Like night dreams, stores often use symbolic language, therefore bypassing the ego and persona, and traveling straight to the spirit and soul who listen for the ancient and universal instructions imbedded there. Because of this process, stories can teach, correct errors, lighten the heart and the darkness, provide psychic shelter, assist transformation and heal wounds.
Interpretation
Stories use symbolic language to connect with our deeper selves and can teach and heal.
In this quote, Clarissa Pinkola Estes emphasizes the power of storytelling as a medium to convey profound truths and wisdom that resonate with our innermost being. Through symbolic language, stories can transcend superficial understanding, allowing for emotional healing, personal transformation, and the enlightening of our spirits, thereby serving as a means of shelter and guidance in our lives.
In practice
In a workshop about creativity, one might share this quote to emphasize the importance of storytelling in artistic expression.
Asking the proper question is the central action of transformation- in fairy tales, in analysis, and in individuation. The key question causes germination of consciousness. The properly shaped question always emanates from an essential curiosity about what stands behind. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.
Tears are a river that takes you somewhere…Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better.
Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and burn, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them. Don't waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success.
Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything - we need only listen.
There's a reason poets often say, 'Poetry saved my life,' for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul's suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.
To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.
What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
Queen and huntress, chaste and fair Now the sun is laid to sleep, Seated in thy silver chair, State in wonted manner keep: Hesperus entreats thy light Goddess, excellently bright.
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
In the old days, people shared music; they didn't care who made it. A song would be owned by a village, and anyone could sing it, change the words, whatever. That is how humans treated music until the late 19th century. Now, with the Internet, we are going back to having tribal attitudes towards music.
It's always appealing to play a character that has to overcome himself as well as an obstacle. It makes the drama so much deeper.
I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.
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