The Four-fold Nature of Impactful Storytelling

Storytelling is the most effective way for human beings to feel better, to come up with new ideas, to get stuff done, and to understand each other and the world. 

There are four different directions that align with the four parts of storytelling, as well as the four seasons, temperaments, steps in the growth cycle, and so many other fours. Experiencing the four directions of down, up, forward, and back, we can better care for ourselves, better gain insights, become more effective in the world, and be able to map the nature of the universe. 

And we do this through storytelling?

Yes, we are homo-narrans, as communication expert Walter Fisher suggests, rather than homo-sapien. 

We are made of stories, and we tell stories in order to find coherence as a species. Human beings like it when our world is coherent.This is why we especially love to orient our world in fours. “Four-ness” is like a sturdy table. Though a tripod can remain upright, the four legs of a table are challenging to topple. I recognize the sexiness of five with its elements and points on a star, the spiritual balance of six, and the esoteric progression of seven, but when we want to make sense and organize ourselves in the world, we are attracted to four. 

The fourness of the seasons is a part of my upbringing, as a citizen of New York State. 

The winter is cold, icy, and a time of resilience. It can be dismal and borderline desperate—and yet we press on. It seems to last forever, and we look for any sign that winter is coming to an end.

And then spring comes like an explosion. It shouts its arrival with crocuses and mud and slush and then black flies. It is a beautiful mess. It is a season of energy and promise and arguments and impossible amounts of cleanup. It seems to last forever, and we look for any sign that the mud will dry up and spring will come to an end.

Summer lands like a biplane with bright sunny days followed by stretches of cold rain. The flowers bloom acre by acre, and gardens produce immense bushels of vegetables and berries and greens, until hot, humid days and nights exhaust us with the almost constant activity. By September we are begging for a cool breeze and crisp apples and looking for any sign that summer is coming to an end.

And then comes Autumn when leaves turn electric orange, pink, purple, and lemon-yellow. Apple and pear festivals happen every weekend, and we delight in good food with enduring friends. We can the summer’s yield and clean out our chimneys, and, as the trees go bare, the ground turns dead gray, and the air seems constantly smoky, we wait and wait with magical anticipation for the first snowfall. And we welcome winter again.

The seasons are all perfectly timed so that we have equal parts gratitude and disgust—bidding good riddance to the old and celebrating the new. We notice every detail in nature because we feel we must. We feel like the season will kill us if we don’t—and it is this elegant balance of the four seasons that is the spine of the storytelling process and aligns with the four directions of down, up, forward, and back. 

1.  Up, air, summer, mental, the content of a story.
2.   Down, earth, autumn, feeling, and the connection with the listener.
3.   Forward, fire, spring, doing, and the motivated change in a story.
4.   Back, water, winter, rest, and the form of a story.

 Fours can be found in storytelling vocality, in attention and story listening, and I use the architecture of the four directions to illustrate the four-fold nature of Restorative Storytelling, Intuitive Storytelling, Collaborative Storytelling, and Dimensional Storytelling. This will be an overview of the four, to be more thoroughly unpacked in separate posts, but the “fourness” is interesting on its own. 

Restorative storytelling™ has been my primary focus for the last 8 years and has been the foundation of our courses and training for kids and adults. 

A program evaluation of a three-month training course was the subject of my doctoral dissertation, and its mission has been taken up by schools, municipalities and businesses around the world. RS prioritizes the somatic experience of the storyteller when reading and responding to the “room” or the listener. When practicing RS, the storyteller pays attention to their presence and the presence of the listener, they consciously use gestures and other forms of body language to meet the listener where they are, they use their voice in order to build connection and treat the storytelling experience like a dialogue. It is an embodied way of communication that recognizes a lot more is being exchanged than the content of people’s speech. Restorative Storytelling promises to restore connection and a sense of wholeness to the listening community. The seven primary tools of RS each have a workbook that can be purchased for 99 cents each. It is ultimately a socially curative practice, resulting in a feeling of trust and safety between the teller and listener, as well as between the listeners in the room. Restorative Storytelling lives in the “down” direction where connections are built, where roots are formed, and where empathy is our primary tool for navigation.

Intuitive Storytelling uses the framework of the energy centers or chakras to access universal wisdom and practical problem solving.

