May 13, 2024

Tynan Grierson Interview Is There Healing In Personal Storytelling?

Meet Tynan Grierson, a storyteller who navigates the depths of universal concepts like death and loss while reminding us of the light and love in the world. Join us on #supernormalized for engaging conversations and meaningful insights. #Storytelling #Podcast #LightAndDarkness
Tynan Grierson Interview Is There Healing In Personal Storytelling

Show Notes

Supernormalized Podcast
Supernormalized Podcast
Tynan Grierson Interview Is There Healing In Personal Storytelling?
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Tynan Grierson is a storyteller who believes in the power of meaningful conversations that delve into deep and universal concepts like death and loss. He values conversations that nourish the soul and foster connection, steering away from superficial small talk. Through various storytelling mediums such as TV, film, podcasts, and more, Tynan aims to entertain, engage, and evoke emotions in his audience. As the creator of The Story Ark, he challenges individuals to confront uncomfortable ideas while always striving to bring them back into the light, emphasizing that amidst darkness and weighty topics, there is still light and love in the world.

https://www.thestoryark.ca/

Transcript

[00:00:00] Speaker A: The thing that I was thirsty for, it’s like being a seven year old and saying like, oh, I tire of small talk, but the thing that I was thirsty for was the meaty conversations and the meaty stories.

[00:01:00] Speaker B: Welcome to supernormalize, the podcast, where we challenge the conventional break boundaries and normalize the seemingly supernatural. Join me, CJ, as we explore less uncharted realms of existence and unravel the mysteries of life. Experience my treasured listeners, if you have a life story or healing modality or unique knowledge that you’d love to share, reach out to me at supernormalized. That’s supernormalized with a z. Proton dot me. Let’s together embrace acceptance of, of the supernatural and unusual as what it really is. Completely normal. Today on supernormalized, we have Tynan Grierson. He’s a storyteller who believes in the power of meaningful conversations that delve into deep and universal concepts like death and loss.

Tynan values conversations that nourish the soul and foster connection, steering away from superficial small talk. And I can totally relate to that cause that does my head in as well. Through various storytelling mediums such as tv, film, podcasts and more, Tynan aims to entertain, engage and evoke emotions in his audience. And he is the creator of the story arc, which he uses to actually bring forth the information from individuals to confront uncomfortable ideas while always struggling to bring them back into the light. It’s a bit of a tool that actually, people are using to reach back through time to inform others about their lives, and in doing so, hopefully help make their lives easier. This is a really lovely talk and I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. So please, please enjoy the show.

Welcome to supernormalized Tyne and Grierson. Tynan, I have a misunderstanding that the world is logos and it’s held together by stories. And from your efforts of encouraging people to engage with their stories, you appear to be weaving a time independent glue that can bring people together.

What drew you to doing this? And can you start with your origin story of your own?

How did Tyna become Taina of today?

[00:02:54] Speaker A: Well, I mean, I think there’s a respect in which there’s the mundane origins of all kids where I don’t know what you, what stories you gravitated to when you were a kid, but like, it’s the, it’s the I want you get branded sometimes, almost like that kid’s a dreamer or he always wants to escape. He’s escaping into story, right?

And I, of course, like most kids, whether it was, you know, comics or film or. I had an endless appetite for all of it. But it was also, admittedly, sometimes exhausted by kids who call themselves, like, you ever see those teens who are like, I’m an old soul, which usually just means I.

I’m getting fast forward on. On my adolescence and.

But I used to note that the. The thing that I was thirsty for this, it’s like being a seven year old and saying, like, I tire of small talk, but the thing that I was thirsty for was the meaty conversations and the meaty stories. And I could, it’s like when you try to tell a kid again to stay in. In that, you know, we’re not going to stay at kids for too long in the origin story, but if you try to tell a kid a story that doesn’t have gravity, doesn’t have death, that doesn’t have real darkness and stakes, they’re bored of shit by it.

