MY WEEKLY BLOG<\/p>\n
TELL ME A STORY<\/p>\n
I was studying ballet quite seriously at thirteen years old.\u00a0I shuttled from Worcester to Boston four times a week, an hour and a half ride each\u00a0way, for a three hour training session. Sometimes my mother would drive me. When\u00a0she couldn\u2019t, she dropped me off at the bus station when school let out and I\u00a0would take the Greyhound to the ballet studio. It was a long trek for a small\u00a0girl all by herself, and to pass the time, I would look at the people around me\u00a0and make up stories about them.<\/p>\n
I imagined that the girls behind me who were whispering and
laughing had snuck out and were meeting their boyfriends. A young man at the\u00a0back of the bus was an athlete on his way to play a championship game. A woman in\u00a0the front row had had a row with her husband and had left her family to start a\u00a0new life somewhere else. My biggest fear was that I would fall asleep and miss\u00a0my stop, so the story telling made the ride less monotonous, it kept me awake,\u00a0and before I knew it, I was at my destination.<\/p>\n
Our stories are our life blood, a part of our DNA, the\u00a0way we uniquely see life. They spark our imagination and transport us to other\u00a0places, new places, places we have never been but are yearning to explore. Or\u00a0places that don’t exist in real time. \u201cTell me a story.\u201d Children have been saying\u00a0this since the beginning of time. Ever since I can remember, story-telling has\u00a0intrigued me and taken me on wild rides. Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into\u00a0gold. Alice in Wonderland growing ten feet tall. A spider writing messages in\u00a0its web. Jack climbing up the beanstalk and meeting the giant. A secret garden\u00a0that could heal children.<\/p>\n
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, a senior Jungian analyst and award\u00a0winning author, remained on the NY Times Bestseller lists for 145 weeks in 1992,\u00a0with her book, \u201cWomen Who Run With the Wolves,\u201d a collection of myths and\u00a0stories about Wild Woman archetypes. She calls story-telling a medicine that heals\u00a0the soul. I agree wholeheartedly. In my writing classes, I encourage my\u00a0students to expose the painful secrets in their hearts by putting their stories
on the page. In this way, they are sharing their life lessons with their
readers, not by hitting them in the head with directives and \u201cshoulds.\u201d Rather\u00a0they are sharing their hard earned knowledge and encouraging others to learn\u00a0from what they experienced. It\u2019s an offering. When we are courageous enough to reveal\u00a0the secrets we\u2019ve been carrying for longer than we can remember, we feel
lighter and more hopeful. We feel compassion for ourselves when we remember\u00a0what we\u2019ve endured and survived. And we feel gratified that perhaps someone\u00a0else can understand our trials and avoid making the same mistakes.<\/p>\n
It isn\u2019t so much life itself that causes us distress. It’s howwe interpret it. The stories we make up. Imagining the worst and creating a narrative\u00a0around it can take you on a downward spiral, leaving you hopeless and regretful\u00a0about something that never happened and never will. But when you interrupt that\u00a0process, when you make up something positive and hopeful, you can find freedom\u00a0and flexibility in the face of uncertainty and change, the unavoidable\u00a0ingredients that make up life. This is not about repression. It\u2019s about\u00a0allowance, seeing the story for what it is and finding compassion for the story
teller. That would be you.<\/p>\n
Poet Laureate, Maya Angelou, said, \u201cThere is no greater\u00a0agony than bearing an untold story inside you.\u201d<\/p>\n
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MY WEEKLY BLOG TELL ME A STORY I was studying ballet quite seriously at thirteen years old.\u00a0I shuttled from Worcester to Boston four times a week, an hour and a half ride each\u00a0way, for a three hour training session. Sometimes my mother would drive me. When\u00a0she couldn\u2019t, she dropped me off at the bus station […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1916,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1917\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}