Art of Story Healing

Session 1: “Collaging Inner and Outer Worlds: Grounding a Sense of Self.” For the first session, you will be building relationships to your personal identities, the foundation for everyone’s stories. You will do this by diving into the enchanting world of images, working with the accessible medium of collage to explore symbols, patterns, and themes of everyone’s lives. There will be a collective brainstorm of the differences between the selves we present to the world and the parts of us that we keep hidden and safe inside. You will collage the covers of your journal (inside and outside to correspond with inner and outer worlds). The journals will serve as safe spaces for your story exploration in the subsequent workshops.

Session 2: “Story Clusters: Reflecting on Our Pasts.” In this session, dive into a simple formula for telling/writing stories (identifying a “before” state/starting point, introducing the challenges that changed that state, and searching for the meaning that came of those challenges/changes). You will also workshop a useful technique for organizing ideas and events, getting them out of your head and onto paper before composing them into narrative format.

Session 3: “Photo Series: Documenting Our Stories as We Go.” In this session, look at the process of creating stories as you go, before you even know what the story is necessarily about. Everyone exists inside of their own story, and the act of documenting moments is a way to bring stories to life. (You will be using images developed from disposable cameras, given to participants in Session 1).

Session 4: “Creating Sacred Intention: a Portal into Our Future Stories.” In this session, you will move through an intention-setting process to clarify what it is you are wanting to call in to future stories, while at the same time, creating visual space and allowance for the great mystery to unfold.