We Are Our Stories

Safety in Safety

Stories make more stories.

“Students sharing their own stories as well as hearing from elders who may be parents or teachers is deep and powerful.” –Positive Times/AU

One of the legs in Arne Rubinstein’s “Rites of Passage” program is Stories. This has been our approach as well.

For both boys and men, this is critical to creating the safety required for a young man to plumb deeper into his own power.

With the phone generation, stories become even more critical to healthy transformation into the mature masculine. Today’s social media apps have posts that are called “Stories,” but these are not stories, they are typically time-sucking distractions. There are “Facebook Stories” and “Instagram Stories,” but they are not stories.

A story is something that takes us deeper into our psyche and opens empathy and understanding as they are shared with the circle/tribe/group.

It is essential that Spirit guides discussions. Facilitators who start off with “topics” are missing the point. Topics about stories are not stories.

When this magic takes place, the group and the community are stronger and safer.

“A child that is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth” - African proverb

For instance, in a group of 15 young men, suggesting we “talk about accountability” might generate topical discussion, but it won’t generate stories. Let’s say one of the boys in the group lost his dog the previous night. That young man is not going to get much out of ‘talking about’ accountability. However, if he is given a space to talk about his dog, his grief and sadness, the joy he got spending time with his dog…he enriches the group with his stories.

Jack Kornfield likes to tell a story about when he was working with a group of inner-city boys and the boys were not responding to the facilitator’s invitation to “change.” He then asks the boys to go out to the parking lot and get a stone for every person in their life they had lost in street violence. The boys came back, some of them with handfuls of stones, and began to talk about the people they knew for whom the stones represented.

Stories make more stories. As the young men in Kornfield’s group found, they shared the anger, grief and helplessness they felt as they talked about the people they lost in ‘the stones.’

The young man who shares the laughter and the tears over the life and loss of his dog, opens the door to others in the group to share about their pets. Often, a lively discussion starts up about walks, picking up poop, cleaning messes, playing fetch with a ball or frisbee and the group builds trust and safety in their shared experiences/stories. These young men feel “embraced by the village” through their stories.

Stories are when the lights turn on, the inner lights. As a young man is embraced in his fullness, all his joy and sorrow, the group sees their own hearts and the light that is within begins to shine brightly.

This is the goal of initiation and rites of passage. Elders give the gift of “space” for Spirit to come in and turn on the lights through stories. When this magic takes place, the group and the community are stronger and safer.