12-week cohort
The content

Welcome!

You have a journey ahead of you. And you won’t be alone.

Becoming Restoried is a process of paying attention to your life. It’s a process of being honest about your life. It’s a process of excavating into the buried truths of your life. It’s a process of naming the lies you’ve believed about your life and finding clarity about the truth of who you are.

Becoming Restoried is the process of scraping the muck and debris off your mirror so you can see yourself clearly. When you look at you life through the lens of shame and self-doubt, your view is distorted. It’s altered by the layer of dirt on the glass.

So before you can stick any positive affirmation to your sense of self, you have to first realize there is mud in the way, and then scrape it off.

That’s what this journey is about. We won’t complete it in these 12 weeks—because in a very real sense, it’s never complete. But we will take powerful steps along the road together, experiencing the magic of content, community, and coaching all orienting in the same direction: reconciling to your life stories.

Week 12: Practicing new pathways of connection

We’ve reached the end of our 12 weeks together, and yet it is only the beginning of an exciting journey of becoming restoried in your life. I put that in lower case because this work is ongoing, whether you’re in this program or not. Your restorying does not end here.

The final part of the Restoried Roadmap, in the New Story quadrant (see bottom of page for the model), is “Practicing New Pathways of Connection.” You name the story you’re in. You scrape off the Wound Story. You move through the No Story. You step into the New Story. And to keep a story alive, you have to tell it.

One of the ways you tell it is by telling it to yourself through your actions and behavior. Form new neural pathways and new narrative pathways by being intentional in how you live. This is stepping into your Power from the Restoried Compass.

In this final worksheet, you will:

  1. Look at what you are feeding your soul or spirit. To grow, the soul needs beauty, art, love, joy, connection. What are you feeding yours?

  2. Get clear on your targets. What behaviors serve you? Which ones do not? Be precise in what you’re aiming at or you’ll hit nothing.

  3. Cultivate gratitude. There is a direct connection between joy and gratitude.

  4. Name who you are in this season. At the beginning of our cohort, you named yourself as the protagonist in your story. Time to do it again.

  5. Make statements of purpose and hope for what comes next. Speak your desires into the cup and let them grow.

It’s been a joy to work with you.

Journal Prompt:

Write a message to your 6-months-from-now self that you want to remember. What’s something you now understand after these sessions, that you now believe, that you now realize, that you now know that you want your 6-month-from-now self to still be clinging to?

Write to that self with the message.

Week 11: Driving Your Life Forward

We are nearing the end of our 12-week journey together. It’s time to turn our attention to how you move forward.

After my divorce last year, I read a book by Jon Kim called Single. On Purpose. Among the numerous gifts of the book was a small section where Kim talked about the “four pistons” needed to drive a meaningful life forward. If you are to have a healthy relationship with yourself, which is the only relationship you are ever guaranteed in life, you need to tend to these four things at least:

  1. Be active and move. The body is designed to be in motion, not stagnant.

  2. Take care of your needs. It is not the responsibility of the people around you to meet your needs without your participation. You need to know what you need, how that need is best met, and how to do that yourself or to communicate it to others.

  3. Remove shame from your mirror so you can see yourself clearly. The Dig Site showed you how difficult events in your life lead to self-constricting beliefs: shame messages. To see the truth of who you are, you need to purposefully and muscularly scrape those away.

  4. Like yourself. As Kim says, “loving yourself” may be too tall an order for where you are today. It might feel like too much to ask. So set that aside for now. But can you, at a basic level, like who you are? Learning to like yourself is key to unlocking the peace you long for.

May this exercise yield good fruit for you.

Week 10: The Hero’s Journey

Time to return to the shape of the oldest story you know—the one you’ve been living all along.

The Hero’s Journey is not just the stuff of myth and movies. It’s a universal pattern our psyches recognize, a map passed down through culture and time. And recent research has shown that when people see their own lives through the lens of the Hero’s Journey, they experience greater meaning, deeper resilience, and higher levels of peace, joy, and gratitude. It turns out that the stories we live—and how we live them—matter deeply.

So this week, we’re not just reflecting—we’re re-seeing. You’ll trace your own path through the mythic arc: the call to adventure, the crossing of thresholds, the mentors and allies, the trials, the abyss, the transformation, and the return. Each part of this journey holds insight. Each moment in your life has the potential to take its place in a meaningful, redemptive narrative.

