The Power of Story
How do you make sense of the world around you and your place in it? What challenges you to see things from a new perspective? What helps you relate to others on a deeper, more personal level?
The answer is Story.
Story is a tool for experiencing and understanding ideas and situations that we struggle to make sense of with our conscious minds.
They spring from what psychologist Carl Jung dubbed the collective unconscious. In Jung’s model of the psyche, he explains there is the conscious mind (ego), the unconscious mind (soul), and the collective unconscious. While a person’s unconscious mind holds all of the unexpressed sensibilities and sensations that have been repressed due to the societal role (persona) they’ve stepped into, the collective unconscious holds all of humanity’s identities (archetypes). The personal unconscious has a foundation built on our own individual experiences, while the collective unconscious is built on humanity’s – across time, culture, and geographic location.
This is why story is so powerful. It is birthed from the collective unconscious that is imprinted in all of us, allowing us to see and experience things in a profound and transformative way.
And when we can recognize that we are all connected, our personal problems suddenly become “figureoutable”, our black and white way of seeing the world begins to fade, and we open ourselves up to the beauty and possibilities of ourselves and the world around us.
