If you’re new here, Story Work is the name of my current book-in-progress. It describes a process of reflecting, reclaiming, and reimagining the stories of our lives. It involves looking at your life experiences as creative material that you have the power to shape.
The weekly Story Work topics cover universal life themes with references from literature, philosophy, science, and spirituality; offering perspectives that spark ideas for personal growth and creative expression.
Paid subscribers receive Story Work exercises every Sunday night at 8 pm et.
Hi everyone,
Last week we finished Masks We Wear, and it’s time for a new story work theme for the next few weeks. I want to share an exercise with you called The Tree of Life. You may have come across a version of it before. I discovered it in Retelling the Stories of Our Lives: Everyday Narrative Therapy to Draw Inspiration and Transform Experience by David Denborough. You can find more of his work on The Tree of Life methodology here.
If you’ve taken my memory journaling workshop before this is a bonus exercise that I always share at the end. (By the way, the memory journaling workshop is our next quarterly subscriber workshop and it’s coming up in July.)
The Tree of Life concept is designed to help individuals of all ages process life experiences in a generative, hopeful way. It’s a twist on the familiar concept of a family tree, where the tree is a visual metaphor representing life and the various elements that connect a person’s past, present, and future.
The insights we discover from the memories, narratives, and stories that come up through this exercise are full of context for our healing, discovery, and growth.
So we’ll take this exercise step-by-step over the next few weeks, journaling about the stories that come up as we go.