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Metaphor Story, Metaphor Stories:

121 Original Metaphor Stories

About Human Change, Healing & Salvation

Created by Silvia Hartmann For "Aromatherapy For Your Soul"

What is a metaphor story?

A metaphor story is any kind of story which contains elements that you can FEEL IN YOUR BODY.

Metaphor stories are rich, resonant and full of life - they are clearly not "constructed" by the conscious mind to some formula or other; they are not just about "facts", they engage the entire neurology; they are usually surprising and not predictable in their outcome; metaphor stories are memorable, meaning that they are absorbed by the human mind in such a way that storage is successful, and the metaphor story can be "recalled" easily at a much later date; and most of all, metaphor stories contain EMOTIONS.

It is the energetic content of a metaphor story acting on the energy body which produces emotions - and those are physical sensations in the absence of a physical stimulus a person very literally "feels in their own body".

Change Is Energy Movement

There are many words and many stories; but not all stories cause CHANGE.

Change is a broad term but it does denote some key aspects, including remembering the story. Obviously, if the story is "forgotten" it failed to impact the human system at any level or in any significant way. This is the problem with all school learning - unless it finds a way to engage emotional responses, unless the INFORMATION HAS AN IMPACT THAT CAN FELT IN THE BODY it will not be remembered. The conscious mind can store such information in the short term with much effort but this kind of storage erodes very quickly; it also lacks the possibility of CONNECTING different aspects of the information being stored, which is process that happens elsewhere. Thus, many a math student may remember different formulae for a time after "cramming" but never understands the bigger picture that underlies ALL these formulae, and after the test is over, forgets all of it to the degree that this information cannot ever be recovered, nor can it be USED in any meaningful sense.

How well a story is remembered is directly linked in a measurable cause-and-effect fashion to how much impact it had on a person, and how strongly they felt this impact through their physiological feedback devices.

It is the sensation or experience of this impact which makes a story "become real" to an individual person.

A metaphor story takes essentially an "energy movement" and packages that energy movement into a variety of forms of expression - the metaphor being used - in order to transmit the energy movement.

When Bambi kneels down next to its dead mother, the metaphor of deer carries the information or energy movements of a situation when a small child experiences what they do when their mother ceases to respond. Energetically speaking, that is a CATASTROPHE and the energy body responds with severe disturbances - and we start to choke up in the throat, feel pressure in the stomach and on the heart, and then we start to cry.

The metaphor story had an IMPACT.

All Metaphor Stories Are ONLY About HUMAN EXPERIENCE

All information transmission, all change and learning humans undertake is ONLY ABOUT HUMAN EXPERIENCE, and about nothing else besides.

That might sometimes get forgotten in the quest for things, or structures, or this and that - at the end of the day, the only thing we are or even could be interested in at all is our own human experience right here and now, past, present and future.

We might make endless metaphor stores about cartoon cats and dogs, cars that go to war, horses that talk, vegetables jumping around, wooden puppets hitting each other over the head, about faires and elves, even about aliens from other worlds, but at the end of the day, this is all just HUMAN EXPERIENCE, learning and change in fancy dress.

Einstein noted sensibly that "you can't change a problem from the same space where it was created" and so metaphor stories allow us to step outside our own problems for a moment, our HUMAN EXPERIENCE PROBLEMS, for there really are no other problems at all!, and to look at these problems from a different point of view.

Aesop, for example, instead of showing us three people having a fight, shows us in his metaphor stories a donkey, a cat, and a fox.

These are PEOPLE IN FANCY DRESS, doing people things; the metaphors chosen denote something we immediately understand - one of these is a bit stupid and stubborn but well meaning, one is selfish and vain and rather lazy, and the third is evil and out to cheat the other two to take advantage of them.

We all have met people like that - the metaphor story condenses and HIGHLIGHTS certain aspects by the use of certain metaphors to produce an easier energy movement, a clearer, more visceral response and more impactful LESSON, or CHANGE in the listener.