They find it not nutritive in that way, that they’re like, there’s nothing here for me that’s going to help me navigate the world. And I was always searching for that. There’s obviously, for every kid, there’s either some family member or someone who was the raconteur or the storyteller and almost showed you what it could be. And in my case, I had a grandfather. This generation’s dying off, sadly, and it’s one of the things that I’m often bumping up against in my line of work that, like, these stories are being lost. But my grandfather was in the war, and he would tell me the story of his getting shot down over the ocean and his crew getting picked off by sharks and the death all around him and then getting sent off to a concentration camp in Japan and getting served horse’s head soup and with eyeballs in it or whatever to break their spirits. And all of these things that made me see, well, a, that’s what story could do. Like, it made me so thirsty for. It made me very hyper conscious of what story could do to, like, well, let me see, that things were that I. That I might see as impossible or insurmountable as a young kid and even as a grown up actually can be traversed that. That all of that stuff started to kind of seep into my bones as far as, oh, this is the potency of what story can do, but just even on a personal level. And then.

And then I went through, you know, the humanities and the literature and the whatever studies and. And even I never had. Did you grow up religious? Were you born, you know, into a religious, particularly religious family?

[00:06:13] Speaker B: Yeah, christian family. Yeah.

[00:06:15] Speaker A: Yeah. So I didn’t have that or didn’t have it foisted upon me. And so even that, I understand some people bristle at it, but I, I just came to it almost removed, like a person discovering, as, you know, Joseph Campbell might. Oh, all of these parables and these stories and these incredible stories that when I went on to study literature and study theology, they too were stories. I was just seeing them through that prism. And again, they amounted to just as with, like, you know, a personal story. It was like, is there nourishment in this for me? Does this speak to me? Does this move me?

And does it serve me? Like, you know, sometimes we don’t ask ourselves those questions, our personal stories, the big, grand stories, like, is this working for me? Does this serve me and move me toward my better self or echo or mirror me toward my better self, echolocate me toward that and all of that childhood and all of that schooling, then went into the more traditional route of like, oh, I’m going to go write. So I left school and I was like, I’m going to write stories. I’m going to screen write, and I’m going to write for tv, and I’m going to put this toward, well, the kinds of stories that captured my imagination.

And all the while, I was enwrapped by, you know, when I would fall into just a storyteller absent, you know, a Martin Shaw. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Martin Shaw.

He’s a british.

I encourage your listeners to check him out. He’s a brilliant storyteller. You can find some of his little stories on YouTube. But, you know, I was always transported, even without the trappings of though I was in love and still am, by the potential of what film or tv or all these things can do. I was always, you know, enraptured by just a storyteller telling a story without all of those elements and what they could do.

And as I say, all of that started to kind of like, I guess, just stew and stir and alchemize in me.

And then, you know, I could fast forward past the. Some of the bits in my story whereby I had the meltdown, the breakdown, the whatever that led to that led to a lower place that meant I became so desperate that I needed something more. But I will just say that after a time, I came to even start when I’d have a breakdown, when I’d have one of those things I’d take a vocal recorder with me on, like, a long road trip. Like, so basically, you know, I had, like, a day to day job, like, Monday, Friday, and.

And that bell would ring on Friday, the end of the day, at the end of the working week. And when I was, you know, done. And these were at times when, like, I’d gone through the cataclysmic breakup, I. I’d gone through some great loss or what have you.

The Friday end of work bell would ring. I’d slide down that Brontosaurus tail and into my car, and I’d get in my car and go on these long, long, circuitous road trips and take a recorder with me. And I didn’t, like, record everything that was happening all the time. And that would be mental, just be sheer volume of stuff for a three, four day road trip.

But I suppose it was me kind of putting in context and reframing and restructuring and changing and alchemizing for myself my own story in real time. So that as I was going through this, I, listening to my own voice, could almost guide myself through this. The story I was telling about myself, the story I was telling me about myself.

And set against the backdrop of this, a couple of my friends lost their parents. Very subtle.

