WELCOME TO RESTORYING

David M. Boje

February 8, 2013; Revised February 7, 2019 revised2

Storytelling is an art. We are storytelling animals. Storytelling is my focus. Storytelling is what I do in teaching, writing, consulting, and research for 35 years. See Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcsPh-5QbdE I love to help people and organizations find this storytelling path. It is easy to become a character in someone else's master narrative. It is more helpful to find your own living story path. Its a matter of finding you voice. Join us at our annual conference https://davidboje.com/quantum We have a mix of storytelling consulting practitioners, researchers, and clients who celebrate finding their own living story. I work with my colleagues in Denmark in two venues. One is the Material Storytelling Lab in Aalborg University where I am said to be the godfather to the lab. Material Storytelling (Anete Strand's pioneering dissertation and lab direction), is based on Karen Barad's work (and a bit of my own), to look at the intra-activity of 'social' with the 'material'. It is part of a huge movement called 'sociomateriality.' We use the term 'quantum storytelling' to get at how there is no separation between social and material. We are both/and. In Denmark I work with TRUE STORYTELLING, a project by Jens Larson, and Lena Larson, to do storytelling boot camps. True Storytelling is possible in consciousness raising boot camps of self-transformation and critical reflexive inquiry into our own habituated thoughts and actions within micro-physics systems, and embedded macro-political systems of power. It is possible to recover an agency of resistance to normalization under the detailed disciplinary technologies of the institutions we work in.

I hope to see you at our events. To get on our mailing list, click here. David

 

Table 1: 7 STEPS of Embodied Restorying Process (ERP)

1. Recharacterize (received Organization identity) from how other organizations are telling it.

2. Externalize (re-label) Make the Problem the Problem, not the Person as the problem.

3. Sympathize (benefits) – of old story of or your organization has its payoffs

4. Revise (consequences) – What are the negative consequences, including the stereotypes of received organization identities being applied to you?

5. Strategize (Little Wow Moments of exception to Others' dominant master narratives); Reclaim Little Wow Moments

6. Restory (rehistoricizes the old dominant narratives by collecting Little Wow Moments into A 'New Story' of you several possibility futures), to not be stuck in the past, reliving one event

7. Publicize (support networking) e.g. letter writing, social media, celebratory events with supporters of your ‘New Story’ of future and potentiality, to stay in the ‘new world.’

Embodied Restorying Process (ERP) is a a novel that begins with♥-of-Care. It begins with mindfulness, embodiment practices to understand the FOUR SELVES: Social-Self, Frozen-Self, Mirror-Self, and ♥-Self. These four selves are in dialogue, continual conversation, in our mind's eye (see http://peaceaware.com).

Embodied Restorying Process (ERP) can be effectively combined with mindfulness meditations, such as Vipassana (http://peaceaware.com) and with Psychocalisthenics exercise to help recovery from Stress, Anxiety, and Depression that veterans often face, after returning from deployment (http://peaceaware.com/ptsd).

ERP deconstructs the Life Time Disorder Label (PTSD) as junk science by the pharmecuetical industry and the DSMers.

ERP moves you out of cacophony into polyphony (the symphony of voices conversing in our mind). ERP is combined with mindfulness skill training so that the 'new story' is supported by dialogues among your Selves that connectto world making.



ERP focuses on ways Grand Narratives, such as from movies, from mental health DSM books, from a Leviathan of institutions, and so on that construct the Self for the person (Rosile & Boje, 2002; Click here for pre-press PDF). ERP begins with the oral context, by asking 'Where did you learn that sense of Self?' Then, 'What are the benefits to you' and 'What are the consequences in your life-world?' This archeology of the Grand-Narrative-Self helps a a kind of historical tracing of how the Grand Narative was learnind. The rest of the embodied restorying is about how to liberate the Self (which of course is many selves) fro the culturally hegemonic Grand Narrative. ERP is all about helping clients to form a counter-hegemenic 'new story' out of Little Wow Moments of exception. The Self (its many dialoguing Selves) is Embodied (Awareness), and the Body as (Selves+Awareness) are in relationality to Life-World (Others+Ecosystem). See more on this point.

“You are what exists before all stories. You are what remains when the story is understood” — Byron Katie (2008: 26). 

This means you are the one who Restories your Self, your relations to Others, and Ecosystem, by increasing your Awareness. Awareness grows with each Restorying. Embodied Restorying Process - Veterans YouTube 22 minutes) is a an example of doing repeated Restorying to bring about Embodiment of the relation of Self to Others, Ecosystem, through increasing Awareness.

 For more see https://davidboje.com

You are what exist before not only your own personal living stories, but also the dumb grand narratives that cultures, governments, corporations, and their managerial agents try to socialize, indoctrinate, or cajole you into. Living stories are ontologically situated, Being-there-in-the-world. To get in touch with your ontological living story is to recapture your own embodiment in aliveness process of Being-in space, in-time, and in-new materialisms. Here we will focus on the 'quantum' new materialisms (Boje, 2014a). Through the Observer Effect, you can gain Awareness that we are 90% unaware of the Others, the Ecosystem, and our own Self.