I talk a lot about multiple ways of knowing with my clients and in my life. Some of the most transformative experiences I have had have happened precisely because I suspended over-reliance on the rational, cognitive parts of myself and leaned into something else just as real. That happened to me one day this summer when I had a profound and unmistakable knowing that I needed to tell the story of how I die.
I have been practicing intuitive storytelling since 2010 when I attended a workshop led by Nancy Mellon at a Waldorf School in Baltimore, Maryland. As she shares on her website, “Storytelling is a way to claim time to nourish our humanity. We deepen our listening to ourselves and one another to discover important and often delightfully profound and refreshing perspectives and guidance.” It’s no overstatement to say that my life began to profoundly change after experiencing the magic of unleashing my power to create worlds and witness unconscious parts of myself come to the light and be transformed as I told stories I had no time to prepare.
Children come into the world knowing how to do this. Their stories flow out of them with awe-inspiring abandon and, in them, they see and learn about themselves, their worlds and the worlds they want to live in. Learning from Nancy and the children, I have worked over the years to deepen my practice by trusting the inkling to tell a story when the inkling arrives. Last year at the end of July that inking arrived and what unfolded was an epic story of a lifetime.
The story unfolded over multiple days, in 25 to 40 minute episodes. They moved backward through time from my last day alive until today, February 2, 2024. Today is an important day for me because it marks the precise day that I have lived one day longer than my elder brother did. You see, when Rick died at age 50, I was 47. I had just lost my father 10 months before and I was becoming more and more anxious about the possibility of me also dying at 50. So, for whatever reason, I thought the way I could manage my anxiety about this was to calculate the number of days he lived and then calculate what the date would be when I have outlived him…even by 1 day. Rick lived 18,502 days. Today, I have lived 18,503.
But the intuitive story I told last August about today had almost nothing at all to do with any of that. At the end of this storytelling adventure of a lifetime, I found myself telling a story about my coaching training program. It was a story about wrapping up my final coursework, reflecting on the self-doubt I’d move through during the 6 months of training, about who my ideal client is, and about turning to the abundance that is inside my purpose, that I found inside the content of the stories I had been telling during this process. The story ends with me detailing what my Monday morning ritual will look like to prepare for me for the week ahead and how I will share this practice with the clients I partner with who are interested in seeing where their own intuitive stories will lead them.
Tonight, I’m here. Wrapping up my final coursework with so many of the answers about my business and my offerings laid out before me in my stories. I’m exactly where I said I’d be 6 months ago. Exactly.
I feel both moved and grounded, seen and sweetly held tonight, as I read the transcript of this story on one screen and type this post on the other. The story ends like this:
This is how you will live into your slogan or tagline: manifesting the world we deserve, one story at a time.
And so it is.
And so it is.
