Attending Story Clinic

The reason why anyone attends Story Clinic is the beginning of the new story to be told.  An individual might want to get to grips with the story of being alive. An interest group such as micro-light pilots, stamp-collectors or boutique wine farmers might want to forge a new identity and project in respect of their focus. A town might want to re-negotiate its reason for existence. A school could want to re-communictae itself. A bank might have run out of internal goodwill, and want to re-assure its branches of a new normal. A hospital management team might decide on kindness to patients as well as clinical expertise. A president could think again, and decide to recalculate.

Here are some basic aspects to the bones of Story Clinic:

There is a huge space between language and reality. Be prepared to explore this. It's safe.

Formality is merely formality. It has no power, unless it is given power. Being alive isn't formal, and neither is being dead. And language is a non-formal convention.

The story that anyone finally believes doesn't make it so. The table of elements has a stable description, but the universe behaves beautifully and badly at the same time. Our planet, solar system and galaxy are all about chemical behaviour, mostly fire, ice, wind and nothing. But we're here to experience, observe and respond. And that makes the real difference.

Consciousness, pre-consciousness and unconsciousness are levels of arbitrary. Choosing on purpose is a huge privilege of being an alive human.

Much of spoken language is voice-box, throat, neck, mouth and facial posture. Mimic that and you've got the communication if not the words.

In Story Clinic we ask:

What stories have you kept to explain your sense of reality?
What made those stories rise within you?
Did they arise in healthy or unhealthy ways? (Your body will instinctively know the answers.)
Turn those big stories into chapters, pages or even one-liners. Do you choose to keep them, toss them or re-write parts?
Your body is part of a material as well as energetic story. To which word-sets do you limit yourself? How well do you know your internal ecology? To what extent do you recognise and respect your external ecology?
When it comes to external ecology, which stories attract your attention? Current affairs? History? Activism? Finance? Let your natural attention explain something about your story-relatedness to you.
Who are the significant people in your story? And from which era are they? And in what sense do you control or not control their presence?

There are, of course, plenty more story-questing ways of teasing your being into presence.  The healthy stories do this, while the unhealthy ones stifle, stop and stuff the soul into the unwashed sock of a contrived sense of reality that smells bad although we all seem to agree that it's necessary to do this. This is strange behaviour based on making ourselves acceptable to each other.

Attending Story Clinic is about paying attention to the experiment of being alive. And we are both the researcher as well as the research population. It's an exciting and fun way to play with normal and new, always with the purpose of understanding what healthy means and does.