Stories that Change - reviving the art of storytelling

Stories that Change – reviving the art of storytelling is an Erasmus+ training course which aims at revitalizing the art of storytelling and supporting it in becoming a fundamental practice in the fields of human development, education, and youth work.

In a world of fake news, AI-generated narratives, doomscrolling, endless reels, and social media ‘stories’, we need to return to the old ways of relating, learning, and evolving.

Logos and Mythos are two ancient Greek terms that represent different ways of understanding reality, telling stories, and finding truth.

As modern humans, we have created an existence where Logos is largely dominant. The logic of the mind controls and manages life, resources, and the environment, and thus we have estranged ourselves from the world of Myth.

The Mythic world is a portal into living life in a more sacred way, more aligned with our Deep Self, the original instructions on how to live on the Earth, our Souls, and the Great Mystery that holds the web of life.

Are you willing to step into the Mythic world?

For 7 full training days we are going to work with several interconnected elements:

1. Stories, lots of stories

Throughout the training, we will listen to and explore a wide variety of stories: myths, fairy tales, teaching stories, trickster tales, initiation stories, short stories, long stories. We will explore their teachings, wisdom, symbols, and deeper meanings, and discover how they speak to our own lives. We will work with stories through dialogue, embodiment, guided imagery, journaling, wandering on the land, creative expression, and encounters with the more-than-human world.

2. Stories of the land

We will wander the land and allow its spirit and creatures to speak and reveal their stories. We will practice listening beyond words, becoming attentive to the subtle movements and invisible pulsations of the Mythic world. We will open ourselves to the stories carried by forests, waters, stones, animals, winds, and places. We will become channels through which the stories of the land can emerge, take shape, and find a voice and explore what it means to become their keepers and stewards.

3. Stories of Our Hearts, Bodies, and Souls

We will open ourselves to the stories breathing beneath the surface of our everyday consciousness. We will listen to our longings, pain, hopes, dreams, callings, and grief, giving them space to be heard and expressed. Through voice, movement, sound, colour, imagery, and other forms of creative expression, we will allow these inner stories to take shape. And we will court our personal myth, the deeper story held within the hidden chambers of the soul. We will explore our lives as Mythic journeys: odysseys of departure and return, loss and discovery, descent and transformation.

4. Awakening the Storyteller Within

We will seek, awaken, and nourish the storyteller within each of us. We will explore authentic ways of becoming storytellers and story keepers, expanding our capacity to tell stories through voice, body, sound, rhythm, movement, presence, and enactment. We will learn not only how to tell a story, but how to inhabit it, allowing it to move through us and come alive. We will explore how storytelling can become a practice that touches hearts, opens minds, awakens imagination, and ignites personal, cultural, and social change.

Practices and activities

We will offer a bundle of practices and activities rooted in the principles of soulcentric development and Indigenous wisdom, such as: wandering in nature, embodiment practices, deep imagery journeys, symbolic art, the Way of Council, praying, fasting, guidance through questions, mirroring and personalized invitations, silence and solo time in nature, singing, drumming, dancing, soul-poetry, community work, ceremonies, rituals, explorations of dreams, conversations with the natural world... and a lot of storytelling.

The program will take place at a peaceful mountain retreat in a village located about 50 km from Cluj-Napoca, at an altitude of 1,400 m in the Carpathian Mountains. Surrounded by forests and mountain landscapes, the venue offers a simple and authentic Transylvanian setting, ideal for connecting with nature and stepping away from the rhythm of everyday life.