Storytelling as a Magical Tool
In this week’s ‘Magic on the Inside’ podcast, Sara and Anna talk all about storytelling as a magical tool. Anna is a mythology powerhouse, using all those wonderful stories throughout her magical and everyday life while Sara loves fairytales. Storytelling is an amazing magical tool. You can use storytelling in Tarot and in Astrology, storytelling in your future visioning, in manifestation tools, working out your past and shadow work, creating your future, casting the vision for your future. There is so much that you can do
Storytelling in Tarot
We believe story telling is so useful in Tarot that we have whole unit in our ‘Tarot Throwdown’ program dedicated to ‘Storytelling in Tarot’. It’s one of the best tarot modules and a firm favorite among students.
So many people who read Tarot get really hung up on the exact meanings of the cards, searching for the perfect meaning and textbook definition. But if you practice your storytelling skills and start to look for the story being told in the cards you have pulled it can really help you to read with intuition. If you look at the images in front of you can see they are telling a story. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end, there are characters and interactions between them and the scenes they are in. You can look at your spread like a picture book. As yourself, what is happening in that story? What does it mean for me?
Looking for the stories is a really great way to start to flex your intuitive muscles and really start to trust yourself in what you’re seeing as truth in those cards for you in this moment, as opposed to the textbook meaning of the cards.
Another way of using Tarot to really help your intuition and your creative juices a-flowing, is we like to pull a card and then make up a story from that card. For example, you might pull
‘The Hermit,’ and instead of reading a textbook meaning, make a story;
“Once upon a time, there was a man on a mountain. It was a misty, cool night. All he had was his lantern to guide him.”
And then you pull another card, that could be ‘The King of Cups’;
“Although he felt alone on the mountain, the man knew that his heart was filled with great wisdom that would soon draw others to him.”
Then the ‘Ten of Cups’;
“But first he had to face up to what had befallen him and take some time alone on this mountain to heal.”
And so on, add the next sentence and keep adding to the story. This is great fun and really helps you think about the card in a different sense, but also helps you to tell stories and develop your creativity. It’s a good muscle flex.
Storytelling in Astrology
We also love to use stories in our ‘Expedition Astrology’ course. Anna is one of our astrology teachers and always brings her vast knowledge and love of mythology to tell the stories of planets and the asteroids and how they interact and influence each other.
For Anna, reading Tarot spreads and astrology charts are just like reading stories. To her, as an intuitive being, they read like a pop-up book, like a book flipping pages of pop-ups. Astrology charts can seem complicated at first, but looking at them as a pop up page, full of stories can really help give readings that are intuitive, useful and easy to understand.
Using Storytelling Rewrite Your Past and your Future
Another really powerful way to use storytelling is to enable you to rewrite your past, helping you to understand and work on your blocks and shadows, and to rewrite your future, manifesting the life you want for yourself.
You can write letters to yourself in the past and in the future or write a story about how you are in the future. For example, in five or twenty years from now, or even next year or next month, what are you doing? How are you feeling?
This practice is so useful in exploring where you want to be and what you need to do to get there.
The Power of Story Telling and Creativity
If you’re not being creative, it can be really challenging to bring things into your life. All manifestation practices rely on creative energy, to be able visualize and feel what you are creating and putting out there. Working with storytelling, such in Tarot, can help you to breed that creative energy.
You might also start to understand where you are interpreting something in a shadowy sort of way and start to see a recurring theme. For example, if you are making a story with Tarot cards and keep seeing or writing that the character is fearful and this prevents them from moving forward, this can show you that you are a little hung up on fear right now and need to do some shadow work to find out why and move and blocks it could be causing for you.
When you are doing a Tarot practice, or any kind of practice, we tend to sometimes attach to a shadowy aspect, or a positive aspect, of something when there is both a shadow and a light. So, if you find you are always telling your stories based on either a very positive or more challenging aspect of the card every time, try and challenge yourself to try to do the opposite next time that it comes up. This helps you to get a deeper understanding of yourself and the aspects of yourself that are hidden in your subconscious.
You can use storytelling in your everyday life. For example, if you are facing financial choices, like asking for the raise you’re afraid to ask for, or facing a big decision, like ending a relationship, you can ask yourself, “If I was the person that already did this, what would they tell me?” You can explore different versions of yourself in the alternate futures and story-tell your way through it.
A great way to manifest something you want into being is by storytelling as the person who already has the life you want and has already done what is needed to get there.
Using the Magic in your Favorite Stories
As well as making our own stories, we can use existing stories we love to help us. Fairytales have so much magic in them and so many lessons for us.
You can use these in growth work, seeing yourself as a character in a fairytale or in a mythological story. understanding the progression and lessons your character learns in there and applying them to your life.
It’s really useful and interesting also when to look at both sides of the story because oftentimes, the villain is portrayed one way and the hero is portrayed another way. But if you are looking at it through the lens of the villain, you can see a lot more about why they are the way they are and do what they do. You may have to rewrite the story in your head from the little bit of background information you find but this can be another really helpful way of gleaming new lessons from your favorite stories.
For example, Medusa is usually portrayed as the monster, but if you look at it from the other side and from her perspective you can ask yourself, ‘Is she, in fact, the monster? What kind of lessons can I you learn by looking her story form her own eyes, rather than through the storyteller’s lens?
Get your creative thoughts going by journaling as if you were the other person in that story and how that might feel. This kind of free writing is so good for developing your storytelling and so good for shadow work. When you take the structure away from something creative, you might uncover something that you didn’t realize. Then, in your own life, it becomes much easier to be able to put yourself in somebody else’s position and realize something you didn’t when you were looking at a situation just through your own monocle.
Sarah Milne, Expedition Astrology co-teacher, The Sisters Enchanted
Download this episode’s transcript here
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