Transformation is not an App on an iPhone. It isn’t even a yoga membership. We are all moving toward and through it. Denied the language of alchemy and fermentation, we have been lost. When really bad stuff happens, all we have are platitudes then more really bad stuff. That’s not life. We have not been living. We have been reduced to bodies that are born and die and suffer unspeakably and meaninglessly in between. All of those are connected with the eleven known systems: bodily functions. Storytelling, too, is a bodily function, and it heals and regulates all of the others.

In the past three decades, clinical research regarding story-based healing modalities have surged well past any researcher’s expectation. As an English, Creative Writing, and Narrative Medicine teacher for over 30 years, I have administer creative writing’s curative magic, and almost all of my students experience profound healing by finding their story. From Basic-Ed and GED to MFA, and even while I produced an annual poetry and storytelling festival, I have witnessed healing and transformation sparked simply by creating space for storytelling. My students heal themselves, and their lives change.

One woman with degenerative disc disease experienced such reduction in pain upon writing memoir that she asked her doctor to remove her dilaudid pump. She has now written three novels and is pain-free.

A 78-year old student started their MFA in Creative Writing depressed with the changes of moving into a retirement community along with their spouse’s dimentia. He connected with the Romantic Poets and created a Poet’s Corner beside the cafeteria and filled a bookshelf with poetry books everyone can borrow. Open mics evolved. He wrote a novel and a collection of poems. He booked a TransCanada Railway trip and wrote poetry in the observation car. Everything changed in him. “I may be 86,” he said during one of our lunches after he graduated, “But I’m a young 86.”

A profoundly COVID-traumatized and caring Emergency Medicine physician, heeded his call to return to writing. He had been an English Major in college. Creative Writing has restored his joy and wonder, and he is telling his colleagues, “You’ve gotta write. It changed my life.” He will be attending a Doctors Who Write conference this Spring.

Creative Writing is a corrective force. My students activate it by writing 800 words a week, give or take. I got the wordcount from a beautiful television series called 800 Words. It is about a London widower and columnist who moves with his two children to New Zealand and bought-unseen property. At the end of each community-oriented episode, he knocks out an 800-word essay. “Deceptively simple,” says on doctor-student who is well into writing his first novel.

A thoracic surgeon moved through his grief while redeveloping his relationship with creativity. He discovered his creative voice while writing about a topic that led him to tell an award-winning memoir and has published six novels.

Another student grew up in Asheville and had sworn she’d never return. She returned and completed her Creative Writing degree with a beautiful, powerful memoir about her childhood and youth in Asheville, and it will be released within a few weeks of this writing.

The effects in the self are emotional, physiological, psychological. The effects of opening the doors of creativity within are not limited to the body. Students’ families benefit. New career opportunities come along, though sometimes by removing them from a current job where they’re miserable and don’t let themselves think about it. Some do the deep dive to write of an extreme loss or an unresolved trauma. Sometimes these bunbble up through other subjects, and they recognize that is time to explore it in the safety of non-judgment, the foundation of our MFA program.

The healing has a source and mechanism in The Storytelling System. It is the subject of every sacred text and practice, including Judeo-Christian. All of it is about our built-in transformation system. As you know, science has been unable to locate consciousness in the human body. Intuition is proof of this in the way a chemical aerosol of some sort alights upon a neurotransmitter to deliver insight, beauty, care, and comfort. 5000+ year-old texts are user manuals. They provide tactics for cultivating our personalities at mid-life through reflection and storytelling. When we attend to our life-stories, we discover the teachings that were there all along, concealed in unprocessed experiences good and difficult.

Yogis call The Storytelling System, the Subtle System, the interior and cosmic system inside us that we activate when we’re doing yoga for its native purpose. We in the West are only now, in the form of Polyvagal Theory, discovering its purpose and use. As long as science only listens to science, though, it won’t notice the role of storytelling inside and beyond the body. Math doesn’t belong here. Metaphor and story, do. This explains the “duality” we hear and read about but tend to locate between opposites and complexities. Storytelling is the only tool for overcoming duality because language holds both substance and soul, the ingredients of everything.