…to reclaim our voices, express our truth, shed negative conditioning, identify what calls us, become who we yearn to be, awaken our vision, attract support, connect us with allies, and mobilize change… 

In this excerpt from the award winning book, Nature, Culture and the Sacred, Nina Simons shares her learning about how the stories we tell shape our world. When we reclaim our narratives, we reclaim our power to create a future rooted in solidarity, empathy, and transformation.

Nina Simons is Co-founder and Chief Relationship Officer at Bioneers and leads its Everywoman’s Leadership program. Throughout her career spanning the nonprofit, social entrepreneurship, corporate, and philanthropic sectors, Nina has worked with nearly a thousand diverse women leaders across disciplines, race, class, age and orientation to create conditions for mutual learning, trust and leadership development. 

Excerpted from Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership written by Nina Simons, edited by Anneke Campbell. Copyright © 2022. Used with permission of the publisher, Green Fire Press. All rights reserved.

Women’s oppression and the degradation of the ‘feminine’ in all its forms has been enabled, perpetuated, and strengthened by silence, shame, and isolation. When we contemplate the waves of women’s liberation and rights movements over time and throughout different parts of the globe, we can see that they are always preceded and combined with women getting together and sharing their stories. 

It’s only when we stop being silent and start to speak and make our voices heard that real change starts to happen. It is no exaggeration to say that when a woman speaks her truth, the world changes. As Ursula K. LeGuin, the late great poet and novelist, says: “We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.” 

A cognitive linguist focused on political change, George Lakoff studies how we respond to stories and how our behavior is influenced by the narratives and metaphors we use. His research strongly suggests that we humans are hard-wired for story. That means that once we’ve heard a story and our hearts and minds have wrapped around it, no amount of facts to the contrary will get us to let go of that story. We environmentalists and social justice activists often assume that if we present the facts we can change people’s minds, but it’s become clear that the facts are not nearly as sticky or convincing as stories are. Only a more compelling story can alter people’s prevailing narrative. 

The author N. Scott Momaday said: “We live in a house made of stories.” Stories are the seed forms of culture we carry around within us. Internalized, they define how expansively or tightly we offer the gift of our lives to the world. We decide how far we can go, how large a stand we’re willing to make, or what risks we’re willing to take, based upon the stories we tell ourselves. 

Sometimes these stories that help define us stem from our family, culture, and social conditioning, and we carry them unwittingly, unaware of how they shape our lives, so it is crucial that we do the work of unpacking and making conscious the stories we tell ourselves. 

About 10 years ago, I began unearthing my own hidden stories, and discovered that I thought of myself as the woman behind the man (and, as you may have heard: behind every great man is a woman, rolling her eyes). It was shocking to realize how self-limiting my inner narrative was. I was horrified to discover that this story or belief had unconsciously embedded itself within me. I asked other colleagues whether any of them — including my husband and partner — saw me that way. They did not. Once I understood that it was only my own story and not reflected by others around me, I understood that I held the keys to my own liberation. This insight expanded my definition of leadership, and an awareness of the centrality of stories has informed and guided my path ever since. 

Sometimes stories can help us to reconnect with emotions that have been banished or anesthetized. Given the scope of the losses we face, with species extinctions happening at an unimaginable rate, anger, loss, powerlessness, and grief are totally appropriate responses. Culturally, however, we have no rituals, no safe places to express those anymore. 

Stories can reopen us, allowing us to feel our emotions in a healthy way so that we can risk casting aside our numbness to respond to these crises from an awakened and alive place. Those kinds of stories are needed to heal our relations with our selves, each other, and this endangered, sacred Earth that is our home. We tend to be far more adept at resisting what we don’t want than articulating a future story of what we yearn for with all our hearts. To paraphrase Yogi Berra: “If we’re not careful, we’re going to end up where we’re heading.” I believe the need for a clear vision of where we want to go is essential to help us connect with and inspire a broad range of people, and to help us develop the stamina and persistence we will need in the years ahead. Much of Bioneers’ emphasis over the years has been to inspire people to act on behalf of a future they want, to understand how interdependent all the issues confronting us are, and to highlight those stories that can motivate us to help build the sort of movement of movements we now need to save our species from its own worst impulses. 

