Therapeutic story-telling is the art of using story-telling to facilitate healing, and is the basic healing technique underlying the bulk of Omanisa’s healing work:
In an aura reading, Om witnesses your story, the story about who you are and what is happening in your life, as it sings out to her through the colourful weave of your aura. By gifting your story back to you as seen through her eyes, she helps you find new ways to tell your story, ways that inspire, empower and heal.
In an aura healing Om takes this process a step further, actively bringing in new elements, characters, setting and plot lines, many of which are inspired by existing themes and patterns in your aura. As the healing story is told, your aura reweaves itself into more beautiful patterns that enrich your sense of self.
During spirit guide sketches and aura sketch and readings Om acts as a witness for your spirit guides who role-model new ways of being in the world, channeling stories in the form of messages and wisdom to help you access buried strengths and gifts. Each guide reflects some untapped aspect of your own psyche and acts like a tuning fork to augment these colours in your aura.
There are three levels of psychology interwoven throughout Omanisa’s therapeutic story-telling. These are the transpersonal, intrapersonal and interpersonal:
Transpersonal
In transpersonal story-telling, the characters and settings tend to be larger than life and are considered separate from us, to some extent. They often have a mythical, epic, mystical or otherworldly quality to them. In transpersonal psychology, we might tell stories about spirit guides and otherworldly characters such as angels, gods and goddesses, magical creatures, fairies, wizards and giants.
Transpersonal stories are often framed as ‘past lives’ to free the storytelling up from the limits set by our conscious memory. Past life settings and sagas often have a glorious metaphorical twist, with your deep subconscious drawing on the rich fabric of your personal history to tell stories that rise above and beyond conscious memories that might otherwise block your awareness of deeper patterns and hidden aspects of self within your own psyche.
Transpersonal story-telling brings the magic of childhood back into to adult lives that might otherwise become dry, tarnished and dull. It uses universal characters and character types (archetypes) that are familiar to our subconscious. Transpersonal characters can function as role-models we aspire to emulate, and the relationships we have with them can improve the quality of our self-talk, functioning as an excellent cognitive behavioural device for clients who are creative, imaginative and/or spiritual.
Do these transpersonal characters really exist in their own right? The answer to that question is unique to each individual. It can be perfectly safe and healthy to consider them real as long as you stay grounded. Omanisa has this to say:
“Transpersonal storytelling enriches my life and gives me incredible tools with which to facilitate magical shifts of consciousness within myself and my clients, but at heart I am a pragmatist: I use what works and I stop using it when it stops working.
Beliefs are tools, and I adjust my beliefs on a moment to moment basis, depending on what is working for me and what isn’t. In some instances, I suspend disbelief and treat characters like fairies as though they are real, but only for so long as this enhances my psychological health. If it hinders, I stop believing.
I love walking with a foot in both worlds and maintaining balance. For me transpersonal characters are both real and not real; literal in some strange magical way I cannot fully comprehend with my limited human mind, while also functioning beautifully as metaphors.”
Metaphors are the bridge that links the trans- intra- and inter- personal worlds of our psyche together as one. Transpersonal characters can be metaphors representing aspects of our own personality, or people around us. By playing with the rich story-telling available to us in transpersonal psychology, we side-step the fixed ideas of the conscious mind and dip into the subconscious. Omanisa again:
“Sometimes I ask my clients to write fairy tales. The only instruction they might have is to start with “Once upon a time…”, and make it up from there. The story they write is often a beautiful metaphor, providing them with deep insights into their own psyche. Why did they write that particular story? And do the characters remind them of people from their real life? It can be very interesting to explore the relationship dynamics between the characters in the fairy tale they have written!”
Transpersonal story-telling is a bit like dreaming. It has a realness all of its own, but it inhabits a realm we don’t fully understand. The wonderful thing is that the stories and characters in the dream can help us peer into our subconscious and the insights we gain often possess multiple layers of meaning applicable to various parts of our lives.
Intrapersonal
This is the exploration of our relationship with ourself. In a healthy intrapersonal state there is a general sense of harmony and cohesiveness between all of our many selves. We may have many aspects to our personality, but these aspects cooperate, negotiate with and balance one another.
When our internal state is balanced, our trans- and inter- personal relationships tend to be healthier, but this can also work the other way: improving your transpersonal and interpersonal relationships can facilitate healing within and between your many facets of self.
In intrapersonal story-telling, we personify our qualities and allow them to interact. So often, we are only seeing one side of a personality trait, rather than its wholeness. For example, the ‘messy and late’ archetype can be a beautiful dreamer and a creative genius. If you repress this part of you because you think it’s all bad and wrong, you cut off access to the positive traits as well. When we make friends with an aspect of self (and this personality aspect in others), we become better at honouring and managing it. We tap into it’s strengths by giving it air time when it’s appropriate, and we set healthier boundaries for it, with love, when it isn’t.
Intrapersonal work can be a lot of fun, so long as we don’t turn our inner selves into real characters with a separate life of their own in either our trans- or inter- personal realms. As per Omanisa’s earlier explanation about the pragmatism of believing in transpersonal characters only to the extent that it’s healthy to do so, turning your unresolved inner fears into scary otherworldly characters and thinking they are ‘real’ generally isn’t going to be very helpful! Patterns like this usually reflect underlying paranoia and trust issues.
Interpersonal
Interpersonal psychology explores the glorious world of our relationships with very real, tangible others. Om specialises in improving interpersonal health via intrapersonal and transpersonal work. Resolving internal conflicts between one part of yourself and another can magically dissolve tension between you and your loved ones. If we have an inner demon we are struggling with, we might project this demon out into the world and make someone else wrong or bad, rather than owning and exploring this part of ourselves. When uncomfortable feelings like guilt, anger and fear are projected out onto others, this can negatively affect our relationships. Owning and resolving our internal conflicts can go a long way towards bringing harmony and happiness into our external relationships with others.