The Original Bio
Intuitive
Storytelling ~ 10 Years On
About
the Producer of the Podcast
Once
upon a time there was not a single book in the
world.
The earliest human beings held all knowledge in
memory and transmitted this knowledge orally. The
stories our ancestors told themselves served to map
out their tribal history, define their cultural
identity and explain and celebrate their inner and
outer worlds. Both history keeper and cultural
leader, the storyteller played a vital role.
Stories were one
of the most important ways the early people had of
explaining the unexplainable, of giving form to the
formless. Those in the culture gifted with insight
into the hidden nature of things would often share
their discoveries through storytelling. The spoken
story thus became a bridge between worlds, a point of
contact between the visible and invisible realms.
Shared late at night around fires, interwoven with
rhythm and song, embedded in rituals and ceremonies,
stories were a living power in people’s lives,
as real as the forces of nature. Told and retold they
became part of the fabric of a culture’s
consciousness, shaping the reality of the entire
community.
As the era of the
hunter-gatherer drew to a close and the development
of agriculture brought about more settled and complex
communities, many other professions sprang up to
encroach upon the storyteller’s preserve.
Priests and theologians, scribes and historians,
poets and actors, all had their own stories to tell
and new and powerful means of telling them. There was
nonetheless a role for the oral storyteller;
sometimes as wandering minstrel, sometimes as highly
skilled court performer. However, as the industrial
era transformed the world their role in the story of
human culture appeared to be at an end. The mass
availability of books and newspapers and the era of
radio, cinema and television flooded the world with
more stories than people had time or inclination to
absorb. In the face of this, and radical changes in
the pattern of people’s lives, the oral
storyteller quietly disappeared.
And then a few
decades ago many people in the West began to realise
that something important had been lost. The English
storytelling revival began in the late seventies with
a small group of talented and committed tellers. Over
the coming years an eclectic movement gathered pace
as more and more people began researching traditional
tales and seeking out audiences to perform them to. A
lot of hard work went into convincing the public that
storytelling was a viable form of adult
entertainment, and convincing funding bodies that it
was a art form worthy of public sponsorship. Progress
was steady, but slow. Largely the revivalist
storytellers found their most willing audiences in
primary schools.
I entered this
scene in 1989, at the age of twenty one. Inspired by
the work of the great mythologist Joseph Campbell I
wrote my own original fairy tales and told them in
schools all over England. There was an exhilaration
in discovering the sheer power of the spoken
narrative. I learned to how to hold an audience in
the palm of my hand and how to carry them with me
into the world of story. Like most beginners,
however, I had no sense of my own limits and
frequently pushed myself beyond my natural capacity.
Performing to up to three hundred children at a time,
three or four times a day, I overstepped those limits
so often that I began running on flat batteries more
and more of the time. Faced with yet another school
hall brimming over with hundreds of excited school
children I began to close up inside and give
performances that were increasingly wooden, more and
more of lie. Within three years I was so burnt out
that I was diagnosed as having chronic fatigue.
Although at the
time this was a very demoralising experience, I came
eventually to regard it as an important stage in my
learning process. Having less energy to expend made
me look for ways of using energy more wisely. I began
to search for the hidden resources within the art of
storytelling itself. How could it be done with less
effort, or indeed effortlessly? What lessons could be
learnt from the storytellers of the past?
Whenever the
early storytellers pursued their craft they would be
drawing upon the creativity of their entire culture.
Oral stories are recreated with every telling. As
generation after generation of storytellers subtly
reshape their narratives a process of distillation
occurs. The plots become more robust, the symbolism
more potent. The early storytellers would have been
steeped in the stories of their tribe, having drunk
deeply of their symbolism and significance. How might
a modern day storyteller achieve such an immersion?
The stories told
by the last European storytellers have today come to
be known as folk tales. Recorded in their thousands
throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth
century, most of them can only be found today in
dusty out-of-print collections. These tales are one
of the lost treasures of our culture. Rich in
insights and subtle wisdom, they offer us a doorway
into the heart of our own mystery. To read them
without an analytical mind is to absorb their
atmosphere, to walk through the landscape they
traverse. To tell them again and again is to absorb
their narrative structures into one’s own body,
so that one instinctively knows how a plot should
run, how a story should gather momentum. These tales
shaped the European story-mind and were in turn
shaped by it. Their imprint is part of the
West’s cultural inheritance.
