Sacred Storytelling
On letting go of the stories we think we need to tell
Stories worth telling need more than drama.
They need transformation.
Twenty years ago (in my 20’s), I understood this in my bones, looking back at a life wild enough for television.
But what I didn't know then was that the real transformation wouldn't come from crafting the perfect story - it would come from letting my stories go.
Almost two decades of seeking, hiding, and remembering later, I discovered writing's deepest medicine: every page reveals exactly where we're still holding on, every scene shows us where we're still trying to prove something. In the gentle unfolding of story, our hearts crack open to truth.
I thought I was gathering stories
like seashells on a sacred shore
not knowing the tide
would pull me under
teaching me to breathe
in the depths
of my own forgetting
until every shell
revealed
itself as a mirror
Some stories belong to the dream realm.
Some experiences are too sacred for telling.
They belong to the mystery,
to the spaces between words,
to the silence where hearts remember.
The hero's journey belongs to the tree of knowledge -
good and evil,
right and wrong,
my truth versus yours.
But the healer's path?
That belongs to the heart's own knowing:
I am also this.
I am also that.
I am both shadow and light,
both lost and found,
both storyteller and story.
This is heart medicine:
Not in proving our truth
but in surrendering our need
to prove anything at all.
Writing itself becomes the medicine. Sometimes, not in the stories we set out to tell, but in how the very act of writing reveals what we're ready to release. Each draft becomes a doorway, each revision an invitation to let go of one more attachment, one more need to be right, one more cry for redemption.
Until finally we're free to create not from wound but from wonder, not from need but from love.
This is when our stories truly serve - when they're no longer ours to hold, but medicine for all hearts ready to remember their own wisdom.
Love, Oriya