And they. Knowing what I was doing and knowing that I had a predisposition towards story, knowing I had a predisposition toward sitting with people and hearing their story and getting them, encouraging them, drawing them into chairing it, those friends who’d lost their parents kind of conscripted me, asked me to record their one surviving parent, because they were like, I don’t want to lose this.

And so they asked me, tasked me with four. They had young kids. Those kids would not yet know that they might one day want the voice of their grandparents or what have you. So they conscripted me into writing or, excuse me, into recording their parents that were surviving the story, and that started the ball rolling. I was working my regular job, but I was like, there is something here, and in this. And I still stayed and maintained in this kind of.

I’m doing this. There’s a purity to it. I’m doing this as a service to people.

But all the while, as they tend to, this thing started to kind of, like, take on a life of its own and evolve as they do.

Once you get it up and on its feet only do you start to see what it is? You know what I mean? You start doing it and you’re like, oh, this is what this is, actually.

So, yeah, I mean, intermingled in there just, you know, love of story that goes bone deep and a love and a family history with audio, uniquely, the voice. The intimacy, unique intimacy of the voice. And, as I say, like, just a bunch of circumstances that, I guess, led me to recording some friends and then that begat other friends and other friends.

[00:12:41] Speaker B: So it sounds like for you, storytelling in itself, for yourself, is like a healing sort of method.

[00:12:47] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it is. I think.

[00:12:51] Speaker B: Yeah, like, you’re reviewing your week that you’ve been in your long drives and you’re recording it.

In those reviews, were you actually just going over everything and then talking about it to yourself? Is that what’s happening?

[00:13:03] Speaker A: I think. I think, look, we have a lot of self talk. Like, when I say even the story ourselves, like, there’s the different versions of it. There’s the Stuart smalley guy in the mirror going, like, there’s, by the way, no shade at this. No, you know, there’s the affirmations, the kind of, you can do this and you’re good enough, and that’s part of your little tiny chunks of self talk. That’s healing, that’s affirming.

But then the bits where I was on these long road trips that, look, we all do talk to ourselves. And, like, in between listening to an audiobook or listening to music on my drive, but often just over top of that would be not at all times recorded. I wasn’t like, oh, I’m gonna. Won’t it be funny to record my emotional unraveling live?

But it was more just from the place of.

I would talk something out until it reframed it in a way that, as I say, I’m gonna fall back on this expression, so I’ll maybe explain it more. But, like, in a way that served me, I think again, like, in the way that served me meaning. Was it generous? Was it generative? Was it glorifying of me?

Which sounds real kind of highfalutin. It’s just a way to say, like, did it as a kind of kind, virtuous mirror, did it offer me forgiveness and grace and light in the way that I was looking at my own bullshit and going, like, can I see this with grace and light and forgiveness? Can I laugh at this? Can I come through this?

Where that is where I believe the healing both comes, but also even can be transmitted to others. Like, if you come through it and you can laugh at it, as I have found in my work, it’s that. That people are desperate for seeing and hearing because it demonstrates to them that you can come through these things that everybody will have, though, they’ll have their unique kind of shape and texture. The time you lost this person, the time you didn’t make the team, the time you didn’t succeed. All of these falls and follies and losses that we go through, but that you came through it not hard hearted or calcified by.

[00:15:29] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.

[00:15:31] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:15:31] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. I love that.

[00:15:33] Speaker A: It’s.

[00:15:34] Speaker B: It’s.

It sounds like what you’re helping people to do and which you were doing for yourself is like a recapitulation of the events in such a way that it gives closure.

