Stories of Choice and Empowerment, final celebration and presentations.

This is the final session of a storytelling program designed for at-risk girls. It is a night of celebration, somewhat like a graduation.

The evening begins with an explanation of what will happen and why we are celebrating. The girls have completed seven sessions of storytelling and self exploration, with the celebration being the eighth session. Each week has built on the last with a focus on metaphor and the power of story.

The girls are told a story. I like to use Laura Simms Black and White Cows for this evening. I call the story Star Woman’s Basket.
A farmer captures a woman who comes from the heavens and milks his cows dry. He wants to marry her and she says yes as long as he never looks in or asks about her basket. All goes well until many years later when she is called away for an extended time as a midwife. His curiosity gets the better of him and he opens the basket, only to find it empty. He barely has time to replace the lid before his wife enters the house. Seeing that he has betrayed his trust, she takes her basket and leaves.

Not only is this a wonderful story about relationship, it is a reminder about the importance of keeping trust.

I then ask the girls to place a dream, wish or something they want to keep sacred into my round basket with the promise to keep them safe. In the spring, I invite friends over for a wish planting ceremony. The girls’ wishes are planted in my garden under a prayer tree.
Following the story, the girls then presented their mandala projects. (See Mandalas for Healing for the method used to create these lovely works of art and soul.) Then each was awarded a key on a string, representing the tool they now have to unlock the door to their future. The key is the power of story.

After all the presentations are given, we eat. Breaking bread together is an important element of community.

Mandalas for Healing in the Crossroads Story Program: Empowering At-Risk Youth

Lesson One: What are Mandalas

The word mandala is Sanskrit meaning circle. They are large sand paintings made by Tibetan monks. They can take up to seven days to create. Prayers or meditations are chanted throughout the process. The monks use their fingers and tiny funnels to handle the colored sand.

At the end of the seven days, the artwork is destroyed. Anyone fortunate to be present at this time is given a bit of the sand, like being able to take a piece of the prayer. The remaining sand is thrown into a body of water with ceremony. The water then carries the prayer. Each mandala is usually made up of concentric circles. These circles include gates that represent north, south, east and west. I have seen them worked from the inner self out or the outer self inward to the center of self. When I do these with the youth, we usually work inward to find self and the gates represent different stages of life.

http://tinyurl.com/yaktun4
http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/online/mandala/mandala.htm

Mandalas Lesson Two: the Outer Circle

This is lesson two in creating a mandala with the girls in my group home program. We drew three concentric circles on our boards. Each circle will have four gates lined up with each other for easy passage. The outer circle’s gates will be your birth gate, your dream gate, your metaphor gate and the gate that brought you to the place where you are now. We began by spending the first two weeks listening to stories with strong metaphors, discussing metaphor and identifying a personal metaphor or archetype.

1. Think of an object, animal or story character (not by name but by type such as little girl, witch, etc.) The girls chose piece of paper, caged bird, Turtapillar (turtle and caterpillar combined), snakadilla (armadillo or snake combined), and I chose a warrior.

2. Why did you choose that metaphor? Paper can be written on, I like to sing and I am caged, a turtle can hide in its shell for protection and a caterpillar is ugly but will become a butterfly, an armadillo can roll into a ball to protect itself and a snake sheds its skin and is new, I am a warrior because I need to fight.

3. How can these metaphors be helpful to you? How can they hold you back? A piece of paper can be written on or crumpled, a turtle has a place to hide and carries its home with it but if he never comes out he cannot eat or anything, a caterpillar may be eaten by something else, an armadillo is slow moving, a snake may bite others, a warrior can become overly hardened by war.

4. We did a visualization. The girls closed their eyes and I asked them to see a door before them and notice they have a key in their hands. They were asked to open the door and find a special tool on the other side of the door. This tool is just for them and their metaphor to use on the journey toward self.

In creating this outer circle, you can make the gates elaborate and also decorated the circle outline. The more decorative, the more interesting. If using sand, be sure drawing is large enough.

The Metaphor Gate: This gate will be where you draw your special tool(s). This represents the entrance that you other self can use to journey inward.

The Birth Gate: When we are born, we are a clean slate. All the possibilities of life lay before us. Some of us may have beautiful paths with everything we need along the way. Others may be missing a parent or both parents and feel lonely on their journey. Some may be born to abuse and poverty. This birth gate is open to us and we must enter but we do not have to stay on that path forever.

