Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything - we need only listen.
Interpretation
Stories provide healing and insight without any action required from the listener.
This quote by Clarissa Pinkola Estes emphasizes the transformative and healing power of storytelling. It suggests that stories are a form of medicine for the soul; they can convey deep truths and emotions, fostering understanding and empathy, all while requiring nothing more than the willingness to listen.
In practice
This quote could be used in a workshop about the therapeutic effects of storytelling.
Asking the proper question is the central action of transformation- in fairy tales, in analysis, and in individuation. The key question causes germination of consciousness. The properly shaped question always emanates from an essential curiosity about what stands behind. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.
Tears are a river that takes you somewhere…Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better.
Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and burn, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them. Don't waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success.
There's a reason poets often say, 'Poetry saved my life,' for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul's suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.
To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.
That is what the intuition is for: it is the direct messenger of the soul.
There are clearly times when quieting down and bringing our energy back into ourselves is a step toward inner peace. _x000D_ _x000D_ Yet the most powerful life is not one in which we bring ourselves back to our center when we have spun away from it, but rather one in which we seek to live from that center at all times.
Do not dwell upon the sins and mistakes of yesterday so exclusively as to have no energy and mind left for living rightly today, and do not think that the sins of yesterday can prevent you from living purely today.
And our wise Father in heaven knows when we're going to need things too. Don't run out ahead of Him.
It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past
My best mentor is a mechanic - and he never left the sixth grade. By any competency measure, he doesn't have it. But the perspective he brings to me and my life is, bar none, the most helpful.
Trust in the process you are now experiencing. Life is on your side. It is showing that to you now, though you may not be able to see it clearly at this time.
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