[00:15:48] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I. I think even closure, it’s true. And I certainly have had people frame it that way for themselves. And I. I think more often than not, it’s both a kind of a closure of a sort, but also an opening of very often behind some little wall of shame or, excuse me, a door, often of shame or fear or fear of being judged or regret. They will wall off this ship that they. That they feel they can’t possibly share. And if they do open that door and open all the windows and, like, let all the air and the light in and can share it, then it’s more like, to me, well, now that’s a room in the house that you can go into, actually. Now that’s a, like, so beyond closure. I. It’s not. I’m not taking exception with the term. It’s more just that, like, yes, you get a certain amount of closure on something, but also it becomes something that you don’t need to cauterize and the wound and, like, never go back to it. It becomes something that you can, in your rear view, go back and explore and spend time in because, well, very often there’s so much, again, meat nourishment to be gotten from the bullshit that we climb through or what have you, but, you know, certainly not if we’re not willing to kind of, you know, give it up and share it for sure. Yeah, but that’s. Yeah, go on.

[00:17:26] Speaker B: I can. I can tell you to relate to that.

In the past, I had some. Several, like, several events where I thought I didn’t do too good by that person. And I actually went and sat with that for a long time, thought about it, and thought, well, okay, what’s the best thing I can do here? And I thought I should contact those people and talk to them about it. And in my efforts in doing so, I contacted two people, and both of them said, that’s not the story or the experience that I had had at that time.

And I have no idea what you’re talking about.

So the story that I had built up around that event wasn’t exactly what they saw as what happened.

And both of them had said, no, no, that’s not my experience. Don’t worry about it.

So it was interesting that I actually had built a story which would, you know, it was all an entanglement that, well, to put it plainly, it was my own sock puppet in my own mind, that I had created after that event, going, oh, this happened. This happened. No, well, sock puppet is a liar.

[00:18:33] Speaker A: And if you talk about, well, it’s a liar in the way that the Rashomon series of events that any event has. Like, of course, any and every person that you’re describing, they had their unique perspectives and the truth, capital t, truth. Like, very often, though, that’s often what I want to get at the heart of when I’m talking to people.

If and when it gets opened up to anyone else, that truth, if you try to, let’s say, interrogated or what have you, it gets real quicksilvery. It starts to move. It starts to kind of like, you know, shake and move and. And at the same time, you know, like, we just had a laugh about it. Because only when you have, though, had the conversation and explored it and shared your truth can you have the light on it that goes like, oh, right. There’s, you know, multiple perspectives on this. There’s a little light around this. But, you know, if you’re, in my experience, if you’re, like, sharing. I’ve had kids who wanted their mom to share this one story, and it was because they wanted her to tell. It’s the other side of the coin. You were just relating. They wanted her to tell the sequence of events from their childhood, the way they remember it, and then they got real shirty when she did not see it, the same way when she dared to have her own perspective on how the life went.

Yeah, it’s an interesting thing. Yeah.

There’s a thing about the truth when it comes to storytelling, just in general, and there’s the personal aspect, but I find even the macrocosm, or the broader idea of story often sheds as much light into it, which is, like, the truth. Like, capital t. Truth A is subjective. Yes, for sure. 100%. But then also, it’s.

Storytelling is like, an art for dealing with truth by not looking at it head on, you know? You know, the myth of the Medusa, right?

So Medusa a, I want to say, got a bad rap. She was just like a woman in, in, and we could get into the mythology of it, but like she, she might not have been as evil as she was portrayed in the myth. She was, you know, she probably got a bad, real bad rap. But the way that the myth shakes out, the way the myth we all know works, the Medusa has what, a capacity that when you look at her, what happens? What happens when you look at the medusa?

[00:21:21] Speaker B: Yeah, she supposedly turned you to stone.

We’ve had relationships like that. So.

[00:21:28] Speaker A: But, so, you know, there’s a, there’s an aspect of this in terms of like the truth or staring at the truth when it comes to like, let’s say activism or something. People get really burnt out on activism very fast because they think under the auspices that like, I’m looking at the hard truth, the cold hard, you can hear it in the language, even the cold hard truth of staring it dead in the eye. And they look at this hard truth about, I don’t know, the environment and whatever, as noble as it is. And what happens? They get paralyzed by it. They get paralyzed by the statistic or the thing that freezes them up. And in the myth of the Medusa, the medusa is the truth. If you stare at it too long, it will turn you to stone, it will freeze you, it will paralyze you, will turn you to ash, what have you.

