The Secret Storyworld

Let Go of the Story You Planned to Find the Story that is Waiting for You

It begins with a conscious entrance into the Storyworld

Narrative stories like the Hero’s Journey are actually a cycle — a pathway that traversed from beginning-middle-end.

Seed-Fruit-Harvest.

And Being-Doing-Having.

By definition, a cycle is a series of events or processes that repeat again and again, always in the same order. Winter smoothes the path for Spring every year. Every ending brings forth new beginnings. Death brings new life. The earth turns and the sun sets and rises again.

Storyspinning empowers us to charge into the cyclical patterns of our own lives, knowing that a better chapter is waiting on the other side of the hard one.

A previous season might have brought the rough terrain of challenge, heartbreak, or even tragedy. And our irrepressible life force pulls our eyes toward the horizon to consider what awaits us beyond this mountainous terrain if we have the Daedalus-like courage to craft wings and fly towards it. Perhaps there are unseen allies, mentors, and strategic partners just around the bend in our journey.

Many of us long for a new story — a better story — than the one we are collectively living. As we each rise on our handcrafted wings towards those new horizons we discover new stories and new opportunities, and the tools to craft wings for each other.

We turn life goals into storytelling games.

• Imagining and then inhabiting characters that help us to shift our identity to become the character who can help change the story for the better.
• Writing stories collaboratively with our fellow storyspinners.
• Escaping the limitations of ordinary reality while developing real-life social skills that we can then take back and share in our life and world.

We use magical rules that honor the cycles and seasons to govern our interactions. In the safety of this container, players explore, improvise, and co-create a new world story. These rules are agreed upon, and we know that we can be flexible to change them when we discover that they are limiting rather than providing a safe container for the game to be played.

All of us in these times feel a little inadequate to deal with the complexities of our world. It brings a sense of exploratory play if we knew that we were inhabiting the storyline of a superhero or a wizard steeped in magic. Our powers, real and imagined, bring new storylines of possibility.

These stories are creative, rule-bound forms of fun where scenes are created in real-time and success requires teamwork and trust.

These activities give us permission to play, drop our inhibitions, and try on new personas. They let us escape into another world for a little while, all the while spinning the stories that weave together our ordinary extraordinary lives

This is how we write the Secret Storyworld.