“remember, the same day we plant our seeds is not the same day we eat the fruit.”
FEEDING THE SOUL – Tabitha brown
(Hi)story(ies) and Personal Stories
What then is a healing story? Or how do you write one? Where do you begin?
Well, healing stories are stories that give us the medicine we need for the deep wounds we carry within. Healing stories help us codify timeless truths so we can reclaim our agency in breaking cycles that disempower us. If we take the example of Human History for instance, we quickly realize that History is based on storytelling—on the stories that get told, and the stories that get silenced. History is not linear precisely because humans decide what stories will be amplified and celebrated throughout time, and what stories will be suppressed, distorted, or buried to meet a particular agenda at one point in time. This is also why the common adage, “history repeats itself,” is ultimately flawed and misleading.
History does not repeat itself. We repeat history.
-Ancestral proverb
Often times, History can be hard to reconstruct because it is fragmented, subjective and prone to human biases. Far from being neutral, History acts as a battlefield of narrative warfare because what gets passed on is a dynamic combination of facts, fictions, beliefs, and edited stories. Still, what counts as official History today is often very exclusive and does not fully acknowledge the existence of parallel archival practices rooted in oral traditions and ancestral stories which are just as important in reconstructing the story of all humans across space, time, and culture. Stories can be powerful tools of mass control or mass liberation—shaping collective imagination and limiting or expanding our vision of what is possible.
Consequently, when we are exposed to detrimental narratives, we end up miseducated like Lauryn Hill, living in cyclical stories, stuck in old scripts and narratives we have been programmed by since childhood. We fall far too easily into the trap of inherited stories, conventions, and narratives passed down across generations. Even something as basic as creating a family tree can expose the cyclical stories that a family has lived and transmitted—often unconsciously. In the worst cases, we inherit wounded and distorted scripts, limiting roles, and self-destructive cultural narratives. And we continue to play the roles we’ve been given until the day we make a conscious decision to stop re-enacting the same storylines that no longer serve us in the present.
Medecinal Narratives
Fortunately, with a narrative framework, we gain the ability to return to the true roots of our often mutilated Historical and Ancestral narratives—those that live in our lineages, our bodies, our minds—so we can begin to restore own stories in the present. We recover the medicinal stories that were buried or abandoned—the ones that heal, that awaken our power, and that restore our soul’s forgotten memory.
Indeed, all ancestral cultures passed on truth through oral storytelling. These stories were never mere children’s tales but rather sacred stories that held survival lessons, memory codes, and the laws of cosmic balance. They carried the teachings of the soul and taught the next generation the sacred roles they had to take on to remain in harmony with themselves, their families, their communities, and the Earth.
That is why when we take the time to rediscover these stories, we realign with an inner axis as well. Our Ancestral narratives are like a symbolic spine that help us stand upright and walk through life with purpose. We stop wandering inside other people’s barren narratives, losing ourselves in roles and scripts shaped by other people’s gaze. Instead, we begin to embody the identity of our foremothers and forefathers whose blood still flows in our veins, thus restoring our own narratives and dignity.
In this light, narratology becomes like an embodied ritual where we work on recovering the medicinal stories that can help us re-member ourselves, restore the broken narratives in our lineage, and re-envision new lives.
Reflection Questions
- What stories do you believe about yourself… that prevent you from flourishing?
- When did you start living inside a story someone else wrote for you?
- What books or oral (hi)stories moved you so deeply that they changed something core within you?
- What roles are you ready to let go of in order to live a life that aligns with you authentic self?
- If you could choose just one sentence to begin rewriting your life today, what would it be?
If you hear the call to adventure, don’t be afraid to answer it. Have courage to cross the threshold and to embark on this new existential quest that your soul is calling you on. The story you seek already lives inside you. But you must walk the path of Memory to bring it back to life.