combined with the support of two loveable characters, Jasper and Zephyr, to rewrite stories of adult remembrances of a painful childhood event. The stories create new internal reactions to this situation, which replace the old false negative beliefs.
These stories, which are thematically organized, i.e. divorce, bully victim, abandonment, etc., are universal in their topics and appeal. As the story plays out with wit and whimsy and always much wisdom, the reader sees the value of rewriting their own story. The book ends with just that opportunity. The final chapters entitled Now It’s Your Turn and Writing Your Own Personal Parable invite the reader to think of their own past incident which they would like to rewrite. They are easily led through a concise questionnaire that brings forth the emotional and visual details of that earlier time to be incorporated into their story.
There are story prompts that begin the co-creating process, i.e “Jasper is sailing high above the earth enjoying the soft breath of his best friend, Zephyr. As Jasper looks down, he sees… ” (Describe the outside location as clearly as possible. Use words that paint the picture.)
To digress, it is important to mention that beyond the purpose of re-pairing the mind with the truth of the heart, these stories have an additional mission of aligning the body’s energy systems as well. It is becoming well accepted in western medicine that stress, depression and anxiety take their toll on the human body and delete years from one’s life. Andrew Weil, M.D. has been a forerunner in touting the need to master our emotions for our own personal quality of life.
Emotions are stored in the body’s energy systems, also known as chakras, and blocking the flow of this energy can lead to physical ailments. Changing the stories changes the emotions felt in the past, which lead to more empowering self beliefs. There is a visceral reaction, a release of the distorted reality and a restoring of our natural energy flow. We begin to vibrate at a higher energy level and we attract more good into our lives. We are what we believe.
Jasper has a beautiful rainbow-colored tail which is color coded to the seven chakra energy systems. The theme of the story dictates the color of the beautiful feather that Jasper gives to the main character, along with a corresponding chakra affirmation. There is a concise chakra chart at the end of the book so the reader can see each chakra lesson, physical area and emotional component. As you’ll see, these stories are not only entertaining, but are also brimming with transformational opportunities for the reader at the level of mind, body and heart.
The Power of the Parable
Do you remember the stories of your childhood?
I bet you do. Whether the stories were old fairy tales or Disney movies or Uncle George recounting how he eloped with Aunt Freda, these stories resonated with you long after they were experienced.
We didn’t know it then, but even simple stories about a rabbit or a bear or a frog helped us connect to a deeper part of ourselves. We fell in love with a particular character, perhaps one that represented the qualities we wanted to embrace in ourselves. A shaggy dog courageously exposes a cat that wrongfully blamed him for eating his master’s dinner, when, in real life, we were too afraid to confront a sister who wrongfully accused us. A little mouse traps the bully cat in his own trap, when, in real life, our next door neighbor Sam was taunting us with punches in the stomach. We didn’t have the adult perspective to define why we felt good after absorbing a story into our being. We just felt good.
While we know that not all endings are happy in real life, the happy ending of those childhood stories helped us to transcend our childhood suffering and bring a new perspective to our experience. The stories helped to change the emotional emphasis of our traumatic experience from feeling hopeless to resolve it, to feeling empowered at having directly confronted the beast. Although the sister and the bully next door may have continued to wreak havoc on our young psyches, through these stories that were embedded into our unconscious, we felt the possibility of a different ending inside. We felt the possibility of a larger, fuller life.
As a child, my love of stories went beyond books and movies. My mother entertained me by recounting simple stories of her childhood, living on a wheat farm in Idaho. The youngest sister of a big Norwegian family of five sisters and four brothers, my mother loved to watch her older sisters get dressed up for formal college balls. As she described in detail the gowns they wore, I could picture everything she told me. As if peering into a window of my own future with men, I was fascinated with the drama of the dating games they played. I begged for more stories.
I wanted to be enveloped in the world of story. My grandmother, who lived on a ranch in the woods of Northern California, read us pages of Swiss Family Robinson during our summers with her. My brother and I were so enthralled with the idea of a family living in a tree house that we created a makeshift replica in the forest and pretended to be the Robinsons. We lived the story.
By the third grade of my Catholic school education, I began to write and illustrate my own comic strips. I felt a deep fulfillment in writing the words and drawing the images of my characters, much to the chagrin of the nun, who said in front of class, that my heroine, dressed in a strapless gown, was inappropriately attired. But it wasn’t until years later as an adult that I discovered why creating my own stories was so satisfying.
As an adult, I have learned that simple storytelling can have a powerful affect on how we integrate our experiences. Recently, I attended a workshop led by Jonathan Young, Ph.D., who years before assisted famous mythologist Joseph Campbell for several years at seminars. During the workshop, Dr. Young told the story of The Ugly Duckling. It was a story that I’d heard as a child many times, but this time I experienced such a profound connection to hearing the story. I realized that I still felt the same feelings in response to the story as when I was a little girl. Only now, as an adult, I caught so much more of the nuances in meaning. Most importantly, I felt like I was still that ugly duckling that was in the process of discovering she was a beautiful swan. I was still that little girl inside.
In working with clients as a spiritual counselor for many years, I discovered that the little girl or boy we once were, is still very much inside us all and not far from the surface of our lives. Yet it is not a part of ourselves that we consciously pay attention to. We are too busy trying to keep up with the information overload, the work and family schedules, the trips to the doctor for the annoying ailments that just won’t go away. How can we possibly pay attention to our inner child’s longings when the sink is stopped up, the bills are overdue and our own child is tugging at our arm to get him a cookie?
That child part of us is very much alive in our unconscious minds. Our dreams speak to us in a language the child understands: through mythical and fantastical stories. We may dream of dragons or earthquakes or some unidentifiable terror chasing us, but that could be our unconscious speaking to us about our troubled relationship with our spouse. The unconscious memories jarred during the day from simply hearing a familiar piece of music or breathing in a voluptuous scent, can appear as a dramatic story as we sleep. Just when we think we have contained our conscious experience of reality in a neat little box, out pops a trickster like a jack-in-the-box to remind us of what disturbances need addressing on a deeper level. We don’t always want to look at the feelings that seem inconvenient to deal with, but the unconscious mind has a way of nagging us to face what we haven’t yet integrated into our lives. It’s easy for many of us to view our dreams as meaningless entertainment and forget about them. But if we are to truly heal and discover the truth about ourselves, we need to pay attention to these messages from the unconscious.
In
