Ask yourself this: How is your current story a reflection of your past experiences, and how is it a reflection of the future story you hope to rewrite? In other words, are your current actions aligned with where you say you want to go—or are they still governed by past stories that continue to haunt you? Or again, how much does your present reflect your past, and how much does it reflect the future you’re hoping to co-create? Your answers will reveal the complex interplay between your individual agency and the external, circumstantial factors that have shaped your life up to this point.

The Stories that Shape Our Lives

You are the living product of your ancestral stories as well as your personal lived experiences. While we all possess agency in writing our life stories on Earth, we are never the sole authors of our individual narratives. The families we are born into, the communities we grow up in, and the cultural traditions we evolve within all contribute to the ongoing construction of our life stories. This is why narrative coaching aims to contextualize your life experiences by honoring your cultural cosmogony, your traditional and ancestral heritage, and your intergenerational experiences. Cosmogonies—origin stories of a people—are not only cosmological frameworks but also deeply philosophical narratives that convey the conceptual systems that govern and organize all societal structures on an individual, familial, and collective level. 

Consequently, we find the essence of our lives in the essence of the stories we absorb from an early age on: stories on our values, our beliefs, our perceived limits, our personal worth, our purpose, and the meaning of life. Hence, if you want to write a new story for your life, you must identify both the internal and external forces that have shaped your narrative thus far.

Scripted Invasions

You must also identify and reject the foreign agents, trojan horses, and virus-like,  ‘script-based attacks’ that have tampered with your agency by successfully implanting false psychic and somatic stories (i.e. trauma) into your mind, body, DNA, and genetic expression, to distort your identity, your origin story, your sense of worth, and your future. For instance, the hi(stories) we have absorbed through the propagandist tools of the matrix—Hollywood films, mass media, televised news—have often been heavily edited, distorted, fictionalized, and re-scripted to reinforce narratives that promote division, war, conflict, violence, and social unrest.

This of course, should not come as a surprise because humans have always crafted stories with precise intentions since the dawn of humankind. To this day, we use stories to transmit narratives, codify laws, sustain rituals, and uphold systemic structures that regulate the functioning of society. As such, stories can act as gatekeepers of social power, structuring collective consciousness to embody ideologies that are either destructive or healing to our planet and all humankind.

Medicinal Scripts as Sources of Power

Of course, stories are also timekeepers of ancestral truths. When rightly understood and embodied, stories can become tools of liberation and healing that cultivate restorative and regenerative ideologies within us for the good of our planet and all humankind. Our ancestral stories for instance, anchor us in time and space because they contain the deep truths and wisdom that enabled our ancestors to survive, so that we may exist today. Without access to these ancestral narratives, we risk losing our sense of identity in narratives built upon deception and alienation—narratives that constantly attempt to convince us that we cannot reclaim the freedom that is rightfully ours as human beings.

Fortunately, each of us carries medicinal (hi)stories within our individual, familial, collective, cultural, and ancestral lineages—stories that offer the wisdom and resilience we need to live holistic lives on Earth. These stories are medicinal and healing precisely because they protect us from the deceitful and traumatizing scripts crafted by oppressive structures to keep our minds imprisoned within the matrix.

Indeed, the matrix does not want humans to dream of freedom or liberation, so it assaults us with disempowering, trauma-inflicting stories that inhibit our ability to imagine, script, and live the stories we long to embody. Medicinal stories, on the other hand, amplify our creative agency and our scripting abilities, helping us to rewrite our stories more authentically. These life-giving stories hold concrete wisdom that we can transmute into practical, tangible steps to reshape our present and co-write the futures we dream of. 

Narratology as Sacred Practice

As a narrative professional coach, my therapeutic framework is therefore rooted in the sacred teachings and life principles of Ancestral philosophies that have long used storytelling as a catalyst for growth, personal transformation, and the elevation of the human spirit. Indeed, these Ancestral teachings remind us that the stories we carry can profoundly shape the course of our lives.

Narratology reminds us that stories are so powerful and healing because they go beyond the realm of thoughts. The right story can heal not only your ways of thinking, but it can also heal how you show up in your body. In other words, we can experience somatic healing by learning to embody new stories in our everyday rituals: rising with the sun, dedicating time for prayer or meditation, honouring our needs and boundaries, attuning to our present, breathing with our diaphragm, and much more. In essence, we experience wholeness when we begin to embody expansive stories and paradigms that provide enough space for us grow into our fullest, truest selves.

Using Narrative Coaching, we will: 

• Work on rewriting the traumatic scripts that hijack your present and sabotage the dreams you hold for your future.
• Identify strategic actions and practical tools to help you visualize and carry out your life mission and long-term professional goals.
• Explore and rediscover your (hi)story by integrating your dreams and ancestral heritage into your present reality—so you can live a life that resonates with your soul.

If you are ready to start your storywork journey, feel free to give me a call today. I would be honored to walk alongside you as you work on writing the new story that your heart calls you to live.