KAPA‘A — What dynamics are at work in great stories and how can people learn to tap into these to bring healing? This is just one of the questions posited by storytellers Ashley Ramsden and Nancy Mellon in their book,
KAPA‘A — What dynamics are at work in great stories and how can people learn to tap into these to bring healing? This is just one of the questions posited by storytellers Ashley Ramsden and Nancy Mellon in their book, “Body Eloquence: The Power of Myth and Story to Awaken the Body’s Energies.” Ramsden and Mellon will teach “The Eloquence of the Body” workshop” Nov. 6, 7 and 8 in Kapa‘a.
“I use storytelling as a healing art by using the basic structure of the story to build a story in picture language so any problem can be addressed,” said workshop leader Mellon.
As a writer, therapist and teacher, Mellon works to support family and community expression through the arts. She started a School of Therapeutic Storytelling in 1996 offering experiential training in story making and telling as a transformative process.
Hosting the workshop is Ala Palamea Creative Arts Studio art therapist, Kim Murriera, who uses “Body Eloquence” to expand upon her own work as a therapist.
“I’ve always wanted to combine body work with art,” she said. “(The authors) see the body and art as not separate. To see how art can companion physiology leads us into our bodies in new ways.”
Through a blend of Western and Eastern medical perspectives, myth and storytelling the workshop will help participants develop new insight into the body.
“We’ll be working with the part of the body that helps us find our way into depth and stillness,” Mellon said. “What part of the body is supporting our desire for purification? What part supports athletic prowess and perfectionism? Bring a notebook. We will work with story in many different ways.”
Teaching beside Mellon is co-author Ashley Ramsden, founding director of the School of Storytelling at Emerson College in Sussex, England. Ramsden travels worldwide telling stories and has performed at such notable festivals as the Sydney Opera House Mostly Mozart and San Francisco Storytelling Festivals. Murriera studied with Ramsden at Emerson College.
“I saw him at Christmas do a one-man show of “Scrooge,”” recalled Murriera. “He played all the characters and that’s when I realized I was experiencing a master.”
Through the therapeutic expertise of Mellon and the depth of storytelling experience of Ramsden, participants will be guided into a deeper listening that is not intellectual so much as it is comprehensive, Mellon said.
“The body is intensely spiritual and intensely responsive to imaginative activity,” Mellon said. “A story can help us and wound us. We can carry (a family story) like a grain of irritating sand and with creative effort turn it into a pearl. It can be a story that is carried five generations and it takes just one person to take hold of it with creative determination and turn it around.”
Personal stories will be transformed into myth and fairy tale. In Murriera’s experience with clients, creating a story provides perspective.
“By taking our personal stories into metaphor or creating a fairy tale it objectifies the personal by allowing you to stand back and see it objectively.”
“Body Eloquence” shows how personal and communal stories are inscribed in the body and provides alternative structures for the reader to build their own story.
“Once you have the fundamental structure of a story (and the book is full of structures) you hold on to it like a surf board and off you go — the streaming of the healing forces can then work,” Mellon said. “The healing forces will take us down into our deepest and most traumatized parts of our psyche with marvelous efficiency to be seen and experienced in a different way.”
The three day workshop is $205 if paid in full by Nov. 6. Individual classes are: Friday, $15; Saturday and Sunday, $105 each. To register and for directions call, 346-5967 or e-mail kiminkauai@yahoo.com.
Ramsden will also be performing at 7:30 p.m Thursday and 7:30 p.m Nov. 12 at Bikram Yoga, Kapa‘a. Tickets are $10.
Want to go?
What: Eloquence of the Body Workshop
When: Nov. 6, 7 and 8
Where: Kapa‘a
Contact: Kim Murriera, 346-5967
