STORY SHEPHERDS

If a medicine could heal trauma, restore our humanity, build community, transform reality, lift depression, end isolation, resolve conflict, boost immunity, reduce pain, heal the world, and end war would you take it? This medicine exists. It is stored in our untold stories.

I’m Laura Hope-Gill, the founder of Story Shepherds. I come from a family of doctors and nurses. It was expected that I would “go into medicine.” I chose the path of poetry and storytelling. I always trusted these for healing and found the healing processes they offer rich, beautiful, challenging, and transformative.

For the past decade, with a team of licensed counselors, doctors, nurses, and surgeons, I have been tracking clinical medicine’s discovery of poetry and storytelling as healing modalities under the name Narrative Medicine. It is now proven that while pharmaceuticals, and surgeries are excellent for some ailments, poetry and storytelling are excellent for others.

It is now time to go beyond studies regarding story’s extraordinary efficacy. It is time to experience the awakening, joy, and meaning of telling our stories. It is time to draw our personalized medicine from this limitless, free, and evidence-based source. Engaging the stories of our respective origins and seeing how these stories resonate with tales from around the world provides additional depth of healing. With levity, community, and physical benefits as a bonus, this medicine transforms us in ways we can’t imagine until we are in it. The effects are so remarkable that we then will say “It’s just my imagination.” And it is. We have forgotten what imagination is for.

Story Shepherds are guides of the shadowy and ever-surprising story realm. In my culture, the Irish and Scottish, bardic schools trained poets, storytellers, and doctors together. Healers and tellers who have made this voyage can guide others who can in turn continue this chain of awakening. Bards, scops, and griots have led people through this land since our origins, and we are still doing so. Now, we can do it without this sense of being secondary to science. Stories are science we live inside. We need guides because the world of our interiority operates with a completely different set of gadgets for acquiring wisdom. Insight, reflection, intuition, imagination, and memory play along emotional lines. These aspects of knowledge have grown rusty. A guide can help us get started then witness us as we find our story legs. I call these guides Story Shepherds.

To heal, we go back into our lives and tell. This is what we call shepherding our stories. This is where we pick up where one group of people used Science to devalue our stories and our sacred medicine. It has now, in the form of scientific evidence, given it back by crafting Narrative Medicine. We can return to our stories and our well-being now. We can return to the earth. We can return to being enough just as we are. We all have a place in this story. This story is still being told to us throughout our lives. This is Bardic Medicine.

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Our stories come from the earth. They weave us to it. They guide our journeys and enchant our experiences good and bad. Stories facilitate belonging, friendships, community, and well-being. They invite us into our broken hearts for a reprieve from dwelling in a cold, harsh world filled with judgment. They welcome us back into our sense of playfulness and forgotten aspects of our personalities that the “real world” called foolish and unnecessary. All of it was and is necessary. We are human. We feel emotion. Our emotions give our lives meaning. By exploring our stories we get to become whole once again. We get to be who we are.

Three hundred years ago, the work of great alchemists, Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke of the Royal Society, was misinterpreted by some of my English ancestors when it deemed Math, Science, and Philosophy the only means to finding the truth. The result of this is three-hundred years marked by genocide, actual and cultural, of Indigeneous tribes and nations, destruction of our environment, and concentration of authority into the hands of one minority, the leaders of the British and European Empires. Entirely unaware of Newton and Locke’s metaphysical fascinations and pursuits, the Royal Academy and the British Crown imposed upon all the rest of the global population one narrow view of reality, with death as the price for not adopting it. That narrow view expands now. The revised view of reality resonates with stories and art preserved by wisdom keepers, and it even seems to be emerging through our memories and dreams. We would call ourselves crazy for these memories, of course. We know that our humanity has been pathologized to the degree that we all believe we are broken. We aren’t. We’ve been living without our stories for far, too long. We realize this is our lost treasure, and across fields of study and exploration one thing holds the answer.

storytelling . Welcome to the Story Shepherds, a healthcare for humanity proven to reduce pain, lower blood pressure, alleviate stress, heal trauma, strengthen relationships, regenerate trust in humanity, and to restore faith in our ideas, our feelings, and ourselves. These three hundred years of cold, linear, unimaginative, soulless, control-driven, neurotic, unrealistic, greed-possessed, disrespectful, alienating, and genocidal obsession with eradicating kindness and empathy are over. It’s time to reach back to our roots and return to being people–goofy, inquisitive, passionate, fun, playful, creative, loving, caring, temperamental, sensitive, sweet, doing-our-best people.

Clinical medicine recognizes Narrative Medicine, Expressive Writing, and other story-based modalities for healing and treating some symptoms and ailments, particularly those related to trauma. These can be treated at no or low-cost through a storytelling healing practice. Bardic Medicine is the medicine of soul and story, proven by science but practiced by story shepherds who have ventured into the mysteries and magic of storytelling and can now support others as they make the journey with the support of community, witness, and compassion.