Many contemporary
tribal cultures talk of stories as being living
entities in their own right. They do not split the
field of perception into “reality” and
“fantasy”, knowing that the subtle play of
consciousness defies such crude definitions. Such a
belief liberates a tremendous amount of energy in the
storyteller. Telling becomes an act of invocation,
of altering one’s own reality and that of
one’s listeners. There is a conviction that the
story is as “real” as anything else one
experiences. How might a modern day storyteller come
upon such conviction?
The practice of
visualising a story as it is being told is one
employed by many revivalist storytellers. With daily
practice the images become increasingly vivid, taking
on a life of their own so that a story can be subtly
different each time one tells it. This process of
visualisation brings the story to life in the inner
world: one starts to feel the feelings, experience
the atmosphere. A charge builds up inside until it is
as if the story wants to be told. Telling thus
becomes an act of speaking the truth rather than
fabricating an illusion. There is no question of
trying to “convince” your audience of
anything and thus a great deal of unnecessary effort
is avoided.
Another source of
unnecessary effort for the modern day storyteller is
the artificial separation of audience and performer
that has developed throughout the ages. Whether they
be a rock singer or stand-up comedian the modern
performer can often be a very lonely figure.
Performing to one new set of strangers after another
it is hard to come upon a sense of mutual support.
The intimate exchange of good feeling essential to
any human relationship is often absent.
It is unlikely
that the early storytellers ever thought of their
listeners as an “audience” in the modern
sense of the word. Members of a tribe would have an
intimate knowledge of one another from birth. Sharing
and supporting each other was a survival necessity.
Taking place in such a context, storytelling would
have been an intimate shared experience. How might a
modern day storyteller come upon such an intimacy?
When telling a
story one’s intention is of crucial
importance and is silently communicated to one’s
audience whether one is aware of it or not. Intimacy
is created when one has a loving intention towards
one’s listeners. This requires that the fear of
audience rejection, not to mention that of losing the
plot, be overcome. A magic is created when the
storyteller allows themselves to be emotionally
honest and fully present. In that stillness a shared
experience begins to grow in which the speaking and
the listening are different activities of a single
awareness. In that sharing, that walking together
into the world of stories, a healing can occur in
which the exchange of energy is as important as the
storyline.
People have long
known about the healing power of stories. By drawing
us away from the everyday they bring us into contact
with a deeper part of ourselves. Those hidden depths
contain infinite resources and the keys to our own
happiness. In earliest times the storyteller would
often be one familiar with the unseen realms, able to
tap into hidden wisdom and share its gifts in story
form. Would it be possible for a modern day
storyteller to perform such a function?
Shortly after
burning out I had moved into a small cottage on the
edge of Dartmoor, a barren wilderness in the
South-West of England. Apart from periodic forays
back into civilisation to continue my performance
work I lived a life of almost total seclusion. I read
folk tales, practised my story visualisations and for
long periods each day would find myself simply
sitting quietly, listening to the silence and to the
inner voice that would occasionally speak.
This daily
meeting with silence brought with it an increased
sensitivity to subtle energy, an intangible feeling
of aliveness in the body. The days and weeks of
solitude would create a energetic pressure inside me
and a constriction in my throat that could only be
relieved by travelling to London and performing in
schools for a couple of weeks at a time. Over the
coming three years the pressure grew more and more
intense until I had to stop my visualisation practice
and folk tale research since both only sent my energy
levels soaring. Feeling like a river was bursting its
banks inside me I would sit huddled up in the corner
of my living room with the energy running out of
control all over my body. By the summer of 1996 the
intensity had become unbearable, the pressure in my
throat unrelenting.
I abandoned my
solitude, flew to the United States and enrolled on a
program of intensive CranioSacral therapy at the
Upledger Institute in Florida. As my body went into
cathartic release of blockages on all levels, the
wild and random energy inside me formed itself into a
coherent stream of light flowing from head to toe. As
this flow of light intensified a profound sense of
peace came over me, my heart began to glow and my
inner voice began to speak with a clarity and
eloquence that I had never heard before. To my
astonishment I began to see vivid fairy tale scenes
in my mind’s eye which, as I described them,
unfolded with a life of their own. I was being told
a story!
