"There is no greater agony than bearing

an untold story within you."

~ Maya Angelou

Just imagine, for a moment, that your life is a book in the process of being written. Every day, upon waking, you step onto a fresh, new page that is just waiting to be filled with the next part of your story.

Now imagine that, one day far from now, someone will read your entire life story, every single day of it, and make it into a movie.

With this prospect in mind, might you start navigating your days with more caution, ensuring you present yourself in the best possible light for any future reader or viewer of your story? Or, might you wake up each day, as adventurous leading lady or leading man of your own life, daring to fill each page to the fullest?

Now, when reflecting on your actual life story thus far, what do you see? Are you the hero or heroine in your own story, or do others fill most of the pages with you appearing as mere footnote? And, if this was someone else's story, would it fascinate and entertain you or frustrate and bore you and have you setting it aside?

As unique as each of our life stories is, at the deepest level, we share a common, collective story. It is the story of the most fundamental dynamics of being human, and it has been told time and again around the world by means of fairytales. For this reason, any fairytale worth its salt runs the whole gamut of life experiences, from the most horrendous to the most magical, and everything in between.

Some of us might think otherwise, but fairytales are far from childish. On the contrary, they are childlike in their clarity and simplicity and childlike in their wisdom. They are full of treasures just waiting for us, as adults, to un-earth.

In our Story Time series, we will be exploring some of these classic tales together. Just like children, we will follow our own curiosity's bidding. We will be looking to discover how these stories reflect our own life story and our responses to it. What is amazing whenever we do such an exploration is that, with each of us sharing our own insights, it becomes easy to see that these universal tales bubble up from the collective. Underpinning all our unique and very personal stories, we discover what unites us.

If you would like to join in the timeless and transformative experience of storytelling, please join us for one or all in the Story Time series. In this three-hour mini course, I will be telling a simple and ancient tale. It is a tale that, in many different versions, has been being told for centuries around the world. Once the tale has been told, we will explore it together to see what helpful signposts it might reveal to us, to help us on our own life's journey.