Human beings have always seen the world through the eyes of the storyteller. We have seen our surroundings and our lives as a collection of stories.  This is how we have always best understood the world and how to live within it in balance and harmony.  A story is the universal human paradigm.  It is through stories we best understand one another and ourselves.  That is what the storytellers tribe represents: a way of knowing ourselves and how we are connected to one another.  Join the tribe, share your story, and discover a world without artificial boundaries, a world in which all the answers are found within our collective, developing human story.

The benefit of the tribal space, a community of individuals that operates through a shared vision that informs a “way of being”, is that the dynamic created among individuals is one of safe exchange and interpolation of ideas. The voices of the tribe may be supportive or contrarian, but the rules of engagement are universal: authentic Self is sacred and even spirited exchange ends with mutual understanding and benefit.

The tribe represents a resource for several essential practices of benefit to the authentic Self: analogical inquiry, reciprocal exchange and mythologizing. Each of these functions of the tribe work in conjunction with one another to ensure the continuity of not only social, but individual, identity. Without such a tribal function in our modern social settings, we become reliant on external validators and cultural contexts to define our value and sense of self.

However, these externally defined criteria for self, identity and function may be false criteria, lacking the essence of what it means to be human, as they are created by artificial and non-human social constructs like economy or religion, not for the sake of human development, but for the propagation of those very social constructs.

Though tribal dynamics may seem, at first blush, to reduce diversity and promote homogenization of identity, the inverse is actually true: the propagation of tribes increases social and cultural diversity by ensuring a plurality of human stories. It is these stories, these created myths, these ways of being that shape our social landscape and provide us the means to self-discover using a language that maintains a connection to the universal human consciousness.

The variation of tribes helps the members of the human diaspora to self-express and self-identify, while moving in their own ways toward a collective human expression. That is to say, it is our diverse collection of stories that provides an authentic pathway to the true Self, as opposed to the artificial cultural constructs that can never truly capture human being, because they were created to sustain a decidedly non-human mechanism: culture.

The Work of the Shaman in Tribal Settings

We have positioned ourselves, relative to this growing tribe of storytellers, as mediators and guides, rather than leaders who direct with some manner of positional power. We have long questioned the value of centralized leadership of this type, as it tends to be static, lacking the capacity to evolve with the growing sensibilities of the tribe.

Instead we value the model of the shaman. A shaman, or medicine man (some people prefer this term, as the word shaman is specific to certain cultures), is the individual that represents both the roles of guide and healer. The term essentially translates into “the one who knows”. The shaman is the interventionist that enables and empowers individuals along their journeys, often making sense of the mysteries, patterns, symbols, omens or revelations encountered along the way.

The shaman essentially helps individuals remember who they are and why they have initiated their journeys. The shaman helps connect the individual with the transcendent spaces, bridging the gaps that exist between this space and the other, to help bring back some essential knowledge or perspective (often termed as medicine) that will help heal the individual. This healing is basically self-remembrance, which allows the individual to embrace his or her true self and face life with the determinism that was lacking during a period of forgetting.

We value this role of the shaman because this stance, within the context of our practice, is well-positioned to help you understand the value of your own story toward self-actualization. We seek to employ strategies that will help develop the cognitive tools that you can use to apply complex self-inquiry toward the sustainable practice of self-awareness. We base our shamanic stance within validated methods that stretch across the span of human history, through the universal practice of storytelling.

We utilize the dialectic method and the dialogic process in order to establish the space in which we can have interactions with you to help you uncover or reveal your true, emergent life narrative. The foundational theme of our practice is based in the shamanic practice of helping the individual “return to his origins” and then experience anamnesis, the recovery from memory into a contemporary context and setting. Our method will help you develop the awareness that your true identity, and the context in which it is situated, have histories that you must explore in order to separate the one from the other; that is, to employ analogical thought toward the realization that you are not what your culture identifies you as…you are, instead, the story you wish to tell.