Last year, a small cohort of storytellers explored this approach in a course called, “How to Build a Spaceship” where each participant created an energetic structure for getting answers to big questions. Some wanted the process to manifest in a book, others a school program, and others simply wished to see the big picture of their lives and set a new course. You can take this course as a part of the full library of courses for Adults.

The framework used the seven chakras to illustrate seven different approaches to creating, building, and leveraging a connection to your personal “higher power” whether that is God, fairies, the depths of your subconscious, the collective unconscious or the singularity of space-time. By moving through the seven chakral colors, storytellers set an intention, clarify the mission, create a support structure, access higher wisdom, harvest the energy and resources needed, and then launch. The launch can look like many different things, but one aspect is always the case: the storyteller and their listeners will never see the world and each other in the same way. Revelation and transformation are built into the Intuitive Storytelling process, which aligns with the “up” direction of optimistic possibility, story content, and where higher thinking is our primary way of navigation.

Collaborative Storytelling is predicated on the idea that everything of consequence happens in relationship with others.

This storytelling modality tends to be the most challenging for our isolating times. Social media, digital devices, artificial intelligence, and home delivery have all encouraged isolation and independence over the nourishing gifts of interdependence. Human beings survived for millennia due to our interdependence, so the current trend is unsustainable. We will not remain isolated much longer, and soon more and more people will return to our preferred way of relating, which I call collaborative storytelling. 

People like to tell stories, and they equally enjoy hearing stories of others. We are literally wired to better live in the world through collaborative storytelling. We co-create our world together. In the collaborative storytelling process, storytellers consciously choose transformative qualities like gratitude, savoring, alignment, and fear to make things happen. You can download a list of twelve transformative qualities here. 

When we experience gratitude, our perception changes and therefore our actions change. 

When two people do this with an agreed intention, the outcome becomes far more likely. Fear and isolation are included as transformative qualities because the evidence is clear that these qualities are leveraged every day in politics, business, and entertainment. Fear sells. Isolation has created a multi-trillion dollar economy. Fear and isolation are both qualities used by collaborative storytelling, where the powerful collaborate with the vulnerable to agree on an outcome: you give me your money, your vote, your loyalty. It works. 

It also works to use gratitude and attraction in the same way. We can build a symbiotic world of mutual love and safety by using the transformative power of gratitude alone. We know it works because we have seen it in action. Collaborative Storytelling aligns with the “forward” direction in that it brings change and action and movement. 

Dimensional Storytelling employs the gifts of the other three storytelling modalities, and directs them toward understanding the ways of the universe. 

What is time and how does it work? What happened before the Big Bang? How do we access the mind of God? All the big questions we carry can be explored by opening up our consciousness to higher dimensions, and dialoging with these higher dimensions through dimensional storytelling. Like the seven RS tools, the seven chakral colors of Intuitive Storytelling, and the seven qualities of Collaborative Storytelling, Dimensional Storytelling explores seven dimensions. 

The premise is that in the zero dimension, we are all a part of a singularity—a complete whole. It is in the first dimension that we choose to experiment with individuality, and in the second dimension we form a connection. The third and forth dimension are how we organize content and sequence and the emergent storytelling happens in the fifth and six dimensions. 

The fifth and sixth dimensions are when we see alternate ways of organizing images and moments. 

We often call this daydreaming or having visions or even using our imagination. We are in the fifth dimension when we are no longer held to the here and now, and can explore other places and timelines. In the sixth dimension, we can then see the grid of infinite possibilities and consciously make choices. Here is where we can see the fabric of reality and engage with it. We enjoy eternity in the sixth dimension, and our storytelling invites others into a timeless, seemingly fantastic universe. We are all reassured in the sixth dimension. We “remember” the singularity of all-in-one consciousness and can come away feeling like wizards or superheroes. We see the matrix and choose to do the next right thing, whatever we decide that is. 

I’ve said it many times: the world is made of stories, and the storytellers are the ones that build the world. Using the four directions gives us a structure to intentionally use our storytelling to make the world a better,  more connective and mutually beneficial place. 

Consider collaborating with me and other storytellers who are working to achieve this vision. Reach out and let’s make it happen!