Story Foraging with Heart Thinking

Story foraging is the ability to find or create emergent content for a specific situation or purpose.

Human beings, being complex, are full of surprises and contradictions. When a storyteller wants to deliver the most effective and useful content to someone, we enter the multitudes of the listener, and use story foraging to find it. This tool leverages complexity rather than avoids it, by leaning into a new kind of thinking, and by tracking the content with a new paradigm of organization.

Our thinking is changing.

For quite some time now we have been developing rational thought as the premium kind of thinking. Rational thought looks at the world using logic, evidence, and systematic evaluation in order to solve problems and make decisions. We developed our rational minds over thousands of years in order to navigate an increasingly complicated world full of electronics, border disputes, tax schemes, and ways to measure the universe. We have needed and continue to need our rational minds, but more recently we have been quietly developing a new kind of thinking.

Heart thinking is intuitive and body-based, where the priority is empathy, compassion, attunement, and coherence.

It is where Restorative Storytelling, and other forms of connection and community building live. Heart thinking helps us with the complex because sensing rather than measuring is the primary modality. Rudolf Steiner wrote often about heart thinking as new brain that is more attuned to the spiritual realm, allowing the thinker to access the cosmic realm.

For the purposes of this book and process, we will see Heart Thinking as a way of finding stories. We will sense our way toward the right story by using the tools in the previous books: authentic presence, intentional gesture, and story listening in particular. We will let our bodies access the exponentially larger wealth of information stored in our subconscious mind, and then steer us toward transformative content by way of feelings, inclinations and our imagination. 

The conscious mind cannot store a lot of information.

Out of the 11 million bits of information that hit us every second, only 30 or 40 bits are conscious. That isn’t very much. Subtle bits of information like facial expressions, vibes, intuitions, minute details heard, smelled or seen will usually go straight to our subconscious mind and body where they sit and wait to be expressed in the form of “hunches” or “gut feelings.” The story foraging tool creates a dialogue with those gut feelings.

Left as a dialogue, story foraging can spread out quickly. This is why we need an equally emergent tool to help sort through the data to form a coherent story. This is the golden thread. 

In Restorative Storytelling, the “golden thread” is closer to a mushroom than it is a “through-line” or anything sequential.

A mushroom is the fruit of the fungal mycelium that lives under the soil. Think of the threads of mycelium as all the information and images we harvest using heart thinking. There is a lot of it, and it is all over the place connecting this tree with that fern with that rotting log. The mycelium is the neural network of the forest letting every living thing know what is happening and where help is needed. 

Mushrooms are felted mycelium. They are banded together, dense threads of this mycelium and essential expressions of the full network. They are the emergent ideas and images that the mycelium wishes to express and make known. This is how the subconscious mind “fruits” ideas into the conscious mind. Those mushrooms are dense images that shimmer to us like gold. And when there are several of them, they form a thread. This is the golden thread. 

Its a tricky metaphor, so I’ll summarize:

Heart thinking is what we use to delve into the subconscious mind/body to harvest emergent and transformative content. The golden thread picks certain images and highlights them by making them conscious. Those certain images are the framework of an emergent and transformative story. They are directions on how to meet this unique moment and audience. 

The tool is not so much the seeking, but avoiding the dismissal. 

We get tons of intuitions, gut feelings, and inclinations all day long. This is the body asking you to use heart thinking. If we engage with it, try to listen and give it attention, we can be flooded with information. So then we wait for the mushrooms. They will emerge. They will appear. Then all we do is forage. We collect.

We already do it, this tool merely brings form to it. We consciously surrender to the moment, pay attention to what's happening, respond authentically by talking out loud—by telling a spontaneous story. Then we keep repeating the steps until the story either resolves or we just stop talking. And as is the case with much of Restorative Storytelling, we trust that it is working. We trust that this golden thread has a unique, healing, transformative impulse specifically for this group of people in this moment, in this environment.