Listening to Myself Telling My Story
12/9/2019
At the Spiritual Guidance Training Institute, we value and celebrate the power of story. Being able to tell your story to a trusted companion can heal, inspire, nourish, connect, and transform us. The first time I told a difficult part of my story to a mentor, he responded, “Well, everyone sins…”. I spent years unpacking that one. Not only is that not my worldview, but his response could have sent me back into a state of fear and mistrust.
A little while later, with the guidance of both a spiritual director and therapist, I continued to share my stories over and over again - until I got to the point where I did not expect my spiritual director or therapist to be the ones to heal me, inspire me, nourish me. Rather, with self-compassion, I learned to connect with a deep inner teacher that ultimately helped me to see me for who I was and am. That is something to celebrate!
One of our current students from our third cohort is an art therapist, poet, writer, and emerging spiritual guide. She recently wrote three poems that we’d like to share with you because they speak deeply to the influence of meeting ourselves again and again through each telling of a part of our story.
A Celebratory Chant
I am a woman who dances.
I am a dance of a woman.
I am a dance of the Dance.
I am a woman who dreams.
I am a dream of a woman.
I am a dream of the Dreamer.
I am a woman who sings.
I am a song of a woman.
I am a song in the Song.
I am a woman with a story.
I am a story of a woman.
I am a story in the Story.
I am a woman who loves.
I am the love of a woman.
I am love inside Love.
100 Stories Each Human Has to Tell
The story of:
loss love fear betrayal failure success
labor grace birth worth faith fidelity
faithlessness mess illusion confusion hurt
healing doubt longing belonging
home homelessness
mother father lovers children
poverty wealth
remembering forgetting hunger abundance
gratitude complaint grief joy
pain illness health stealth
time youth aging refusal acceptance
internals externals
roots culture wildness domesticity
ancestry land politics
generations history colonization
slavery trauma violence
peace brokenness wholeness
trust distrust anger
balance imbalance
possessions knowledge wisdom
questions change growth seasons
hatred loneliness
solitude community family tribe
war famine harvest
song mirth creativity
falsity truth dreams beauty
cruelty compassion
hiding revelation dying
greed generosity redemption
Each Time I Tell My Story
Each time I tell my story,
it is different,
seen through the hundred
different facets
or ways of being human.
And there is a listening spirit
(that some call God)
listening to each telling,
and all hundred names and ways of God
hear and respond,
until my story becomes
a hundred times a hundred stories,
or ten thousand stories.
And you, my fellow human,
are also listening,
and you are hearing and responding
with all your stories
within the hundred names and ways
of being human
and my story becomes
a hundred times ten thousand
or a million stories,
just between the three of us,
you, me, and God.
And I carry within me
these million responses,
and to each,
from all my human ways,
I respond within,
and so, my story becomes
a hundred times a million,
or a hundred million stories
each of which can then be told 100 ways
and be responded to by God’s 100 ways
and by each living person’s 100 human ways,
times seven billion people,
and these responses,
can be taken in and lived by me
and then stories told
from that living
on and on until so very soon
infinity is reached
because the story
never was my story.
It is always our story.
And always one story.
The endless and
eternal story of All.
That being said,
now again,
let me tell you my story…
-Poems by Liza Hyatt