The Gate that Brought US to Where we are Now: This gate represents the path that brought us to our current situation in life. It may be an event that pushed us here, or a person or people who helped us get here.

The Dream Gate: This gate represents that path you would choose to travel someday. It is not looking back and wishing things had been different. Instead it holds the promise of our future.

Mandalas Lesson Three: The Middle Circle.

The Middle Circle (not the center one) is one that we used as a next step toward achieving a better understanding of self and in our group’s case, a step toward achieving our goals at each outer gate.

The Objective is to get the youth thinking about the many possibilities their lives could have taken at any given moment to empower them to take a proactive role in changing their path to be successful in obtaining what they really want in life. This was done by making them think about what was available to them at birth, what brought them where they are, who they are now, and what they would like to be in the future.

This middle circle brings them closer to self by asking them to consider what they went through in each of those initial gates (Metaphor, Birth, What Brought Them Here, and Dream).

Do they have a straight path to center from birth?
Did they have to break through a wall?
Were they incarcerated, addicted to drugs?
Do they feel in control or out of control of their lives at this time?
Where do they want to be and what is needed to get there, education, money, a job, a support system?

The girls were really forced to think beyond the past and the here and now. They had to look at layers of self-discovery.

Mandalas Lesson Four: The Center of Self

Self is something we cannot achieve until the end of our days, unless we are completely devoted to this discovery. I don’t really recommend this devotion to my groups as they are still in egotistic stages and I feel they need to mature to the stage of thinking of others more than themselves before they should begin looking inward again.

Discovery of self is not the same as ego, in fact it requires setting ego free and being unattached to self.

For the very center circle in our mandalas, I asked the girls to draw something that represented openness. They chose flowers, onions, eyes, and geometric.

The girls will be asked to tell about their creations on our last night. Using art is the way I have found they open best to telling the story of who they are and where they have been. They can do this safely through their artworks, it helps keep them at a distance and separate from the emotions attached to their stories.

Grief and the Weeping Lass

The Weeping Lass (Scotland)
adaptation of "The Weeping Lass at the Dancin’ Place" :Twelve Black Cats by Sorche Nic Leods
Copyright©Czarnota 2008
No portion of this adaption may be recorded in any form without the author’s permission

There is a place where the young folk go to dance and laugh. Although Mary went there, she was not happy. While the others played at the games of love, Mary sat alone beneath an overhanging bush and wept. Every night it was the same.
Then one night, when the young people were well into there fun, a tall handsome stranger came. All the lasses danced with him, but Mary never noticed he was there. She didn’t notice when the dancing stopped and one by one in pairs and alone, the young people went home, and the stranger stood before her.
"Why does such a young and pretty lass sit alone and weep?"
"I weep for my love Jaime who’s gone off to sea and drowned."
"Well I knew your love Mary, it was months ago he left and it is time to get on with living. Come dance with me."
"I’ll dance with no other than my Jaime and he is gone."
Before Mary could say another word, the stranger took her hand and pulled her to her feet. He turned her in great circles. Little by little Mary looked up until she looked into his face. Well she knew those eyes, that nose. And the mouth she had kissed a hundred times. It was her own true love. Mary was overcome with joy and the two danced into the wee hours to music only they could hear.