From that moment
forth these stories have been a constant presence in
my life. Commonly taking the form of an hour-long
story-within-a-story-within-a-story, they seem to
spring from an inexhaustible source of inspiration.
In the first months of this process I could only
receive a story when sitting quietly in meditation.
Day after day the stories would educate me, reading
what was in my heart and guiding me towards a deeper
acceptance of life’s challenges. Sometimes I
would pose specific questions and receive in response
multi levelled teaching stories that would not so
much answer the question as take my understanding to
such a new level that the question became almost
insignificant! I felt myself to be in the presence of
an intelligence far greater than my conscious mind, a
mighty and irresistible force of creativity. To
surrender day by day to this force brought an ever
deepening sense of peace and fulfillment. Like a
musician hollowing out a flute, the stories expanded
my heart and mind until the flow of images and words
came more and more intuitively. Before long I could
receive them with my eyes open and within a year I
was performing them to live audiences.
These stories
speak of a new way of living, of breaking out of the
illusions of our daily lives and finding a happiness
far greater than we have ever dreamed of. The
interconnectedness of all things is illustrated time
and again; the journey back to Love mapped out in a
hundred different ways. The images are always fresh
and surprising, the symbolism rich and multi layered.
The stories come with a tremendous sense of
compassion and good humour: this life is for
learning, the journey is one best taken with joy.
My understanding
of life has been totally transformed by these
stories. A sense of ease begins to flow when one
realises that everything one experiences is in
one’s life for good reason. Crises and problems
are seen as opportunities to open one’s heart
more fully and surrender to a deeper sense of
aliveness. Stories are the perfect way to illustrate
such truths as characters grapple with intractable
difficulties and overcome insurmountable obstacles.
We come to see how so many of our problems are down
to misconceptions, how our isolation is simply the
result of our own choices. The stories speak of
patience and self forgiveness, and of the
inevitability of change. The overview is given time
and time again: we are all one life, here to
experience in the richness of physicality the journey
through separateness to a deeper knowledge of union.
Stories are
powerful. We form our lives out of the stories that
we take to heart. This is as true for modern human
beings as it was for the earliest hunter-gatherers.
Whether we receive them from the newspaper, the
television, or hear them from one another, stories
shape the way we see and experience the world. They
can carry us into the light or plunge us into the
darkness.
There is a
tremendous spiritual hunger in the modern world.
Could it be that for too long we have listened to
stories which do not nourish our souls? Out of touch
with that which connects us with all life, our way of
living threatens to destroy the very biosphere which
sustains us. More than at any time in human history
we need stories that affirm our kinship with every
one of the Earth’s inhabitants; stories that
reconnect us with the cosmos. These stories lie deep
within us, longing to be heard. As we allow these
stories to speak we begin the healing of ourselves
and of our world.
Storytelling will
always be a contemporary art form in that it is born
out of the relationship between teller and listener,
shaped by the needs of the moment. Stories spring
from the dreams we have in our daily lives: we are
all inhabitants of the story worlds, whether we
realise it or not. If life is a journey then stories
are what fills the travelling with delight.
“Facts” begone! “Reality” step
aside! The Story is what we are really here
for! Let us hope that our hearts will always soften,
our souls begin to beat their wings, whenever the
magic incantation is spoken; “Once upon a
time....”
This article
appeared in the Spring 1998 edition of Kindred Spirit
Magazine, the leading New Consciousness magazine in
the UK.
Intuitive Storytelling ~ 10 Years On
When I wrote the above article I had been telling
stories intuitively for a little over a year. Now
I've been doing so for well over 10 years.
What have I learned?
Well, my key learning has been that the best attitude
that I as an intuitive storyteller can have is one of
allowing and following. I tell my best stories now
when I trust and give credence to every image I
"see" and every word I "hear"
inside. That means telling them without a second
thought. The more of those second thoughts I have,
the more stodgy the telling becomes, both in its pace
and its content. Now I find it quite exciting to tell
without that editing mind, just to let the story be
and trust that it will go where it needs to go.
