Intent in Stories

The act of Storytelling is ultimately just a manipulation of Intent.

Intent, unlike intentions, is the funneling of energy beyond the realm of the mind.

For example, if you were to witness someone telling a story in an incomprehensible foreign language, the intent they’re able to manipulate is easier to perceive because we don’t get caught up in the words.

If we cannot See Intent, we do not know what we are manipulating.

When an audience participates in a Storytelling experience, they are trusting that the storyteller has done their homework and understands what they are conveying.

Audiences are playing the more receptive role, while the storyteller is acting more as the provider.

This more receptive role is more innocent and naive. This means that they don’t know what they don’t know. And it’s not their job.

They don’t know if they’re being roped into the unresolved issues from the author’s childhood.

They don’t know if the author is using their own self-pity to appeal to their emotional body.

They don’t know if the author’s usage of Intent is conscious or unconscious, and so it’s become a rare and “lucky” find to come across truly great stories.

This is also why producers are constantly on the lookout for high-quality stories because typically they are completely contrived as they are coming from unconscious agendas.

So, the Storyweaving revolution was just begging to be born. It could change the entertainment industry completely.

Storyweaving is nurturing the nurturers, birthing the birthers, and cultivating the cultivators.

This is big.

Joshua

The Quality of Seeing

The difference between someone who is awake and someone who is not is the quality of Seeing.
If we cannot See accurately, we are operating on assumptions.
Most of what we see is stories, not actual reality.
And so, giving ourselves permission to alter those stories, even to something completely fictional and irrelevant, quickly reveals that if the story can be changed that easily it’s not really true. It’s not really “who I am”.
We become so invested, so much momentum into one particular story that the inconvenience of changing it tends to outweigh the desire to See accurately.
But that seeming inconvenience ALWAYS catches up with us one way or another until Seeing is actually the most obvious choice.
Sometimes the story had to get to an absolutely absurd place in order for that to happen.
This reveals #1 that absurdity is always an option, and #2 that such a shift in energy had the power to change things.
For writers, it is well known that truth is often stranger than fiction. This is why.
Own it, and then fiction can become as real as the truth.

Magical Re-framing Effects

Storytelling has magical re-framing effects, beyond what the mind can comprehend.
And Storytelling is happening whether we are paying attention to it or not.
Investing our energy into doing it well means becoming good at something incomprehensible to the mind.
This funnels and directs energy according to what we prefer.
This approach is very simple, and very rare at the same time.
Re-training the mind to use this skillfully is only possible when the mind is willing to break down its own habitual pathways in the process.
This is The Art of Transformational Storytelling.

What is an ImageDetox?

Since the time we are young, we are fed images and stories which play a major part in the development of our identities.

I remember seeing “Aladin” and “The Lion King” and applying these stories to my own life as if they had really happened to me.

I remember seeing “Saved by The Bell” and “Are you afraid of the dark?” and “The Simpsons” and inside myself, I related to the characters in these shows as if they were my real-life friends. Friends who I had some connection with, but they didn’t even know I existed.

These types of relationships (especially featuring less than ideal role models and one-way connections) train children with subconscious misunderstandings and false assumptions. For example, this may be one of the major contributing factors which cause children to confuse admiration for love. Thinking later in life that they must become famous in order to become lovable.

Additionally, usually as we get older we are exposed to more horror movies and images of carnage. In the information age, not only is helpful information more widely accessible but so is extremely unhelpful and grotesque imagery. We would never normally be exposed to these types of unnaturally violent scenes, and it has become increasingly easy to be exposed to an ever-growing array of catastrophic imagery that our nervous systems do not know how to handle and process.

Coming to terms with this exposure can greatly help us in coming back to our true creative essence. We have to know what needs to be cleared in order to clear it from our nervous systems.

In order to know what to do with this visual information as we hunt it down inside of ourselves, we must have a general understanding of the mechanics of how stories affect us positively and negatively. This is a significant conversation and is something that is all going into the ImageDetox course – step 1 of 4 in the Storyweaving Strategy. We call this step “Discover Basic Assumptions” because without this internal investigation it is very easy and very common to express our creativity through these invisible filters. When doing so, we are unable to see the subtle motives and messaging driving all of our decisions and this gets infused into our work.

Not everyone notices or cares about these limits on creative expression – but if you’re here you’ve probably noticed and become curious about what’s under the hood.

New Storyweaving YouTube Series

Hey Storytellers!

I am creating a new series of videos designed to help Immersive Storytellers tell deeper and more impactful stories. Would love to hear if this video is helpful for you, and I am taking topic requests too.

Take care,

Joshua