But the shield is the story. And if in looking at the Medusa, not directly but through the shield you are using, it’s a greek term, but it’s called metis. It’s cunning in service of the holy or in service of a higher idea. So in storytelling you are looking at the shield to look at the Medusa not directly, but rather that is you looking at the truth, these profound big truths that if I was just forcing you to sit down and deal with these big deep truths, you’d be like a kid trying to be fed some food they didn’t want you. Nuh uh. No, don’t want it. But under the, with the use of that metis, that cunning of using story or storytelling to look at the truth by not looking directly at it, that’s when we can well come to reconcile or deal with in broader story. And it, it’s true to some extent in our story as well, if we can distance ourselves from our personal story. But I always found that fascinating because yes, I want truth, but I don’t want, just as people, when I ask them to like share the truth, they get real squirrelly about it. They don’t want to stare dead, you know, dead in the eyes because they fear it.

No.

[00:23:40] Speaker B: What do you think the ultimate benefits are of telling truthful stories?

[00:23:49] Speaker A: I think we don’t see ourselves, like, on a day to day basis. It’s so muddy. Even our internal dialogue, as we were talking about, like, we don’t see ourselves very well. Like, by that, I mean, we don’t see ourselves clearly. And also by well, I mean, and I’ll come back to this, probably again, just as I often overuse, does this story serve you? But, like, I mean, we don’t see ourselves well, as in virtuously. Like, we don’t see ourselves through a virtuous mirror. And, you know, like, the truth is not some all fired holy thing. And in fact, very often it can scare, harm, wound people. You know, a mean 14 year old, she will knock you down with the truth. She will.

A truth that scares the shit out of you, and you will not like it. So it’s not all fired holy thing. But I do think that if in service of getting at the truth again, your truth in storytelling or in telling your story, or whatever it might be, what you, again do is find a way to own and reconcile and reckon with all of these disparate and shadowy aspects of yourself that, I mean, this is classic Jung 101. It’s like it’s just drawing the shadow.

It’s true. In psychedelics and whatever other modalities you might want to use. Like, all of it is these are methods whereby we can draw these things that we might otherwise put in shadow and out of our minds, but are all the while doing something to us and through us. And it’s not always that good. It’s not always bueno.

So I think it’s about that, to me, at least, that there’s all kinds of people at all kinds of ages and stages who, if they could only own their truth about all of these sequences of events, it would open up all of these, all the windows and the doors on their life and also shed a light on how they might navigate, you know, the. Well, the creation of the future story that they often disavow their power in creating. Because they’re like, ah, my story is I’m. Or the truth is, if they. Sometimes I’ve had people say the truth is I missed my shot. Or the truth is, I am a victim to this thing. Or the truth is, I. So they use it the same way. Like some people, like, wield the word science or whatever. Sometimes people use it like it’s just science or whatever.

They swing it around like a cudgel or a little bit too freely, but in your relationships and in this circumstance, in your most important relationship with yourself, it can actually alchemize, to use an also overused word, but one I still think is right. It can alchemize all these things that were weighing you down, that were led in your. In your life or in your life story.

[00:27:19] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that when people are doing that, it’s a bit of a secondary gain there. They don’t actually get to face themselves. And there’s a comfort in that and a security because, you know, sometimes. Sometimes facing yourself with these sort of truths or the truth about yourself or the truth about where you are in life can be quite burning and hard to face.

[00:27:41] Speaker A: Yeah, 100%. It’s. Look, any and all of these things are, you know, I think a lot about.

I got a step kid. I think a lot about rites of initiation and rites of passage or what have you, and as pertains to him. But I also think about all the ways in which were I able to concoct one for him or what have you. It is all about having the courage to go in and face yourself and some of these things that you might, again, you know, want to avoid, numb from, kind of move away from. And I think when I am often doing this, I think about, you know, there’s.

