What a story and an experiment can tell us about our incredibly inventive left brain (Yes, you might have thought that was your right brain's perogative!), and how to check it out for yourself!

It was back in 1999. The Head of my children’s primary school rang me to ask if I’d do a day’s storytelling and workshops. When I told my kids, Sal, who was still young enough not to be embarrassed said, “Yesssss!” Sam, four years older, rolled his eyes, to which I replied, “Don’t worry Sam, I’ll make sure I’m dead cool,” to which he rolled his eyes some more!

Three blind women were walking down a path through the jungle when they heard a loud rustling  ahead. They stopped; the rustling stopped. They walked around the next bend and all three of them crashed into the obstacle. Whatever it was it stretched from one side of the path to the other.  The first woman screamed…

What if our natural confidence is always there beneath our fear/our story that it isn’t, e.g. In an important meeting, or when we want to impress someone? If so, instead of trying to ‘get more confidence’, wouldn’t we become more interested in how not to lose it instead?

"We shall continue to use story in all walks of life, and the more conscious we become of how we use story and why we do this to narrate our lives, the more we shall be able to cultivate honest speech in impossible times."

Jack Zipes - eminent fairy-tale scholar

What if our creativity extends far beyond what we might consider 'creative activities' and into the realm of 'who we think we are'.

So, the messages we get are never 100% true. They may have their basis in a real behaviour, but the message/story about what that behaviour ‘means’ about you is totally up for grabs! Different people would have said it differently! This isn’t about fault and blame, it’s simply about seeing how it all works, seeing where ‘reality’ stops and ‘story’ takes over; catching the gap between the ‘isness’ of things and what we decide they mean.

Stories don’t exist in isolation, they’re a happening: you ‘meet’ them. They’re not fixed with some pre-determined meaning, and no explanation can ever be the final word, because there isn’t one.

The indologist Heinrich Zimmer  says this beautifully in speaking about the wonder stories of the folk tradition:

Our lives and story are inextricably intertwined, so a story about how this works is a great place to start!

The Mullah Nasruddin is a wise man of Persian Sufi folklore and here he is helping a man literally change his experience of reality :)