• I encourage you to check out my book, Some People You Will Always Love: Finding the Stories that Satisfy Your Soul.
  
  The stories in Some People You Will Always Love are simple, true stories of the day-to-day that will return you to the enchantment of your own life and your own stories. This book makes celebrating your life through story an accessible, exciting process. The simple but powerful exercises at the end of each chapter will help you to find the stories that satisfy your soul. You will put the book down knowing that you, too, are a storyteller.


• It is the loveliest, most fascinating and fun adventure to have a coach guide you as you discover your new story. My offer to you as a reader of this special report is a free ...
...

You are a storyteller.  Your stories are powerful. Your stories will come.  Take to heart the words of Barry Lopez in his book, Crow and Weasel:

Trust yourself, your seeing, your knowing. Gather in groups to tell stories about your journey. Body stories. Time (or lack of it) stories. Mother stories. Heart stories. Health stories. Menopause stories. Love stories. Each voice is unique, yet each echoes the other until we stand together with shared ...

Your stories don’t have to be literal.  You may depart from verbatim fact to access the truth of being.  In other words, use the truth of your experience, of how you look at the world so that you tap the universal message about what it is to be human within the story.  Recreate the scene, even if you don’t remember the exact details.  The story will take off on its own.  The characters will do what they want to do.  Go with that.

For example, you remember a blue cup in the china cabinet that stood in the corner of your grandmother’s dining room.  You can take the cup and create a story around it. Who drank from it most often? Tell about that person. Maybe there is a story in how the ...

This is a very important distinction. I am not advocating wallowing in your drama. When we think we are our stories, it’s a dead end street that will take you into a narrow and numbing old age quickly. What I am asking is that you lift yourself out of the old drama and look with new eyes at who you are in the world. Stories transform when we realize we are not our stories, but instead, that we can learn from them about what it is to be human.  Keep asking questions like these: What has a particular loss taught me? What did it take to make it through a hard time? How were you able to love in ways you never thought possible when you were younger? Who is that strong soft woman who keeps emerging through it all?

A good story has a...

Your body was made to move, touch, taste, see, feel, laugh, cry, holler, breathe deeply and love. Use your body to unlock your stories.  Your body will release the stories carried in its bones, its blood, its strength, its injured muscles, its aches, its quickness, and its slowness.  Your body will tell you because it is wise and it always tells the truth—if you listen.  Your inherent beauty will come forth if you are willing to see.

If you don’t listen to your body, you are not alone.  Our culture does not encourage it.  Our bodies may gently whisper, “Rest,” “Stop,” “Get more exercise,” “Love me.”  We rarely pay attention, however, until they whop...

Stories tell us about ourselves. From them we can learn what our passions are, our themes, our obsessions, and our essential values—if we’re awake.  Then, when life demands whatever it does of us, we may go forth, enchanted by our stories, into the unknown to meet our challenges, delight in the magic, wrestle with our losses, and design new futures.

Your stories need not be heroic. Simple stories of the day to day return us to the enchantment of our own lives.  They are explorer stories.  As Pat says, “There is no time off.  It is all here in the moment.  Even the littlest things can make a big impact—if we’re awake.”  If we’re not, we wait for someday, hoping to ...

According to Angeles Arrien, anthropologist, storyteller, and author, when someone came to an indigenous healer with dis-ease, the healer would ask these four questions:

• When did you stop singing?
• When did you stop dancing?
• When did you start being uncomfortable in the sweet territory of silence?
• When did you stop being enchanted with the stories, especially the stories of your own life? 2

The many responsibilities of midlife, life changes, physical changes including menopause and relationship changes, can all create a sense of dis-ease. Therefore, it’s important to take a closer look at each of these questions:

• When did you stop singing?

Metaphorically speaking, when did you stop using your voice to carry your ...

With so much cultural attention on youth, physical perfection and self-help for body, mind and even spirit, it is easy to think that we are always just a grab away from getting better.  Then we get “better” and find there is further to go.  But there comes a time, even if we have had some bad breaks in our lives, even if we have had dis-ease (in the sense that anything that makes us uneasy is dis-ease), that we notice we are whole, and perhaps ...