There’s a lead time wherein I task somebody with, well, just the simple revelation that, like, you will get out of this, as with most of these types of things, as much as you want to put into it. So whatever lead time, you go in all the intention, all the forethought, all the whatever, but all the while, you are. You are trying to give it some reverence and some import. And, you know, I think, yeah, people get squirrely around all manner of things. They get squirrely around the ways in which it might have them. Just like a rite of passage or initiation. Reckon with death or the finitude of their own lives. Reckon with all of these big, scary, hard truths. But it’s also been my experience that when you do, then things can move in unforeseen and potentially hugely potent ways.

[00:29:37] Speaker B: So you’ve built the story arc, and it’s to get people to get their stories out. Can you tell us what this is about and how that works? And, I mean.

[00:29:51] Speaker A: It’S funny. Like, when it started, I, as I said, was getting solicited by some friends, or then I get this recommendation, and more often than not, it was that a friend or whoever I’d been referred to, whoever been referred by they had a parent, a grandparent, a mentor who had, you know, like, maybe they were a little older. They were kind of, to their mind, to the child, the grandchild, the mentee’s mind.

They were, you know, a little nervous about losing them and losing, well, their voice when they were gone. They’re to be not hear it anymore.

I have a friend who lost both of her parents. I was mentioning a friend who lost some friends who lost, like, a single parent. I friended Jennifer, who lost both of her parents in a car wreck. And I remember her. I will never forget her telling me after they had passed that she manically tried to search for this one voicemail. Like it’s the most mundane thing. Like her mom saying this one thing. She was looking for this fragment, this aspect of her voice.

And I was tasked very often with, as I started the story arc, with going in there, as I said before, like, this isn’t Lawrence Olivier in Marathon Man. I can’t go in there with needle nose pliers and get anything that somebody’s not willing to give. I can’t pull the story or the thing out of their heads. But I was very often getting tasked with going to a grandparent or whomever it might be to their place. And I was navigating all of some of the stuff that I mentioned before. Like, it’s just a human relationship. And whatever the context, whether it was going into a therapist’s office or doing what they were doing with me, they had to be encouraged to give. And the backdrop of that was often, and it became even more so in the pandemic.

But the backdrop of that often was, yeah, but these fucking kids or this grandkid or whatever, they don’t visit me. And now they want this thing from me.

[00:32:18] Speaker B: You know, what, my stories.

[00:32:20] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And, like, they never the grand, the grandfather or the grandmother or what, have you never articulated it quite this way. But it always struck me as almost like, you know, the indignance with which that grandparent or mentor might greet that was that as though somebody had come into their house, like a grandkid had come into their house and, like, started looking around their house at, like, oh, that painting and that lamp. I’ll want that when you’re gone. So they started, like, putting post it all metaphor, but, like, for the physical.

[00:32:54] Speaker B: Yeah, I get it.

[00:32:56] Speaker A: They were like, oh, now you want this shit. You want this stuff? And you’re kind of seeing me off. You’re like, so you’re navigating all of that. You’re navigating the fraught kind of aspect of a family history. But then, or the family disconnection and the ways in which people we could get into, but the ways in which people have, for convenience or for other reasons, certainly in the west, have sequestered away their elders or what have you, and then the elders, like, oh, now you want to come visit and get the stuff.

But then as I started doing it more and started separating out because it wasn’t their grandkids showing up to take anything, it was me. And I was trying to impart upon them that, like, as I said before, you will get out of this as much as you, you give.

