Shaping the Stories that Shape Me/Us

Ever wondered about the stories that live within you? The tales that shape your existence, whispered by ancestors and woven through the various versions of your being? Stories, let me tell it, hold the power to illuminate our lives. Stories hold power and they help to distribute power.

Apparently age 46 is where I come into the realization of the intricate dance between narratives and power; it’s my storygatherer arc! I notice it in myself and in people I’m close to. This dance echoes in our diverse, layered bodies—repositories of things told and untold.

Our bodies are examples of a layered, diverse stories about power.

Not just the story of a physical body, and not just the stories that told a body into existence, but also the stories that get trapped in your body, or my body.

The old ones that got lived and told by my ancestors, way before this version of my body existed.

The ones from the different versions of my body when it was a child, when it was adolescent, as now it continues to grow.

There is a link between stories and power. And being a student of myself and of the patterns I notice throughout the years helped to create this always-visible thread, this weaving that makes it so that I can notice or create connections among things that my unquestioned schoolish mind used to see as separate.

Living a life without centering school and therefore without separating learning into distinct, timed topics, showed me how intertwined various skills are, and how my children and I, and you, can take a zillion different paths to get to the same wisdom, and the process is important, not just the resulting wisdom.

I turned my mere Patreon space into a whole-ass sanctuary for unraveling narratives—my church, I grin. Yesterday, at church, I shared this post about stories getting trapped in my body, and how I use shapes (circles and triangles) to access release, tell, discover, shift those stories. It included a video, and the images at the top of this post are clips from that video*.

Here’s another video (this one’s in a public-view space) that relates so beautifully to my inquiry here about bodies and stories. Whew chiiiile, the way these movement stir me up! Anyhoo—Tamara and Gil convey one of the ways they move things through/as the body, and I'm so grateful for the guidance, the insights of people who are willing to tell their stories. It’s also why I be so ready to discover and tell my stories.

I value the discomfort of telling an authentic story to strangers and friends combined. What about you? What is your history, or your today, with stories as/with/about/through your body?

I value the very mystery of why I have been a storygatherer and teller since childhood. My mother tells stories about the stories I told as a child. I told them vocally back then, but I bet I was telling them with my body back then too. Circles, triangles, shapes that represent the stories that shaped me. And stories that I helped to shape in all the ways that I hold, wield, notice, live into, examine, and resist this thing called power.

*The video won’t live here because I’m reserving that level of intimacy for people I invite to gather occasionally, real-time, virtually, to tend to the stories and other experiences we share. And where each person’s voice contributes to the weaving of the wisdom. Become part of 'church,' where stories unfold, intertwine, and evolve. Patreon.com/akilah