Healing and Meaning Making Through Storytelling and Poetry

Abstract The article highlights the way storytelling and poetry can heal a worried mind and make sense of life events. Three main focuses will be presented and discussed. First is the nature and quality of storytelling and how it relates to meaning making and life events. Second is the healing power and freedom of the words used in poetry. Third is storytelling and poetry as imagination and everyday experiences. The relationship between meaning making and storytelling is something neither determined by innate biological drives nor solely created in the individual mind. To speak of meaning making in first-person narratives, one must include the concepts of culture, politics, history, and living in the world with others. By weaving concepts from the field of art, philosophy, history, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, the manuscript shows how storytelling and poetry deal with experiences and emotions that affect our understanding of life events. First-person narratives guide us back to people’s everyday experiences and let us understand human experiences and meaning making in the way that they are seamlessly lived. Meaning making and storytelling are universal cultural activities that we need to understand to communicate and understand oneself and others.