"Is it possible to slow down the undigested words that are rushing at our minds and fingertips? What would it take for us to first feel our words circulating from the stars through our ears and heart and toes and to catch them rising up from the earth beneath our feet?”

Remember how you felt the last time you finished reading a really good story or poem; the kind that seeped into your soul and warmed the heart like a cup of hot tea, drunk in small, savory sips? Stories can have a healing power that seems to be magical. Our Global Awakin guest, Nancy Mellon, seems to hold the magician’s wand that plucks rhythmic syllables and temperamental consonants out of thin air and weaves them into heart opening words that transcend the rational mind. A teacher, a storyteller, and a healer, Nancy has been on a journey to discover the nourishing power of words since as long as she can remember. In the following interview with Pavi Mehta, Nancy shares unbelievable stories of healing and transformation.

I remember a woman from South Africa that had lost her voice after years of abuse from her husband. She stayed in the hospital for 2 whole years without being able to speak. Finally this young and very intuitive physician came to meet her and he gave her a very special prescription - a volume of Shakespeare and an English dictionary. This woman knew very little English and I think the doctor knew that. He instructed her to read a little everyday and that was all. She did what he said and she became so fascinated with the English language, the flow of words and their meaning that she found that she could speak again. Her voice returned through Shakespearean English!

"We are all made of vibrations that are built into the fiber of our being and these vibrations span eons. The sounds from these vibrations are absorbed into words and sentences and every cell within us recognizes those sounds and is sensitive to those vibrations."

As Nancy embarked on the journey of uncovering the healing power of language, she found herself working in the Wigmore Hippocrates Health Institute and offering a course titled “Creative Mind” for people who suffered from health related ailments. She developed a great affinity for adventurous plot lines! Through this course, students were instructed to take their greatest problem and transform it into an image, whether it was an ogre or some other obstacle in their story. The dynamics of creating those stories within a concentrated period of time led some of her students to experience spontaneous and profound healings.

Teaching that course set Nancy on her path. There was something there and she discovered that different parts of the body actually responded to different kinds of plot lines. By encouraging people to create stories of intention, written for different parts of the body, she could help them to heal.

Research taught Nancy that every organ of the body listens to words and to what lives behind our words. As she poetically describes,
the rhythmic musicality of language streams like blood in our body and soul, warming and lifting our spirits. Our words can command health or disease.

Nancy shared an illustrative example of how a story was literally medicine for the liver. There was a woman that suffered from a chronic liver infection for 7 years. At the end of those painful 7 years and after seeing many specialists, frustration led her to ask, “Why doesn’t this go away!?”

Then something magical happened. This woman met a doctor who talked with his brain tumor everyday for 20 minutes until one day it went away. So Nancy’s friend sat down exactly the same way everyday and spoke with her liver for 20 minutes every morning. She told it stories about its experiences and that it had every right to be upset. She practiced this for 3 months before returning to the doctor that she had seen all those years. After examining and studying her, he exclaimed, "You couldn’t have had Hepatitis B, it’s impossible!" Now she is a professional storyteller that has completely healed from her 7 years of chronic ailment.

On the Awakin call, a caller from Scotland asked Nancy to share anything about the value of storytelling for people who have dementia.

"Storytelling is preventative medicine. In people with so called dementia, there is a breaking down of the sense of self. What is needed is a story that can be heard and sensed by the individual, so that slowly, there is a rebuilding of the self."

Nancy suggested bringing in any tangible object that people could easily relate to, such as a loaf of bread. Encouraging them to share something about the loaf of bread will help them to put back together their memory from within themselves; it is like medicine for their brain waves. Nancy explained that there is a lot that can be reconstituted in the brain through exercise but we give up and say “I have dementia” instead of looking at what’s actually going on in the souls of these people, in the way they’re experiencing their own souls and their relationship with their memories. This kind of story project might help them to regain a sense of hope.

Nancy has also worked as a teacher for young children, committing herself to the love of the spoken and written words. Words woke up within her and she began listening to their quality and visualizing the images that they painted. As a teacher, she understood that words could nourish children in their struggles to grow and to find their true selves.

“On my way to school while sitting on a crowded bus every morning, I wrote poems for my students and spawned images that I felt met my students emotionally and mentally. It’s through this process that I learned to trust my imagination.”

Learning to trust our imagination is something that’s very hard for us to do as we grow into adults and our left brains seem to take over. But Nancy reminded us of the child that is alive in all of us, no matter how old we are in years. She explained that our inner child is layered into our psyche, which is why as adults we still love to hear stories. Even though the adult brain is goal oriented and linear, the way that we live in our ego oriented left brain can bridge into the more imaginative world of the right brain.

“When we’re able to bridge back and forth in this way, we come into the wisdom mind and out of the rational mind; we’re closer to the life body that nurtures our whole self and not just the ego self.”

Our right brain gives us the imagination and vision that we need in order to be ourselves and be resilient human beings. Albert Einstein was a perfect example of this continuous bridging back and forth between the left and right sides of his brain! 

We are all storytellers whether we know it or now. But often times, the stories we tell ourselves aren’t the healing sort and they become our mantra without even realizing it. Stories that focus on fear and violence work on the soul and can erode the natural harmonious spirit that lives within every being. It’s upon us to create a new story that can help us to put ourselves back together and allow our heart to expand in trust, where our essence can shine forth.

Can we heal ourselves and help to heal others through the gift of storytelling?

“When we create a story space where all our faculties are invited to work - our heart, our intuition, our imagination -in the service of another person, a story will emerge and we will feel inspired to bring story as a gift offering to another. Even the most unlikely people can do this.”

Nancy suggests that we create a heart listening space for our friends. By lighting a candle and baking some cookies or serving your favorite tea, you can create the ambiance to offer a healing story. Before your friends arrive, sit for some time in silence and reach out to them with an openness of heart. Then allow a picture to emerge that is truly helpful for this friend or family member or even a problematic person in your life. Invite their spirit into your house and trusting your imagination and the picture that has emerged, keep breathing, sit with it for 2 or 3 minutes, and create a story which takes that image in a positive direction. No matter what happens, the story will have a positive ending. Now imagine handwriting these stories on beautiful paper, rolling it up into a scroll tied with wild grass or rosemary, and offering it as a gift.