The Story and the Storyteller
“Our capacity to tell stories that engage, with compassion and empathy, is the engine of change”
Our weekly Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders and allied organizations. Keep checking back for more of these videos here in our blog.
Click the picture above to watch the video.
Abdul-Rehman Malik, an RCC steering committee member, captured and modeled the beauty of storytelling on our community call on April 13, 2021. An award-winning journalist, Abdul-Rehman shared with us the power and empowering nature of stories and even more importantly, the transformative journey of a storyteller.
A starting activity is to consider the story of our retreat centers and organizations.
Questions pondered were:
What is the origin of your organization?
What is the meaning of the name?
How has the space impacted you?
In this quick activity, we learned that we are holders of stories as retreat center leaders and friends. We think of the story changing people, but many people do not realize it is also the space, place, land, and the courage to tell the story itself that is transformative. Retreat centers hold transformative space and story well. In this community call conversation, we discuss that story circles, gathering around the hearth, are the oldest tool of empathy; it is how the human spirit sings.
A question to leave us with:
How can our spaces continue to be more intentional about how we tell stories and empower other storytellers who can change the world?