I spoke with Jim Brule’. Jim is a Maggid, which is a traditional storyteller who tells stories of healing, hope, and transformation. But, I first want to talk a bit about storytelling. None of us are strangers to the practice of hearing and telling stories; we’ve been hearing stories since the day we were born and often even before that. We all love to listen to a story told by a good storyteller. For me, it wasn’t until graduate school that I realized how powerfully stories can define us, and how we can allow stories to change the way we understand the world around us.
“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”
Patrick Rothfuss, author
In fact, when we tell stories to our kids we are contributing to the development of their morals; we are sculpting their values into something that resembles the way our own parents sculpted ours. Just re-read some of the fairy tales that we listened to and read as kids. Read some of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales and you should be able to see how those works may have contributed to the German national identity. Or read Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” or even watch some of our modern fairy tales, like Frozen and Moana. These stories instill values and morals into our kids, and into us, parents, as we tell them. You can very easily find themes of gender equality, gay rights, and warnings about having too much political power.
Politics
And the stories we tell our kids often align with the beliefs and values underlying our political ideologies. Psycholinguist George Lakoff writes about the ways in which our current political leaders have become skilled at weaving the language of liberal and conservative worldviews into their public discourse, and how that language becomes so deeply engrained into the teller and the listener that the transmission of political values has become an art form.
In fact, it is impossible to have a transformative discussion with someone on the opposite political spectrum unless you understand the etiology, the silent meanings, of the words used by your opponent-storyteller. The only way we are going to win an argument with our political opposite is to use their own language, which carries generations of secret meaning meant to silently deliver deeply held beliefs, values, and morals. In fact, the power of stories to inform complex systems of thought is reflected in the fact that at a meeting in 2019 of the Annual Society of Neuroscience they held a minisymposia devoted to the topic of storytelling.
Neurology
I don’t want to make this too much about neuroscience (although Jim will speak briefly about this), and I certainly don’t want to make this about politics. But it reminds me why I love the art of storytelling. A good story affects us cognitively, neurochemically, and emotionally; it affects our values and morTine these ideas in action. And stories serve as hosts in the transmission of those values and morals to our children and to future generations.
Today’s Guest: Jim Brule’
Jim Brule’ is a Maggid, which is a traditional Jewish narrator of transformational stories. He is a teller of stories that inspire growth and change in the listener. Jim is also a Clinical Psychologist by trade and is actively training others to become transformational storytellers. Head over to TransformationalStorytelling.org to learn more about Jim’s work as a Transformational Storyteller. Here’s my discussion with Jim Brule’. And stick around until the end of our discussion when Jim offers a story of transformation and hope.