But as morning drew near, Jaime said "I must be gone before daylight Mary." He whistled for his horse. A steed black as midnight came to the call.
"Oh no," said Mary. "Now that I’ve found you, I’ll never let you go."
"Mary, the house is cold and dark and small. You cannot come with me."
"But I will," she replied. And he had no choice but to put her behind him on the horse.
Jaime kicked the horse’s side and off they flew across the landscape. Or so it seemed to Mary that the horse’s hooves left the ground. Faster and faster they went until the world was a blur around them and Mary grew cold. She leaned closer to Jaime for warmth but he was cold and wet. And it was not raining!
As quickly as they had begun, the horse came to a halt inside the village cemetery. Mary knew the place for it was here she had erected a stone in memory of her Jaime. He slid from the horse and gave her a hand to help her down. His hand was cold and
pale and when Mary looked into his face she saw the once vibrant rosy cheeks were grey and sunken. Jaime pulled Mary to him and she struggled to free herself.
"Let go whoever you are!"
"I am your love," he said "And now that I’ve found you I’ll never let you go! No longer will you keep me awake with your weeping. No longer will you wet me with your tears."
Mary pulled and pushed and finally freed herself but the plaid shawl wrapped about her shoulders came loose in the deadman’s hands. Mary ran for the gate and he chased her. She could feel him on her heels but she never looked back. Just as Mary crossed the threshold, the sun rose over the trees and she fainted.
When Mary woke, she found herself in a safe warm bed with a fire burning in the kitchen beyond her door. An old couple had found her on the road and now heard her stir.
"You’re awake at last," said the old woman. "Tis good to see the color in your cheeks."
They explained to Mary how and where they had found her and she told them her story.
"Tsk," said the old woman. "We dream such strange things at times."
"Twas no dream," said Mary. "Go to the cemetery and find my shawl, then you’ll see."
It was plain to see there was arguing with her so the man took two of his friends to search in the cemetery. They found a scrap of plaid near a headstone. The stone read "Jaime, Beloved of Mary, Lost at Sea." They tried to pick up the cloth but it was buried in the earth.
They sent for the priest and the old man sent one of his friends to the shed to fetch a shovel. "We’ll dig it up."
And dug they did. They dug and dug until they came to the roots of an old tree that grew nearby.
"Look, it’s tangled in the roots," one man said.
"And more," said another. "It’s tangled in the fingers of a corpse!"
The priest helped give young Jaime a proper burial then they returned the shawl to its owner. Mary pressed it to her face. She breathed in the scent upon it.
It smelled like the earth. It smelled like the grave. Mary wrapped the shawl about her shoulders and went home, never to forget her love but never to weep for her Jaime again.

Grief is a real human emotion, the other side of joy. As with most things in life, we cannot have one without the other. We must have death to have life, night to have day, cold to have warmth. Contrast is the design of life.
Grieving has stages and each person will experience them in different ways and in different order. Some people will go through all stages of grief and others will skip. It has to do with coping skills, severity of loss, and distance from loss. Those at the center of the circle will feel it most and probably take longer to heal, but healing will come. If you worry about how you feel, know that grief is normal and natural and only really becomes a problem when it interferes with normal activity such as eating and sleeping or makes us ill. Even then, you can get help by talking about your grief, telling stories of the wonderful life of the one you lost so that you celebrate and honor all that made that person or pet or job or whatever, valuable. Sometimes it may be necessary to get professional help. Just know you are normal for these feelings. In fact, we should worry more about someone who does not feel this way after loss.
In her 1969 book On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross defines the five stages of grief as Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. These are in a reasonable order of processing but some people will experience them in a different order.
Perhaps the most important thing I have learned about grief is that we do not have to experience it alone. We should not be afraid to allow ourselves the support and comfort of friends and family. If these people are not available to us, we also have clergy, teachers, counselors and many others to be there for us. Grief like life is a shared human experience.

Presence

Today’s lesson in archery class was follow-through. I teach students to anchor the draw in the same place each time for consistency, shoot, and freeze until the arrow hits the target before taking another arrow. Moving too fast makes us less accurate.
We can be so overwhelmed by our many tasks that we forget to be present in the moment and enjoy the fruits of our labors. This is simply going through the motions without presence. It is survival without living fully. Granted, licking a stamp and mailing a letter or washing another dirty dish may not be thrilling, but we can still do it with purpose and with presence. These mundane activities can help us transition into other more difficult tasks if we allow ourselves to use this time to focus only on what we are doing instead of our minds wandering to the past or what is next.
Enjoy those moments in life when you accomplish something, mundane or important, before moving on to the next thing. Listen to the arrow in the air, hear it land, see it quiver, feel the experience in your whole self, then go for the next one.

Courage and Fear

Courage and Fear, both are born from the same place. They begin with not knowing.

Heroes start the journey from that place of naivety, not knowing their own ability or what they might face. Nonetheless they throw themselves into it, as a moth dives into the fire. They cannot be afraid if they have no experience to make them so. “What we don’t know can’t hurt us.” This is the innocence of youth.
Yet on the other side of this innocence is fear of what we do not know. We become heroes when we discover fear and have the courage to surpass it. This takes little effort for some, but most of us will meet with setbacks, those who block us, and our own self-doubt. If we can just push beyond those things, the journey’s path will open before us and we may move forward.
These setbacks are the “riddles” the hero must answer in order to continue.

“Courage is not the absence of fear. It is going forward with the face of fear.” Abraham Lincoln

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.” Eleanor Roosevelt