Because seeing your life this way doesn’t change the past—it changes your relationship to it. You begin to understand that your pain can have purpose, that your struggles carried seeds of wisdom, and that your story is not over. You are still becoming.

In Becoming Restoried, this is what we seek: not perfection, but integration. Not answers, but wholeness. Not escape, but return—with gifts to offer.

So let the Hero’s Journey be a mirror, a guide, and a key. You are the one you’ve been waiting for.

Week 9: The Handless Maiden REvisited

Time to return to this guiding story. Dr. Martin Shaw, the incredible English mythteller from whom I learned this old Germanic folktale, often speaks of “fidelity to the stories.” And within fidelity is an invitation to return again and again to that which we’re faithful. To see what new wonders might await. Because what stands out to you in a story is the doorway to repatterning your subconscious.

In this engagement with The Handless Maiden, I’m inviting you to consider how your life connects to this story through two lenses: mythic structure and character archetypes.

All myth, and perhaps we could say all story, is built on a three-part structure: severance, threshold, and return. Again we are back to the Becoming Restoried logo, the triskelion, which speaks to the power of threes. What in your life has been severed? What has been your dark forest threshold of change? How and to what have you returned?

Then you will look at the characters of the story. How have others shown up as these characters in your life? How have you been these characters for yourself?

All this is in service of stepping into The Integrated Story. In one of the four other stories—Self-Doubt, Self-Defeating, Victim, and Avoidance—you live out of balance. Your “bad” qualities feel spotlighted, your mistakes appear prominent, and your struggles look more like character flaws. In one of these stories, you succumb to the danger of the single story, as Chimamanda Adichie says. (See her TED talk included here if you like.)

In the Integrated Story, though, you live with more balance. Not believing yourself to be better or worse than you actually are. Recognizing you have great capacity for harm and great capacity for healing. You can be the hero and the villain. You are never just one thing. And there’s immense freedom and grace in this truth.

So, see what this beautiful story has for you this week.

Listen to my fuller telling of The Handless Maiden. If you want the shorter version, scroll down to week 1.

Adichie’s remarkable TED talk about the danger of a single story.

Week 8: The Dig Site, pt 1

Fair warning number: Another deep dive. This week is going to focus specifically on a painful memory, so resource yourself well. I want you to do some real work in this exercise, and at the same time, I want you to be mindful that we aren’t in-person, so there is a real limit to the type of support I can provide. So don’t go somewhere in your story that will send you into a trauma spiral. I’m not concerned with you being emotionally activated—that’s what gives us the heat to cook with; I am concerned with you being trauma-activated beyond your window of tolerance.

You have pain in your story. Everyone does. But not everyone dares to dig down to the sources of pain in their stories, study that pain, make sense of it and its impact, and then heal it. Such work requires tremendous courage, hope, and a determination to no longer remain under the constraining power of that pain.

You have this courage, hope, and determination.

This week’s work is in two parts. It’s about looking directly at a prominent pain point. Excavation of the buried pains of our past requires making a dig site. Just like a dig site at an actual archaeological excavation, this one will have layers of meaning, layers that require curiosity and examination. (If you’ve done a trauma egg before, this has a similar structure but is focused on a single painful experience rather than the totality of all your trauma.)

Why do this? Because as James Baldwin said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” The painful stories of your life are filled with Siren messages, beckoning you away from the heart of your true self and toward the sharp rocks of self-doubt and toxic shame.

Once all this is seen for what it is—lies born from pain—the truth can again be believed.

Shall we go? Let’s go.

Adding my 2022 TEDx here if you have not seen it. In this talk, I introduce and explore the language of self-excavation that this week’s content draws from.

Week 8: The Dig Site, pt 2

Back to the dig site we go. More to do.

Last week, you identified a core pain memory and connected core wounding messages. This week, you will unpack the additional layers of meaning at this dig site.

Give what happened to you a name, identify what you felt, consider what behaviors you began to deal with those emotions, look at the consequences those behaviors had for you and your relationships, and then get clear on what you projected to the world so that no one would see the pain you were protecting.

Finally, turn it into a concise story. Stories are perhaps the primary way our brains make sense of the world. Learning to narrate your dig site is a necessary step to processing and ultimately healing the pain buried there.

Since you’re finishing the worksheet from last week, no new one to download today.

