Why Sharing Your Story Is So Important

ears ago, I was on a course called The Possibility of Women with Carol McCall. It was a very interesting weekend. 

For the first half of the workshop I was uncharacteristically  nervous, even just standing up having to introduce myself, I felt self conscious and anxious.

All weekend, I kept seeing little white angel feathers everywhere, which I thought was interesting, but random! 

After a number of group exercises one day, Carol basically told me that I wasn’t a team player! I was extremely offended. 

What do you mean? I asked her. She told me I didn’t share my whole self with people. I thought, “yes I do! I’m open!” I was extremely defensive back then. 

Later, I watched her energetically balance the room, seating each woman’s energetic equal across from each other in the long room. She was sitting on the back row with chairs on either side of her, forming a big U and then there was one big chair cross from her at the other end of the room at the open part of the big U shape of chairs. 

She explained that that was The Angel Chair and that they (she and her team) had selected about 4 women to do the work for everybody. Immediately I thought, “Oh no!” because intuitively I knew I was going to be picked. Suddenly all the random angel feathers made sense to me!

Naturally, the first one picked, was me. I was so nervous. 

I sat in The Angel Chair. I was trying not to look at all of the women on either side of me. There must have been 45-50 women there. 

I was feeling extremely vulnerable. So I just focussed on her. She said, “we see who you are.” That made me even more nervous! She asked me to tell everyone about my birth story. I was immediately relieved having told that story a number of times. 

As I was recounting my birth story, I noticed that women were crying, the box of tissues was flying around the room and I wondered why my story was triggering everybody? 

Afterwards, all of the women had to feed back, and they were all saying stuff like, “thank you. You’ve just helped me heal my relationship with my brother, with my mother, with my father. Oh, I totally understand why I behave the way I do.” And other amazing feedback. 

I was surprised that all of those women were so moved just from hearing my birth story. 

She also told me that they knew that I was a highly spiritual person and vibrated at the level of Love.  I didn’t know about the vibration of words yet back then, but I was pleased to hear it! 

Back in those days, my spirituality was a secret, only my innermost circle of people knew. I still had all that witch history fear of feeling like I’d lose everything and everyone I loved if I allowed myself to be who I truly felt I was on the inside. 

But it was my secret. I was outted! My homework was to share the spiritual side of myself even with my corporate people – I was a corporate trainer back then. This was right before shaman school.

It was a very empowering moment, because as vulnerable as I felt sitting there in the chair – and she did get me ugly crying after a while with other things that came up in that moment – but what I realized was how important it was to be vulnerable with others in a safe held space.

This set the stage for me to feel safe speaking up in a room of over 100 people at shaman school. To get the most out of any workshop you need to be brave to speak up and share so you can receive guidance and feedback.

Share your story, because you don’t know how it can impact other people and help them progress on their own journey. 

The other thing that was highly empowering for me was fully being seen and heard and being honored by all of the women there that day. It was an extremely profound moment. 

If you’re feeling like you’ve got a story inside of you, you don’t need to write a book and tell the whole world about it, but get a trusted few people and share your story. 

I remember teaching shamanic energy medicine to two friends that would come every weekend for a couple of months, and I took them through the whole process. 

One of those weekends, my friend sat down on the couch, and she said she was going to tell us both her whole life story. It’s important to be witnessed, and to be received.

She told us about her whole life, all of the challenges and successes that she had had, all of the things that she’d overcome, all of the guilt, pain, joy, shame, everything. She held nothing back. 

It was extremely moving and emotional to hear it, and it was also a privilege. When people are trusting you with their information, that’s empowering, too. 

If you feel like you need to be seen and heard, find some people that you trust and allow yourself to be vulnerable and share your story, because you don’t know how it could be helping them. 

Since then I’ve always maintained that the strongest people are the ones who are willing to be vulnerable. When we’re hoarding secrets because of fear or shame, it only puts up an energetic barrier between ourselves and everyone else.

If you want to share your story with me, I’d really love to hear it.

Book a free 20 minute mind-shift call so you can feel seen, heard, received and be held in a safe space so you can allow yourself to be vulnerable too.