Metaphor stories involving animals, like Aesop's tales and many fairy tales and children's stories, are one way of presenting information that creates a MOVEMENT from here, to there, across a threshold that might be in the way of that movement. This threshold may be a blockage in the energy system of the listener; and the movement in the story is designed to get the listener over that energy blockage, and out to the other side where resolution is achieved, and all can "live happily ever after".

Fairy Tales As High Level Metaphor Stories

The highest level of metaphor stories, the most complex metaphor stories, are classic fairy tales.

Fairy tales involve PEOPLE, rather than just talking animals; it's an important distinction to make. The concept of a "fairy" tale also includes the presence of "otherworldly" powers or forces, which may act in surprising ways - fairy tales are metaphor stories about people interacting with each other, with the world AND WITH FATE.

However, we still retain the "other viewpoint" - these are not our neighbours Peter and Anne and their two children we are learning about, these are people "from once upon a time, in a kingdom, far away."

With metaphor stories, we are literally lured into a false sense of security - "This has nothing to do with you, you are quite safe, it's all far away from you and your problems, just listen, my friend ..." and as we are drawn into the metaphor story, we BECOME A PART OF THE STORY, enter into it, and when that happens, we experience the same energy shifts that the people in the story experienced, in real time, as the story progresses.

We get angry when we feel the bad treatment by the evil stepmother in our own bodies; we get afraid when the hunter takes us into the deep forest with a sharp knife hidden behind his back; we are shocked when something bad happens, we are sad and upset - in fact, we are making a dance of PRESCRIBED ENERGY MOVEMENTS as we follow with or rather inside the flow of the story.

And this is where the CHANGE to our own energy system occurs.

This is how real learning happens, this is how we human beings learn and change.

People learn by events in their energy system, in their body; and that is how people learn through metaphor stories.

To write a good metaphor story, you have to tune into the flow of events that you know about and then metaphorize it to whatever level you might want to choose.

Do you know a funny story that happened in your family? Something interesting happened to someone you know? Something interesting or important that you learned, and that happened to you?

Here is an example.

Example Metaphor Story The Waves

The "real event" is me, swimming in the sea off the west coast of England, and finding to my horror that I had been washed out to sea by a strong current, that I was getting tired and there was no way I could swim against this back to shore. I would drown out here, in full view of my kids.

So I stopped swimming and struggling, trying to catch my breath, trying to deal with my fear at this situation, trying to come up with a solution.

As I floated, I noticed that the tide was coming in - there were waves running to the shore. And that gave me the idea - I started to swim with the waves, swimming as hard as I could when the waves were going towards the shore; when they receded, I would stop and catch my breath.

In this way, half an hour later, I made it back to the beach - completely exhausted by incredibly grateful to be on safe ground, and alive.

This is a true story, and even in this format, it already reads as though it was a metaphor story.

But it really happened, and that's the key to ALL METAPHOR STORIES - there has to be underlying TRUTH about the causes and effect of the laws of the Universe in there. If that is missing, you have "a Hollywood block buster" and nothing much else besides; something that is not remembered, that doesn't impact anyone, that is forgotten, that is essentially NOTHING AT ALL.

Now we may retell this story in all manner of different guises - instead of me we might have "a sailor, from long ago, who fell off his ship, and the shore was too far away ..."

Well that makes a great metaphor story, doesn't it! It transmits the same sequence of energy events - the horror, the understanding or decision that "the land's too far away and I will die out here", the exhaustion, the moment of stopping, the breakthrough information from the environment about the waves that will always wash you towards the shore, the way the resources were used to "make hay while the sun shines", and the eventual triumph and rescue.

We might tell exactly the same story, the same SEQUENCE OF EVENTS, and it's a small duck this time that found itself out in the open sea and the land was too far away ...

It might be a migrating bird. losing its strength over the ocean on its way to safe, warm shores far away, and finding a current in the air instead of the helpful waves.