Week 7: Survey your life

Fair warning: This week is a heavy lift, but potentially a remarkably illuminating one. Remember—one of the reasons you’re here is to pursue a new, deeper type of self-excavation in a small community with coaching from a guide who has done all this too. So let’s go.

So far, we’ve anchored ourselves in two old folktales to give us direction and shared language. And we’ve considered our lives through some of the core components of story: character descriptions (identity), desire/goal (purpose), and imagination/vision (eulogy).

Now it’s time to survey the whole of your life story. Why? Because any proper expedition starts with the 10,000-foot flyover. Whenever you are preparing for a trip, you plug in your starting place and your arrival place. You zoom out on the map to get a sense of the terrain you’re traveling. Film crews fly over lots of areas before deciding on a shooting location. Archaeologists look down at the whole site before picking their dig site.

These next two weeks are about looking carefully at your particular life stories. This week we do a flyover. Next week, we dig down.

For this flyover, you will break your life down into 5-year increments. In each increment, you will identify several components: facts/feelings/experiences, key characters (supporters and antagonists), theme or title, and the quality of human connection you experienced.

This will take you some time. To do it well, I recommend giving yourself two hours. Most people never take the time to reflect on the fullness of their lives. Don’t deny yourself the benefit of this experience. You’re already in it now—stay in it. We can’t cook without heat.

Worksheet walkthrough.

Week 6: where your story will take you

Stories are the way we talk about our experiences of the things that happen to us. Therefore, most stories are about the past.

And yet, one of the most powerful stories you can tell is the vision story—the not-yet-happened story. It’s the story you want to live into. It’s the lighthouse you orient to in the darkness of the voyage. Becoming restoried means changing your relationship to all the stories of your lives—past, present, and future.

The question is this—how might the rest of your life unfold? And more specifically, how do you hope the rest of your life might unfold?

There are many ways to craft such a story. This week’s process is only one way. If you feel inspired toward additional ways for telling such a story, follow your energy.

For our purposes, you have two options: write your eulogy, or write a letter as your elderly self to a child you love telling them about your life. More instructions are in the prompts and in the video.

As I wrote last week, plants grow toward the light. Humans do too. We need vision stories to grow toward.

Journal Prompt:

Option 1:

Write your own eulogy.

Imagine you have lived a long life, well into old age. Imagine you were able to do all you wanted, to be the person you wanted, to have the impact you wanted, to have loved in the way you wanted. Now imagine you’ve passed on and all the people who loved you have gathered to honor you. Imagine someone who saw the fullness of you and your life stands to offer your eulogy. What do you hope they’ll be able to say about you?

Option 2:

You are old and nearing the end of your life. You decide to tell a child you love dearly all about your life—what happened, what you loved, what you learned, who you became after you tended to your personal growth and healing. What would you say to this child you love?

You could write this as a letter or an imagined conversation. You could put this in song or poetry. You could imagine it as a play or a puppet show. There’s no wrong way to do it, as long as you are true to the intention: to speak tenderly about your life—what’s already happened and where it goes from here.

Week 5: The origin of your purpose

One of the three pillars of living a thriving life is feeling securely attached to a sense of purpose. Take a look at the Restoried Compass to see a visual. In Becoming Restoried, I talk about purpose as the connection of your core pain to your dearest principles to your greatest passions.

We all move through the world wanting to heal, whether we are aware of it or not. Research has shown that we are approximately 30% genetically indistinguishable from a daffodil. And daffodils, like all plants, grow toward the light. It’s wired into them. We humans too can’t help but orient toward the light. We want it. We need it. 

And so I’ve found that the greatest experience of purpose you can have in the world is connecting your passions—what lights you up—to the wounds you most want to heal in your own stories. The meaning held in that healing, and in facilitating that healing for others, is extraordinary. It’s why I created Becoming Restoried. 

So, this week we are looking at purpose. But more precisely, we want to examine where it comes from. What’s the origin story of it? This is both a look at the present and the past. What gives you meaning and purpose now? (And keep in mind, you may not actually be pursuing it at the moment, but that doesn’t mean it’s nonexistent.) And where did this sense of purpose come from? 

Why does this matter? Because to feel stable, secure, and okay in your life, you need to be tethered to some sense of meaning and purpose. This need, along with the need and ability to tell stories, is one of the things that makes humans unique among life on this planet. And to feel tethered to this purpose, you need to know where it came from. You need it to be anchored in story. Your story. 

