The Power of Metaphor: Story telling & guided journeys for teachers, trainers and therapists: Story Telling and Guided Journeys for Teachers, Trainers and Therapists - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Michael Berman PhD worked as a teacher and a writer. Publications included The Power of Metaphor for Crown House, The Nature of Shamanism and the Shamanic Story for Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Shamanic Journeys through the Caucasus for O-Books, and Journeys Outside Time for Pendraig Publishing, Tales of Power for Lear Books and Shamanic Journeys, Shamanic Stories for O Books. ELT titles included A Multiple Intelligences Road to an ELT Classroom, In a Faraway Land (a resource book for teachers on storytelling), On Business and for Pleasure (a self-study workbook). and ELT Matters (written with Mojca Belak and Wayne Rimmer).

David Brown is a psychotherapist and administrator of Hampshire Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. He was an EFL teacher for many years and was Principal of the International Language Academy in Bournemouth from 1990 to 2001. He has degrees in Psychology and Linguistics and diplomas in TEFL counselling and psychotherapy. He regularly leads psychospiritual workshops

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In this book you will find a collection of stories, ancient and modern, and journeys of the imagination that can lead you through the story that your life was meant to be.

Stories have always been a powerful tool for communicating information from one generation to the next and for educating the young. If they were not highly successful for this purpose, the art of story telling would not have survived.

Whenever people meet, stories are told and they have been told since time immemorial. Story telling is an oral tradition and because of the issues which have been worked through by the telling of the stories, story telling has contributed to the creation of the great epics of the world. The storytellers themselves have been described as the bridge to other times, and ancient teachings and the telling of the stories helps to keep these teachings alive. The children of future generations learn from the storytellers and apply lessons of the stories to their own lives.

The earliest stories were probably chants or songs of praise for the natural world in pagan times. Later, dance and music accompanied stories. The storyteller would become the entertainer for the community and the historian, musician and poet too. The oral tales that were passed on from one generation to the next by word of mouth included epics, myths, parables, fables, fairy tales and folk tales.

The art of story telling was particularly popular from around AD 400 to 1500. Storytellers would travel around visiting markets, villages, towns and royal courts. They gathered news, swapped stories and learned regional tales in the process. When popular tales began to be printed cheaply in pamphlets known as chap-books and sold by pedlars, their popularity started to wane. With the advent of the mass media, the storyteller has unfortunately become more or less extinct.

Story telling is also an effective vehicle to deliver messages to the subconscious where the 'aha's of metaphor take place. It is our ability to make metaphorical connections that allow us to learn anything at all. When something new is like something we've done before, we take what we know from the first situation and transfer our knowledge to the new situation. Metaphor instils the learning of content or process on a very subtle, often subconscious level. When the subconscious is activated or accessed, the material enters the mind with no resistance. As a result, metaphors can effect dramatic change in an individual.