The Healing Art of Storytelling: A Sacred Journey of Personal Discovery - Softcover

Richard Stone is the founder of the Storywork Institute, and Stone has been a pioneer in the development of story-based training programs for healthcare organizations around the country, and is recognized for his presentations on the power of storytelling to transform healthcare, healing relationships, and enhance a culture of caring. Most recently, Richard founded the Imagine This! Company, an organization that is developing television, educational curricula, and home based games and activities based on using storytelling as a tool to enhance the literacy and imaginative skills of children ages 8 to 15.

Storytelling is not merely an art, Stone argues; it is a lifeline to understanding, both between persons and within an individual psyche. Stone is passionate about storytelling and its possibilities for human healing, and he carries us along with that fervor. Our culture, he contends, currently suffers from "destorification," a process parallel to desertification (the slow drying up of previously fertile land), in which our lives are slowly losing vividness and meaning, while banal or vulgar sit-coms and worse stand in for the stories we have lost. Stone's book is not merely a jeremiad, however; it also offers a series of exercises to help individuals reclaim and polish the stories our real lives are waiting for us to tell. Not just for storytellers, this may prove an excellent resource for teachers, seniors, and spiritual seekers, too. Patricia Monaghan