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Gaian Rants | ||||
Healing Stories: An Interview with Deena Metzger "To follow story is to understand the path of healing. Each of our stories is a universe. Each one of us is a living story. To discover its shape and essence is essential to soul making." When I read those words I knew I had to talk to the woman who penned them. Deena Metzger is a writer and poet, storyteller and healer who uses the power of story to address physical, emotional, and spiritual crises. She teaches writing and trains and initiates healers. She is also a breast cancer survivor. “Story”, she says, “is a form of knowing and healing” and the “organizing principle of our lives.” A short list of Deena’ work includes Looking for the Faces of God, Parallax Press, 1989; Writing for Your Life, A Guide & Companion to the Inner Worlds, Harper San Francisco, 1992; TREE: Essays & Pieces, North Atlantic Books, 1987; Intimate Nature: Women’s Bond with Animals edited with Linda Hogan & Brenda Peterson, Balentine, 1998; The Other Hand, Red Hen Press, 2000. Her latest book, Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing was written in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 and published one year later. “I wrote it,” she explains in the introduction, “as the times demanded, without inhibition, calling myself, on a daily basis, to the courage and stamina it takes to say what must be said.” In this book, and in her work every day, Deena helps people wake up and ask, “What is Spirit asking of us?” SML: Something shifted on 9/11. I got this image of a huge bolt of energy just coming down and shaking everything up. Many people had dreams or premonitions of something horrible about to happen. My son, Colin, for example, woke up late for class, in the middle of a dream that, when he turned on the television, was coming true. It felt like a chiros moment — nothing would be the same again. DM: Exactly SML: And here we are. It didn’t have to be this way, but it is. The war seems to be a continuation of the energy of that day, like it’s happening over and over again. DM: We are living in a time when the relationship between healing and peacemaking is clear. Healing can be personal but it is also spiritual, cultural, political, and environmental. It is about wholeness, harmony and well-being. When I come across someone like your son who has a dream and wakes up to it in reality — of course you’re his mother so he knows how to meet this, but often people don’t — I ask them: What is the true nature of the universe in which such things can happen? And don’t tell me it’s coincidence. Even if they try to figure it out scientifically, at some point they are going to have to deal with the nature of the universe that they have not recognized before. They thought they were in a linear, cause and effect, animate/inanimate, human/nonhuman story. But that’s not the story. SML: What does story have to do with it? DM: Stories act as a map and a guide. They are given to us by Spirit as profound instructions for living our lives. Spirit speaks to us in story, engaging us in ways that are creative and awesome. Stories concern every aspect of our lives, including our relationship with the Earth and all the visibles and invisibles. SML: How do you teach about story in your workshops? DM: I offer a series of exercises that are conceptually based and build on each other so that people come to recognize the story they have been given to live. Story is formed from our experiences and also from, we can say, interventions from the other side — events we couldn’t have designed or choreographed. You begin to see how the parts fit together. SML: When you talk about story are you talking about our life purpose? DM: Your story would reveal it. You don’t necessarily know your life’s purpose until you look at the story you’ve been living, which is both a look at the past and a projection of the future. And of course there are stories within stories. When one is ill there is the story the illness is telling. If you know that story then you can extrapolate the healing story from it, a story based on your particular experiences. When I talk about story I’m talking about the little universe. Little in that it’s personal, but universe in that it’s infinite and complex, consisting of many interconnected, dynamic parts in which you’re living and which is a kind of field of intelligence and possibility. SML: What do you mean by field of intelligence? DM: The composite dynamic understanding that forms from facts, information, myths, dreams, synchronicities, intuitions, auguries, events . . . the field of intelligence is everything that interrelates to the story. And there’s a resonance between all the parts. You know what fits or doesn’t fit by whether it resonates or not. The story attracts to itself all the parts that it needs in order to be expressed. SML: I feel that way about my life. When I’m doing what I feel is my soul’s work, I meet the right person or whatever and there are signs along the way. DM: And you keep following those, and you hold the moment — the road you’ve