The second thing I've learned is that the simpler my
ideas of where the stories come from, what they are
meant for, or what they say about me, the easier the
whole thing becomes. This is perhaps that first
learning from another angle: i.e. "just tell
it!" So now I keep my focus on my deep longing
to do the work, which for the last 10 years has
burned unceasingly regardless of any setbacks I might
encounter. I seek to tell the stories as well as I
can and attend to the practicalities of disseminating
them, but I try not to get too attached to
strategies, plans or ambitions. I'm trusting that the
stories will find their right audience in the right
timing. This is already happening.
And in the last ten years I have met and married my
lovely wife Stella. We now have a son, Luke, who has
just turned two, and another child coming this
summer. To my surprise, Luke is already asking for
stories every day. I thought we'd need to wait
another year or so, but no, now he asks for a
"Toiee!" several times a day. And I tell
him very ordinary stories of what he did that day, or
about some of his favourite things (cars, ice-cream,
lawn-mowers, cows, pizza).I exaggerate a little at
times, but not so much that he can't follow the
action any more. I imagine that when he's four or so
I could tell him intuitive stories, and then I hope
we can make these stories available to children
everywhere, a growing range as he grows...
Meanwhile I tell intuitive stories to children in our
local Steiner (Waldorf) school and focus the rest of
my work on adults. I often record alone in a nearby
recording studio and have recently begun a promising
collaboration with a percussionist, Carol Scorer.
Occasionally I tell live to an adult audience, but
it's about the scariest thing I voluntarily do, so I
don't do it that much. I'm hoping that over time it
will get easier...
And what have I learned from the stories themselves?
Well, when the stories arrived in my life, much of
their "message" was alien to me. Now it's
pretty familiar, I have experienced many of the
shifts of perspective that the stories describe, at
least momentarily. At times it's hard to know whether
the stories teach me, or whether the learning I do
colours the message the stories offer. Whatever it
is, I feel more of a sense of "standing
with" the stories most of the time, although I
don't always fully understand their message, and
often fully embodying what they teach seems to be
beyond me for now. But I still really enjoy creating
a big juicy story-question to take to the studio and
letting the story fly in response. Delicious....
One thing that has greatly supported my journey has
been Nonviolent Communication (NVC) as developed by
Marshall Rosenberg (www.cnvc.org), of which I have
become a certified trainer. As well as being a
process that supports relationships I have found it
to be the most profound and practical way of
understanding myself and my motivations that I've
ever found, enabling me to get to the essence of
anything in my life, untangle any knot. The stories
speak a lot of "deepest desire", and I
think that's partly down to my immersion in NVC (or
is it the other way round?).
I'm delighted that our biweekly podcast is proving to
be so popular, with more and more people subscribing
every month. I'm deeply grateful to Michael J.
Ferguson, my friend and long time co-visionary, for
creating the website and podcast and continuing to
give it so much love and energy, making the stories
available to an ever growing audience. Thank you,
Michael. And thank you to you, for your interest in
my work, and in the stories. It is my deepest wish
that they support you in your journey. Thank you for
receiving their gift, for by doing so you enable me
to fulfil my deepest longing!
Leo Sofer, Findhorn, Scotland, May 2007.
About the Producer of
the Podcast
Leo has asked me to share a few words about who I am,
and my connection with the stories. So, here goes...
Similar to Leo, in my early 20s I experienced
something that had a lasting effect on my life. I
found myself, if however briefly, bathed in a state
of deep peace -- feeling an immense reassurance that
something much bigger than myself was guiding this
crazy dance of life. From then on, I set the
intention to be in service to this immense
"bigger something."
After a time, my journey connected me with Leo and
his stories. We've been working together now for over
seven years. Still to this day, after having listened
to a countless number of stories, I still find myself
touched and inspired by them. I recognize in them
that same force that "woke me up" during my
20s. I feel very grateful to be a part of getting
them out into the world.
Like most, some days I feel I have it together, and
other days I really struggle. Many times I need a
lifeline to assist me back to center. In their purest
forms, I see stories, music, and poetry, as ways of
reminding us of the deeper truths of life -- why
we're here, how to live, and how to be in deeper
communion with each other and the world around us.
Apart from producing this podcast, I've been biding
my time as a singer/songwriter, poet, music and
multi-media producer, studying Nonviolent
Communication and permaculture, and currently doing
quite a lot of research into alternative cancer
treatments for family members.
I wish you well on your journey.
Michael Joseph Ferguson, July 2007.