It’s vital that we tell stories of a future that’s believable, emotionally accessible, sensually connectable, and that we passionately want. I agree with Charles Eisenstein that we’re in a time “between stories.” There’s a story of fear, separation, and scarcity, based upon domination, ranking, and greed. It’s got a long and bloody history, and we’ve all had lots of practice adapting to it. 

The emergent story is one of solidarity, of relatedness, of empathy and equity, giving and sharing. It includes meaningful rituals to mark changes and to form new relationships and life passages, respect, and appreciation for diversity and for the sacredness of all life, and operates on principles of inclusion and mutuality. This new culture will simultaneously draw from the best of humanity’s ancient wisdom and the most positive emergent new ideas. It’s a story of the relationship economy, not one based upon exploitation and transactions. This story has at its foundation the shifting of focus and priority in our societies from counting things to mapping connectedness. It’s the story of a security that’s based upon love, rather than material acquisition. 

We’ve learned that neither fear nor threat can change people’s minds or behavior. It’s having a more enticing story — a narrative that speaks to our hearts, that describes a future we would all wish to live in, one that we all want to be invited into. Oh, I want to live in that story. Yes, I want to contribute to that future, that vision that someone just so beautifully evoked in their poetry or song. That’s the world I’m motivated to give my time, resources, and love to co-creating. 

Stories are also vital to mending the false separations, the pigeonholing that our society is so patterned to reinforce. They can enhance our empathy, our capacity to imagine walking in another’s shoes. Most of us yearn for intimacy and deep relationship. Really listening to others’ stories and sharing some of our own are among the most effective pathways to transforming our cultures and growing deep connections. They work on us through identification with the storyteller, connecting us with those we might not normally see or hear. They are medicine for our false isolation, a way to forge connection and community and help shift our course. 

Jensine Larson’s global media project, WorldPulse, connects women from around the world to share their stories and create networks of mutual support. It’s an example of just the sort of story-based initiative we need. Fortunately, WorldPulse is not alone. In the last few decades, whole new bodies of story-based practices, some based in ancient indigenous ways, some emerging from newly integrated understandings of neuroscience and psychology, have emerged. The practice of “Council,” of which there are many variants, and a slew of hosting and convening approaches and methods that use storytelling as a cornerstone of their methodology, is spreading far and wide. 

We’re all involved in midwifing a new world into being, as the old world is crumbling around us. How do we engage with the tremendous uncertainty of the current human predicament? 

Joanna Macy uses an especially powerful storytelling-based exercise to teach us how to shift our relationship to time. This is an exercise that comes from her Work that Reconnects: Imagine that time travel is possible and that you’re about to be visited by someone from seven generations in the future. A young person is coming back in time to interview you because you were alive in this pivotal moment. Take a moment to imagine and notice what you anticipate the tone of that interview might be, and let your body feel it. Notice any sensations that come up in your body, your heart, your mind, or your spirit. 

Joanna suggests that this young person is coming back from the future because you are a hero, or a shero, to them. They are coming back so excited to ask you how you knew what to do. They ask you: “How did you navigate this extraordinary moment when everything about human civilization had to change? What can you teach me about how you gave yourself to this immense and essential transformation?” Again, notice any changes in your body, heart, mind, and spirit, and then, very gently, when you’re ready, bring your attention back to the present moment. 

Did you assume initially that somebody coming back from the future would be mad, or angry? I sure did. I was pretty convinced that would be their stance. When I heard Joanna frame it that I was the hero, that I was here, that I helped make the change, I thought, wow, look at that invisible bias that I carry! 

It’s a story that anticipates and assumes — based in part on experience — that we good guys are losing. We have lots of reasons to have adopted that insidious belief: just turn on the nightly news, it gets reinforced all the time. But this is why it’s so radical and so important to monitor and question our inner stories. We can support each other in knowing that the outcome being predicted in the media spin is not the final word. Our attitude towards what happens is key, and if we can show up for a positive outcome in a wholehearted and believable way, we can engage others to join us. 

As Gandhi said, “Social change occurs when deeply felt private experiences are given public legitimacy.”