Hi Friend,
For the last few weeks, I’ve shared stories about origin stories - how powerful they are as part of the codes that create and can help change culture, organizations, families, and individual trajectories. I hope I’ve also conveyed, in different ways, how much fun and how satisfying this process of working with origin stories can be, even when working with difficult subject matters.
Now I am explicitly inviting all of you storytellers, world crafters, and remembers to join our origin stories course which starts in about two weeks
What is the Origin Stories Course?
Origin Stories for inter-being is a 10-week, mythopoetic storytelling course where you craft an origin story that is meaning for you — whether that's memoir, familial history, ancestral, organizational, national, mythological or cosmic. It is not a lecture series. It is a creative, participatory, embodied process. I’ve designed this course around a process I’ve developed over many years. We meet you where you are, inviting you deeper into a relationship with a story already living in you.
Our format — six weekly sessions followed by two sessions every other week — gives you a regular creative rhythm (especially helpful to jumpstart your writing process) while also offering spaciousness for stories that need time to breathe and unfold.
I explicitly invite the fantastical as well as the truthful; the generous as well as the courageous.
What this course is NOT:
I don’t expect anyone to come out with a piece that is ready to publish - that’s a different course. 😊
A place to perpetuate the dominant culture’s stories.
A critical writing course - you will receive feedback.
You'll receive:
A warm, aligned community of fellow storycrafters.
Structure, frameworks, and practices to support your creative process.
Accountability and encouragement as your story takes shape.
Room for writing, drawing, oral storytelling, and other forms of expression.
Exercises to engage with ancestors who want to support this kind of storytelling magic.
Embodiment practices to support that which wants to emerge from you.
Deepening into ecological family histories and multi-dimensional lineages.
Strengthening your capacity to work with paradox.
Compassionate feedback on your stories/writing.
A container to support your process of orienting yourself and others during this time.
This course welcomes all kinds of storytellers — not just writers. Comix artists, musicians, filmmakers, pastors, artists… your voices and visions and creativity are needed.
Including those of you who are wondering if you fit in or who are not sure if you have a ‘good enough’ story to tell.
We start with connecting to ancestors (not just your blood lines either!!!) so you don’t have to come in with something all ready to go!
I often work with people who are re-telling family stories. If that’s you, I especially encourage you to participate!
If you are curious but unsure, you might want to come to our informational webinar…. Starting tomorrow!
Why now?
We are living in a moment when origin stories are being actively contested, rewritten, and sometimes deliberately erased. How we tell the story of where we come from shapes what we believe is possible — including for ourselves. Origins can be both close at hand as well as far, far away… and working with them entails working with our capacity as myth-makers as well as truth tellers.
At the same time, people are hungry for stories that connect rather than divide. Stories that hold complexity. Stories that honor ancestors, land, and the living web of relationships we are part of.
And we need them. Our children and grandchildren need origin stories that will help us and them navigate these times.
A note on organizations….
I’ve purposefully designed a framework for this work that can include how organizations tell their own origin story and how it distinguishes itself from and within larger cultural origin stories. That’s because of how powerful this process is for organizations: it impacts identity, internal cultural dynamics, trust building with potential clients, and funding potential.
That said, do feel free to attend our informational webinar for more info!
I hope to see you in the circle this spring!
Many blessings-Sara Jolena
