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 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 pretty 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. 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.