Stories We Live

Welcome to “Stories We Live”, a place to explore the myriad uses of personal story and narrative to promote healing and conversation. Included below are personal stories, reflective narrative accounts of the experience of telling and working with personal story, and thoughtful observations and explanations of how personal stories are used to help create occasions of healing for self and others.

We welcome your reflections on what you find here. We are eager to hear how these and other stories have evoked memories or hidden stories within you or a listener. We would also appreciate your contributions of a personal story or experience working with story in your healing work, whether it is in a formal healing setting or an informal interaction.

We encourage you to use these stories and commentaries as examples to help you create and use your own personal stories and/or to develop approaches to using personal story in your healing work.  However, we ask that these stories not be performed, recorded or reused for any commercial purpose without specific permission from HSA and the author.

Facing My Fish

Facing My Fish

DIVING IN THE MOON HONORING STORY, FACILITATING HEALING ©Lani Peterson “There’s no way you’re gonna make me do this thing. No way.” I looked out across the seated group of eight adolescent girls. Their high school guidance counselor had referred them to this after school “Finding Your Voice” storytelling workshop. Most of the girls were …

Facing My Fish

E Pakeha!

By Gaye Sutton ©1998. Moana Huaana was gorgeous, and when we were in Year Eight, at the old Porirua School on the edge of the mudflats where the City now stands, gorgeous was beginning to matter in a new way. Moana had a dark cloud of wavy hair, flashing eyes, and skin like Manuka honey. …

E Pakeha!

Waving Back

Waving Back

by Allison Cox ©1997. A few years ago, I traveled with my two teenage daughters to Montana where we had once lived. We were so busy visiting old friends that it wasn’t till we were on our way out of town to go back home that we finally drove over to see our old house …

Waving Back

Dancing With Dad

By Gail Rosen © 2013. It had been a year since my father died. It was a rough year. He’d been sick for a long, long time and I found myself grieving not only his death, but all the years in which our relationship was limited and shaped by his illness. I found myself talking …

Dancing With Dad

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