life so I could feel myself. Yes, this staying alive became an indignation. Because a suffering heart cannot bear the weight of inauthenticity as living out of alignment with what the heart desires to feel and express. But what about a healthy heart? What can a healthy heart do in the presence of inauthenticity? I suppose a healthy heart would not be in the presence of inauthenticity. Because the healthy heart has an essence that molds with exactness to the story of love. I’m tired of explaining the definition of love, because part of me feels that remaining in the place of explanation removes me from the place of living. And another part of me finally sees that love is not mine to define.

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I’ve tried hard to move mountains in my life. Not everything is a mountain, and I know that because I have also dreamed and shaped miracles into being. So why do I encounter mountains in my stories? Well, in the stories I choose to tell, now that I know I am a conscious storyteller? Maker and destroyer of life?

I think somewhere someone told me there must always be a conflict in a story, and I believed it. I believed it so much that I would teach my students the same. I would ensure there were always conflicts in my stories. Drama. But in truth, I question the validity that there must always be some sort of conflict for a story to move forward, to feel it has momentum. What, then, is the purpose of a story, anyway? Not quite the stories we write and read and tell ourselves so we can fall asleep at night. But what is the purpose of the way we coagulate information within ourselves such that the energy, the essence, of this information presences itself as story? We see that characters rise to the surface, first thing. In fact, sometimes characters other than ourselves expose themselves when we really want to be living our own lives, living our own stories. I suppose that’s one way to know when we are indeed living the stories of other — when we have our hands in the pot of others’ visions of reality. More distortions. My lens can never truly be clean and reflective of my truth if I keep directing my eyes to the next story just meters away from my internal screen. The challenge of this life, one challenge of this life, is to recognize the multitude of layered stories happening within us, around us, and in intersection with our personal stories. And then to hold the restless reality of multiplicities. Is this the purpose of the formation of story, then? To guide us into greater complexity within?

More questions.

I think it’s necessary, though, complexity. Truthfully, I want the complexity and I need it. I am not satisfied unless my emotions, sensations, and visions are honorably integrated into my experience of life. And my emotions need story to be made sense of.

Stories are like raw materials, in a way. They are the raw materials of who we make ourselves up to be. We make ourselves up to live out certain stories, on an energetic level, first, and then in our physical reality where we can taste the salt from our tears and feel food stuck between our teeth. It requires a sense of subtlety and spaciousness to understand energy, in general, and then especially in the way it creates life — and then again in the way it interacts with itself as life. Understanding energy requires an ability to observe and not have to be actively living each story as it is playing out. Imagine pausing an interaction with another human, even while it’s happening, to observe what dynamics are existing, what feelings within are arising, what cues you’re reading from their body language and through the micromovements on their face. What story is this interaction telling in this given moment? What larger story is this interaction playing into?

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Some of the stories of our lives are predictable. Well, I might say that all the stories we live out on the week-to-week are predictable. Yes, I believe stories are expressions of energy in a certain transmission. But after the energy expresses itself, it connects with other living stories to create personality or relationship dynamics, ethos or culture, or the ways we’re socialized (either individually or collectively). And that these stories build upon themselves to produce more of the same stories or similar stories… is predictable.

However, we cannot see all stories coming. At some point in my life, I finally realized that one of the stories in my living cultivation is the one that I can only feel deep satisfaction if I live life in my own time, on my own terms, and in connection with what brings me pleasure. It’s incredibly personal. And yet, it had been a story I found I had contracted out to whomever else but me to create, tell, produce. It’s the story of a creator, a being with a collection of tools and gifts and interests, and, beyond all, a unique connection to the ultimate Creator. It’s a story that had scared and challenged and shamed me, and so I gave the responsibility of living my path as a creator, an adventurer, to the world. I’d given the world power to influence my mind, but never (ever) access to my profusely bleeding heart. At some point, the suffering heart would suffer no longer. At some point, the suffering heart would retreat into its depths and resolve to speak to me in ways I had to transform myself into someone new to learn. New vocabulary. New energetic expressions. New pain. New images. New sensations. When the suffering becomes too much to bear, when the suffering threatens to overwhelm the soul, new stories must emerge. In my case, the story of a warrior. The story of war.

It's a story many of us are living. But how many of our war stories have us in the role of helpless protagonist? Victim? Child of violence? Child exposed to the cruel? My story of war is a story of triumph. The victory was inevitable for me. It was the journey that would be challenging. The journey would place me at the opening of all my most treacherous stories. The ones told to me through the manipulation of my heart and those of others. The ones I believed so my heart would survive a violent world. I clearly hadn’t seen my strength. I’d felt my beauty, but I didn’t see my strength. And because my beauty was a tender thing, a wild and permeating thing, a permeable thing, it needed protection, even if that meant to dysregulate my flow. To pull myself out of inner alignment. Because I didn’t see my strength. My war story not only showed me my strength, it created new narratives in the center of old stories where my strength would not only be seen, but felt.

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As for now, I am in practice with conscious storytelling. It requires space from me. It requires peace from me, in this moment of practice. And because my heart speaks to me with a new timbre, I cannot ignore the call. I desire to hear and receive the call. Inner strength says, “I am the path to your treasure of wisdom.” It says “I want to hold you in troubling times like you held onto your hope to feel me like you felt your fear.” Strength is speaking, through the megaphone of the heart.

It is here, at the threshold of yet another story, waiting to dive in.