And that, you know, I had some instances of, you know, some 73 year old grandmother, let’s say, you know, not everybody was of this age and stage, but it always struck me as so beautiful when I would see it in somebody of an older age whereby, you know, they both took the time and had great reverence for what they were doing. And it didn’t even necessarily matter about who downstream was going to benefit from this. It was principally, yes, secondarily, my grandkid, a great grandkid, a mentee or whoever downstream may benefit from this. But first and foremost, as we’ve been discussing that, it started to change things for some of these people. And this 73 year old grandmother who then, you know, was able to reframe, uh, these large and, you know, quite difficult events of her life that, you know, were the ones that stuck out. But suddenly, you know, in so doing, she was, uh, well, you know, she was lightened by it. She was, uh, it made her feel, uh, a different relationship to her younger self, to her future self. And then it reframed how she might, you know, go forward so that she, you know, whereas prior she was, you know, doing really nothing and getting ready for retirement and then just doing nothing. And then she kind of started this, you know, gardening business. Now, it doesn’t, that’s, it doesn’t matter what the specifics of the downstream business are. It was more just that, like, as it evolved what this was and, and that it was this intimate process. Just me, just them. Audio, uh, I’m a huge proponent. We’re on video right now. Video, um, I’m a huge proponent for audio.

Um, and I do this exclusively in audio because though I, I think video is universal. Like the, the thing that I typically say when somebody asks me why we’re not recording video for the story arc, though, I think video is universal, audio is personal. It’s intimate. In all those ways that, like, yes, video can go, you know, transcend language boundaries and go into countries and places that it. That audio might not be able to, but audio is personal in those ways that it seeps into you, it lives inside of you. And the way that I usually relate to that or note it is so, you know, we have these parasocial relationships like, we’re doing a podcast right now. I had, I have had myself parasocial relationships that were these profound, you know, deep, intimate parasocial relationships with some podcaster that, you know, was sharing these aspects of his life or her life whereby, you know, I. I came to really understand the depth of what audio can do in that context. And though it’s a bit of a silly, you know, analogy, whereas with video, like the parasocial relationship, there’s a bit of a boundary. Like, if I thought Joey from friends was sending me personal messages and having a real intimate relationship with me, or if I thought that the local newscaster was doing that, then that means that they should come and take my shoelaces and send me to the comfortable, padded room.

I have lost the plot.

But back to the thread of the story. What I do is try to give these individuals an opportunity, be seen and heard, and for them to, well, as we were talking about before, to reconstitute, reframe in a way that serves them these stories of their lives. And then, as I say, and it very often does go this way, if downstream, the little book that holds their story that sits on their shelf. I’m not being metaphorical, there’s like an actual little book that it comes in that the service comes in that. If downstream, they want to give that to a grandkid, whoever. Absolutely. But the way that it’s changed as it’s evolved is. Yeah. Initially grandkids son saying, hey, I’d like that lamp before you go to now this is a service for you.

[00:38:53] Speaker B: Excellent. Excellent. So specifically, it sounds like you’re recording mainly people at the end times of their lives to get across information. Or is it anyone?

[00:39:05] Speaker A: It’s anyone not exclusive.

Certainly there have been and was at least at the outset, and there have been more people who have come to me. And sometimes in instances where they, where they tasked me with something that, like, you know, was almost all but an impossibility, they were like, oh, my God, my grandmother is dying and she has this degenerative disease. Quick, let’s catch this before it goes kind of thing. Like. And sometimes, as much as it. It pains me truly because I want to deliver that for them. And I want to be able to do that for her and them, you know, there, there has been and had been, like an airing toward. Yeah, like, I want to. Now that I’m thinking about how old my grandparent is or how old my dad is, I’m trying to get those stories and then interspersed, and it started to become, you know, that I would find, as I say, like, sometimes, and I get tasked with, like, this is my mentor and he was at, like, I want these stories or these specific aspects, and he’s not at a later stage of his life, but they want kind of a record of that, albeit the book is not fully written on that professor, that whomever, but they want a record of that. So, you know, it’s, it’s not or hasn’t been uniquely older people. But the presumption, your presumption was correct. Like, there’s a lot of instances where people are like, I want, you know, this person before they go, yeah.

[00:40:57] Speaker B: Get those recipes.