The metaphors or containers might change, but the story remains the same, the energetic events and the FEELINGS remain the same, and the very real LEARNINGS remain the same as well. I have told this story to many people over the years, and quite a few have come back to me and told me that it was helpful to them, that they REMEMBERED the story in a moment of crisis, and that they used THE SAME ENERGETIC MOVEMENT PROGRESSION of stopping to think and listen carefully, helping them to find some thing in the environment they could practically use to afford a rescue, when if they had kept on struggling, they would have been doomed.

Metaphor stories are fabulous things. They are multi-level, multilayered, wonderful complex MOVING events that have the power to change those who choose to interact with them.

They can teach us new ways of dealing with problems and situations we personally might never have faced before; and very importantly, they can be used to "get us over" energy blockages and reversals that stop movement and growth, in thinking, in emotional responses, and even in a physical sense of allowing healing and natural restoration to take place.

121 Metaphor Stories About Change & Healing

I have used fairy tale format, short and concise metaphor stories in "Aromatherapy For Your Soul" to explain the effects the various essences have in the energy system - the MOVEMENTS these essences create.

These energy events are translated by me into stories about people, and about change.

Every one of the 121 metaphor stories is a story about change and getting over some kind of blockage.

You can read all of these metaphor stories free online at http://silviahartmann.com/aromatherapy/ and even better still, you can use the site's search engine to find metaphor stories by problem, by metaphor, by artefact, simile or even by colour!

That's quite a resource; and for practise, you can have a think of how the same story might be re-told, using animals instead, or cartoon characters, or even to bring it right into the here and now with people you know.

Here are three of the short metaphor stories from Aromatherapy For Your Soul.

As you read through them, note the SEQUENCE OF MOVEMENTS, note the emotions, which will give you access to the underlying energy events that are transmitted through the story.

If you understand this basic flow of events, then you understand metaphor stories - how they work, what they do, and what they are.

You might even like to start considering writing your own metaphor stories. It is a very interesting way to tell about the most important experiences in your own life, to share this richness with others, but without having to compromise your own personal privacy, as you "translate" the movements and events of the story across to other metaphor domains and let the "essence of the story" be played out there, on a different stage, with different actors, different costumes, different times - but the story remains the same ...

Silvia Hartmann

February 2008

Example Metaphor Stories:

Three Metaphor Story Examples From "Aromatherapy For Your Soul"

Metaphor Story "Alien Messages"

A wise old man who has been a teacher for many years is sick and in pain. He can't sleep so he goes outside to find solace in prayer and contemplation as he has done for nearly all his life. But the pain keeps breaking his concentration and this night, there is no solace - all seems just an illusion, and the only reality that is left, is suffering and death. He starts to cry but then, a flashing star in the sky above catches his eye.

As he looks up at the star, he hears a far away whisper - and in his heart, a sense of wonderment begins to grow that last he felt when he was just a child.

And with this wonderment, the pain begins to fade away - it leaves him not, but now the night is life once more, alive once more, and death is not yet here.

Metaphor Story "The Adventurer"

A team of adventurers finds themselves in the middle of nowhere, in the heart of a desert. They have run out of money, food and water and also, out of patience with each other. They argue and fight amongst themselves. Some want to go back, some want to go forward, some want to stay where they are and wait for help to arrive.

One amongst them has enough of all the fighting and walks out into the desert to get away from all that noise and complaining. As he walks through the sand, the voices behind him start to fade away, and when it is all quiet, he sighs with relief - and notices a strange shadow on the sand. Immediately fascinated, he goes to investigate. It is the entrance to an ancient temple, full of treasure, buried long ago and waiting here to be discovered ...

Metaphor Story "Delicious"

A sick child in hospital won't eat and is fading away, not getting any better. Everyone is upset and a wise woman hears about this. She sets to making a special sweet desert for the child; it is full of vitamins as it is made from special fruits she grows in her garden, but there is more to it than that. She also adds magical flower petals and blesses it, puts it into a beautifully shaped coloured glass bowl, decorates it lovingly with tiny leaves and fairy flowers, and takes it to the child.

The child is so delighted by this offering, he actually puts his finger in the soft, sweet, cool stuff and smells it, tastes it. A shudder of delight runs through him, he smiles and eagerly, hungrily, sets to eating the entire bowl.