Mission: to keep the light of Traditional Story Listening and Storytelling burning for the good and health of humanity.
Objective: to educate the modern world in the ways of story listening and storytelling as it has been practiced for more than 50,000 years in service to healing of the self and maintaining balance among the seen and unseen, heard and unheard worlds.
Description:
Students come to the mountains of Western North Carolina to attend weekend- and week-long learning experiences with Connie Regan-Blake, Laura Hope-Gill, and guest teachers from fields of Storytelling, Music, and Narrative Medicine.
Students come to explore the deep roots of Storytelling woven through the mysteries of traditional telling and listening. This roots hold medicine that current medical research directs our attention toward and that ancient and ongoing lore and wisdom preserves for when we are ready to recognize and renew our connection with it.
Students develop skills in allowing personal stories to arise from the “gut brain” where memories regenerate and spring back to life. They learn to treat these with care and respect and to honor what the soul wishes to show and tell them and others through the practice of Storytelling.
Students learn to appreciate the creative self rather than to suppress, criticize, and ignore it.
Students experience real-time discoveries of aspects of ourselves that they “left behind” due to cultural pressure. This re-membering of the self is critical to health and well-being because they make us whole again.
Students read, listen to, and work with stories that have been passed down for at least 50,ooo years, the age of the oldest known story. These stories hold lessons and secrets of how to live and sustain life on earth with other living and non-living beings.
Students start or continue their process of becoming who they are meant to be far away from the factors and forces that drive us to edit out the most important parts of who we are as humans.
Students venture outside to waterfalls and trails in the oldest mountains in the world, reawakening awe and reconnecting their hearts to the heart of the earth.
Students discover how traditional tales transform us through a deeply personal and intuitive process by which our individual experiences graft themselves on to a much older, shared experience. And how this resolves existentially perceived loneliness and isolation.
Students revive “natural intelligence” which the West left behind in the Renaissance and replaced with empiricism in the Enlightenment. Natural intelligence resides in the nature of Storytelling, and by re-engaging Storytelling in the traditional practice, we retrieve it swiftly and realize just how necessary it is for well-being.
Students revise their understanding of the relationship between science and creativity, seeing that both are critical and neither superior to the other in the scope of sustainability and survival.
Students loosen up and cease beating themselves up over little things—and develop skill and openness for facing big things. Students relax often for the first time in decades. They return to their breath and heartbeat and find their own stories belong to something deep, renewing, and astounding.
Narrative Medicine in the Mountains 