In the video, I’ll walk you through the worksheet and how my own story maps onto it. 

Worksheet walkthrough.

Here is the guided meditation did with the inaugural cohort early 2023. It starts at 16:16 and ends at 51:19. You do not need to do this to complete the worksheet. It’s just a bit of extra goodness should you wish for it. If you don’t know why this video is here, watch the first video and it will make sense.

Week 4: Desire & Constraint

This is all about your values. Values are central to the development of any story. Stories are our most powerful vehicle for communicating emotions and values. Stories illuminate what we care about, because stories narrate our choices in the face of the things that happen to us. And, typically, we make choices based on our values.

Story deals significantly with the relationship between desire and constraint. A protagonist wants something, but they don’t yet have it. If the protagonist already had everything they wanted, there would be no story; just a description of reality.

So, in making meaning of our stories—those we’ve experienced and those we want to move into—discerning our values and desires is crucial.

So on we go.

Week 3: You are the protagonist of your own story

One of the defining features of a story is the existence of characters—the beings that are experiencing what is happening. Any interesting character in a story is multi-faceted. We learn of their gifts and setbacks, their gold and their shadow. It’s the plurality of their identities that makes them interesting. Purely “good” or purely “bad” characters are actually quite boring. Because nothing unexpected happens. There’s no conflict, no tension.

In the story of your life, you are the protagonist. You are the central character, whether you want to be or not. So the question is—who is this character of you? How would this character be described? What identities did you as a character choose and which were chosen for you? How do others see this character and how does that fit with the character’s self-perception?

If you are going to explore and make sense of the stories of your life, you need to be familiar and honest about yourself as the central character. This week then is all about identity.

Who are you?

Week 2: Toward radiant contentment

We return to The Lindworm. We aren’t done with this story. Nor should we ever be in my opinion. This story, like The Handless Maiden, deserves some unhurried exploration and engagement. It is a truth-teller, an invitation toward radiant contentment.

For me, this story asks: 

  • What is the grief that hangs over me in my life? 

  • What are my white and red flowers, and what serpents does eating the red flower give birth to in my life?

  • What have I exiled about myself in my life? And how has it returned to me with hostility? 

  • What would it look like to make room within myself for that which I've cast out? How can I bring it closer? 

  • What is the wisdom I need that might lies at the edges of the forest? 

  • What preparation is necessary in order to encounter my own Lindworm? 

  • What are the layers of scales I've grown around my pain? And what will it take for me to remove these scales? 

  • What is the ordinary beauty that lies beneath? 

  • What might radiant contentment look like in my life?

For me, these are powerful questions. The kinds of questions that can shift things in our lives. I invite you to wrestle with these, be curious about them, and listen for their quiet responses.

I’ve created a worksheet to facilitate your exploration of these questions. Not all the questions above are in the worksheet, so I invite you to take those additional questions for a walk. See what they might open up within you as you move.

The video for this week walks you through the worksheet, using examples from my own life. If you want to rewatch the story, just scroll down to Week 1.

Week 1: The two guiding stories

From the English mythteller Martin Shaw, comes two illuminating stories: the Handless Maiden and the Lindworm. In the first video, I tell a short version of the Handless Maiden story on stage (you can read the full story in Shaw’s book Smokehole). In the second video, you can hear Martin Shaw tell the Lindworm (full story in his book Courting the Wild Twin).

These two stories are foundational, guiding stories for our work together. In many of our calls, language from these stories will be referenced. They are stories that hold us together and orient us in the same direction.

For our first call, we discuss these stories and what wisdom they offer for our journey.

Journal Prompt:

On the first encounter, where did I see myself in The Handless Maiden story? Where did I see myself in the Lindworm story?

Which characters were I drawn to? Why?

Which characters were I resistant to? Why?

What images/language from the stories have stuck with me?

THE solo intensive

Accelerate your restorying journey. Just you and your coach. Live and in-person.

the restoried roadmap

A short walkthrough of the Restoried Roadmap.

MIchael’s Tedx

Watch the TEDx Michael mentioned. It’s from August 2022, delivered for TEDxNashville at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. It’s all about how a robust process of self-curiosity can help reveal and heal pain. It’s also the first time he ever mentioned Becoming Restoried publicly.