been walking — in your memory so that you begin to see a pattern. You also have to look at the events in the story with a little bit of objectivity because they do not necessarily mean what you think they mean. Let me give a simple example from Rowe (where Deena had just given some workshops). I started by asking people to tell an event from their lives. Not a great traumatic event, just a simple thing that in this moment felt important. One man told of three little events. The first was when he was a kid he was on a baseball team and he suddenly remembered that every time there was a game an elderly couple came, applauded the team, and always brought the kids oranges. In the second story he stepped out on his front porch one day, and this only happened once, and there was a bear looking at him. The third was that there was a tree that had been very important to him as a young boy. His interpretation was that he had not been paying attention. He didn’t know who the couple was, didn’t know why they went to the games, and he never thanked them. He realized in this moment that the bear was important but he didn’t really get it until now. Same with the tree. His interpretation was negative: he was inattentive, needed to improve, etc. But my view was that he had been gifted. Forget about the fact that he hadn’t noticed. Get down on your hands and knees now and notice that presences had come to him. When he was able to do that he was in another story. SML: It was magical. DM: It was magical. Instead of the story of someone who was not up to snuff as a human being, he was in a story of someone surrounded by gifts. Now he can go back and find that pattern and live the life of someone surrounded by gifts. If you are surrounded by gifts you have a different relationship to the universe. It is generous and you want to be generous in return. You don’t feel deprived or needy. The story of being someone to whom the universe has been generous in a magical way is a very different story. SML: I can see how that would be very powerful. And if you hadn’t been there to see things with a different perspective he might still have that negative feeling which he’d carry around. DM: And turn it in on himself. And there are consequences for everybody around him. SML: I wish everyone could see their lives this way, to see the magic and the connections and how things fit together. DM: The problem is it’s very complex and you really do need a guide to begin, someone who can see what you can’t see, who can help you let go of your assumptions about what things mean. SML: One of the things you’ve said that I love is, “Time does not heal traumas, consciousness does.” It’s a very hopeful thing, really, because consciousness can change quickly. DM: One of the people who is mentoring with me has had a life-long resentful relationship with her father who was very erratic and violent. Her story is that no one protected her. We recently spent some time doing what we call ancestor work, which is understanding the story of what our ancestors have lived and what wisdom they might have. I learned that her father came to this country from Poland by himself when he was nine years old. He had a cousin in NY, that’s all. Now do we need to say more? If we can enter into who the nine year old had to become when he came here and didn’t know the language. He was a lost child. Then he got married, had a child and he was further lost. SML: A lost little boy. DM: Yes. It’s a matter of trying to see through the story to its core and not bringing all our desires and insecurities and narcissistic needs into the situation. That’s the kind of consciousness that heals ones own trauma. SML: You have written about the importance of initiation, how necessary it is if we are to carry what we must carry. It seems like we’re carrying more than our own stuff these days. We’re also carrying cultural or social karma. And the more aware we become, the more painful it is. DM: We’re overburdened and we don’t know how to carry it. We’re not in right relationship. And of course no one wants to hear the voice of the spirits heavy upon them, and most people don’t really want initiation. SML: But that’s part of what we’re here for. DM: That’s right. But you’re interested in consciousness. I can hear it in your voice. SML: Do you feel people are becoming more aware of the need for initiation, of the need to become conscious and connected on a soul/spirit level? DM: It does feel like there’s more desire for consciousness, at least in the circles I’m traveling in. Unfortunately, the president is an uninitiated man, the people in the government are uninitiated people, and that’s why they are doing such dangerous things. We need to learn to read the signs, to understand the story, to recognize where and to what we are being called so that our actions will sustain us, each other, our communities, and the Earth. And we must not be innocent or shy about our gifts and wisdom, because now is the time to act on behalf of what is most precious and beautiful so that all will not be lost. | ||||
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