[00:40:58] Speaker A: Yeah, sure.

[00:41:04] Speaker B: Well, it sounds like a very powerful tool for people to connect over time, for sure. And I think that later generations are going to really appreciate the work that you’re doing.

I mean, obviously they’re appreciating it now, but over time, it’s going to grow, and that’s a huge thing.

[00:41:24] Speaker A: Oh, for sure, mate. I mean, like, it’s, as I say, I try to impress upon the person themselves that they are doing it for themselves. But I think also very often the same way that if you separate out the indignity that I was describing of some people being like, no, you don’t get to have all my stuff. There is another side of it whereby they want to share it. They want it to feel like it happens to someone else. Sometimes people are like, I want you to have my commemorative plate collection, so to speak. And people are like, I don’t need a commemorative plate collection. Sorry. But they’re like, they’re like, I want at least for this to have downstream significance. And I think that’s, that’s very often, you know, where somebody can start to envision or see how, as I say, very often it might not be that they’re at an age right now, like, their grandkid might be too young to appreciate it and might be maddeningly exactly at the age or stage where they don’t visit and they don’t want to hear the story in that moment. But then later in their life, probably when they get knocked down themselves, then they might. And it’s kind of that.

I would hope that this kind of downstream.

[00:43:01] Speaker B: If you could summarize for me in a short sentence, the power of storytelling, what would you say?

So what would you say is the power of storytelling in a short sentence? How would you explain that to somebody?

[00:43:23] Speaker A: I think it is.

I think it is alchemizing and owning. I don’t have a stock answer, so I’ll just bumble through one. I think it is.

It is a capacity and a mechanism and a technology, if for lack of a better word, whereby you can own and alchemize all these aspects of yourself such that you can see the way that you are actively building out who you are by the stories you’re telling and by the ones you gravitate to and by the ones you’re telling yourself, maybe most of all.

[00:44:09] Speaker B: That makes sense. That’s really good. So I was going to ask you, how can people find about you?

[00:44:15] Speaker A: Yeah, so I’m in Canada and the website URL is www. Dot thestoryarc. Dot ca. So that is thestoryark, the story ark arc like a boat arc like Noah Ca.

And truly, if you know, they want to reach out, they can email me at my full name, first name t y n a N. Tynanhestoryarch. Ca.

There’s other links in there and on the URL you can kind of go and explore a little bit. But if they had any questions, any queries, if they just wanted to reach out to.

To connect or ask a question.

That’s the email. That’s the one.

[00:45:06] Speaker B: Nice. Nice.

Well, Tynan, we’ve come to the end of the show. It’s been a pleasure talking to you and about your understanding of story and how it’s affected you and other people’s lives and all power to you with helping people get their stories out there and reconnecting them through history.

[00:45:24] Speaker A: Thank you.

I really love the chat.

Thanks.

[00:45:29] Speaker B: Okay, I’ll say goodbye to listeners.

That was a fun talk with Tyson just now. And I find a great resonance with the idea of storytelling and how it can affect people’s lives. And, yeah, sometimes the truth needs to be faced in different sorts of ways. And one of the ways a lot of us do it is through that internal dialogue, which I call that sock puppet, that we basically let rule our lives sometimes. And externalizing that and talking to it, and as he explained that he did by driving around in a car and using a dictation machine at the end of his week, is an interesting tool in itself to discover for yourself what is actually true about a situation and make light of it or bring it to light in such a way that helps things to be resolved. And I think that his efforts in bringing the story arc to people will help people reach through time and encourage others upon their path. If you’ve enjoyed today’s show and would like to share it, please share it to a friend. I’m sure there’s other people out there that would enjoy this.

It’s a great show in that because it does actually affect many people’s lives.

And if you’ve enjoyed today’s show, too, please like and subscribe. If you’re on the YouTube and, yeah, and if you can get on your podcast app and give me, give me five stars. I need those stars. It actually helps other people to find the show as well. So thank you so much for listening, and bye for now.

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