Meta Commerse
Meta Commerse Explores the Power of Stories
Stories have power. They have the ability to give life through inspiration and authenticity. They can also crush it through lies and hostility. Some stories are half-truths that skew our perception, while others open us to greater understanding. And some even have the ability to heal.
Using stories to reconcile and empower our past is the basis of Meta Commerse’s Story Medicine—a program that is a special blend of West African and indigenous healing that ties ritual together with the written word.
For indigenous cultures, says Meta, medicine goes far beyond just pharmaceuticals and surgery. It is any substance that helps cure or treat a disease. Myths and legends have the power to heal because they remind how to live in right relationship to others, the earth and ourselves.
In Western cultures, she says, many of us have forgotten or dismissed our stories. Not only are we disconnected from the stories of our ancestors, but we also don’t recognize the power held in our individual story. Reclaiming our story— even the wounded part—is how we reclaim our power and what makes Story Medicine so transformational.
As Meta puts it, “I don’t see how anyone could grow up, living where we live, without some amount of wounding. We pack it away, and then carry it around, silently, in the shadows, like a backpack of boulders weighing us down.”
Yet, as she has seen with so many of the participants of her workshops (in which her participants use writing to help recover, heal, and strengthen their sense of self), each of the wounds also offers a gift. She points out that to find the gold within the gift, one simply has to be willing to dig around in the mud for a bit.
The first step is to be willing to look at our repressed, suppressed and denied emotions. “If we can’t feel it, we can’t heal it,” continues Meta.
She says the next step is to give the story a voice, adding, “Often we ask, ‘Have you broken your silence yet?’ When we speak it, write it, and put it on the table, we find there is no shame in our story. We see that everyone has something like this in life, and we have been tricked into thinking that we were all alone. Instead, we find nothing can be further from the truth.”
As people discover their stories, which might be autobiographical in nature, poetry, song, or fiction, it often requires research to put it into time and space. For example, when researching her own story, Meta, who grew up in Chicago during the civil rights movement, traced her ancestors first back to Cuba and eventually back to her West African roots. She began to recognize that her ancestors did what they did for the sake of the future.
“They endured what they did so I could be here,” she says. “My story goes all the way back to my great grandmother. She is living in me still.”
Discovering the greater context can bring understanding to our stories, and it can help us rewrite it so that our memories serve us, instead of us serving our memories. Meta suggests that by seeing the bigger picture, we can start to foster forgiveness, find our own ground, and begin to stand with life.
Meta has written six books, including The Mending Times, a novel fundamentally about healing. She also leads a nine-month healing program as well as programs for men and women that include a completion ceremony that acts as an initiation into one’s newly discovered and empowering story.
Meta will be offering a free Story Medicine sampler workshop at 6 p.m. on Friday, June 24, at West Asheville Public Library, 942 Haywood Road. To learn more about her workshops, visit storymedicineasheville.com.
