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Michelle talks about fairy tales and how they can help us to heal.
I don’t understand what fairy tales are, exactly. What are they and why are they important?
I think of fairy tales as “enchantments” that have been spun with the express purpose of revealing the inner workings of nature. They use imagination to take us to another world so that when we come back, we’ll have a better understanding of the one we’re in. The Wizard of Oz is a modern fairy tale. The story explores the longing to be somewhere else, over the rainbow, anywhere but home. At this time of not being present, when so many of us are multi-tasking and talking on the cell phone while buying groceries, the story may have more relevance than ever.
There are common features to “fairy tales”—you meet larger-than-life characters who reflect aspects of our own selves. Kings and Queens may reveal our ruling, masculine and feminine natures. Wizards and witches cast spells and utter curses that throw us off course and cause bewildering losses. Allies introduce us to wondrous new possibilities. The whole landscape of enchantment is speaking to us the way a powerful dream might speak.
I spent a long time walking around these enchantments, trying to figure out how to get into the “kingdom within,” as it were. I’ve learned that there isn’t one way in. The way into these stories is made by each person who approaches them. What is it in The Wizard of Oz, for example, that stays with you? If you were to take that question to heart, and, say, write a poem, or just note what you see in the scene, you might find that the scene becomes a mirror of your own soul. Let’s say I see Dorothy clicking her ruby shoes, uttering the mantra, “there’s no place like home.” As I write out what I’m seeing, I might start to tear up because I realize that’s me. I’ve always been searching for home out there, when it’s been with me all along, standing under me, in my own under-standing.
The folk and fairy tales that we still tell from the past have survived generations of oral transmission. Stories like Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk, Beauty and the Beast have traveled a long way to come to us. I think of them as ancestral gifts, communal dreams. The authors, as William Blake said, “are in eternity.” They express our deepest, most poignant experiences in characters that are colorful, and plots that are safely embedded in another world. Terrible, wicked things can happen and we can walk around the most monstrous events and characters, and ask, Why do good things happen to bad people? What is the nature of evil? How do good intention and a loving heart survive such cruel injustice? What enduring thing is wrought through all of this?
How can a fairy tale help me to heal?
Most fairy tales are not what you would call “success stories.” The plot gets set into motion because something unexpected happens and it’s often terrible. In The Handless Maiden, a miller’s daughter gets sold to the devil. Cinderella’s beloved mother dies. Rapunzel gets taken by a witch as soon as she’s come out of her mother’s womb.
When you’re reading the stories, you know the ones that speak to you because you feel the wound. Maybe you haven’t lost your physical mother, like Cinderella did, but you feel the loss of mother love. What does that mean to you? Where does that grief come from? Your interaction with the story can help you to understand that grief, and perhaps see the possibilities that come out of your engagement with it. You might, for example, be led to do some work in the community that calls you to express your own mother love, and bring here what you have felt is missing in our world.
Some of the tales take us down into some pretty grim stuff but they also carry us to the other side. If you’re willing to step into the characters’ shoes, and feel their wounds, you’ll also gain access to their revelations and recoveries. Fairy tales are good for our mental health, and that’s been known for a long time. As Richard Stone said in his book, The Healing Power of Storytelling,
In Hindu medicine, fairy tales are used metaphorically to effect changes in persons suffering from mental afflictions. It is hoped that by contemplating the tale, the sufferer may find a path through and beyond the emotional disturbance. Hindu physicians understand that a story can work upon the psyche in mysterious and incomprehensible ways. The tale functions as a koan, a guide, a model, and a teacher to the listener, transforming a stuck mental process into one that flows like a story does from a beginning to a conclusion. If the protagonist in the story can find peace and tranquility at the end of the proverbial rainbow, there is hope for all who listen who have lost themselves along the way.
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