About Us
Founder & CEO Meta Commerse
Meta’s Journey
Mission: To create and support communal experiences of story medicine.
Vision: A world where human harmlessness (Ahimsa) is a primary, living value.
A Work in Progress: Releasing the Pain & Finding the Medicine.
Gye Nyame
“Go back and fetch ones essence”
Nyame Nti
“By God’s Grace”
Akoma Ntoso
“Linked Hearts”
The Body
1988: Bodyworker – Began her private practice seeking a special theme. Story as healing theme emerged in 1992 with clients’ unsolicited stories of trauma. This prompted Meta’s search for her own story, the one she then viewed as something long past, needing none of her attention.
The Story
1994: Story – Began community healing program for battered women and conducted it for the next decade. Began writing across genre, teaching students of all ages, and learning to perform, all in the spirit of story medicine, grounded in her own story. Beginning with her return to school, Meta’s deep dive came with major life changes.
The Whole Person
2011: Founded Story Medicine Worldwide for long-form groups and leadership development.
2015 – Present: Designed and taught classes, workshops, and programs using the modality.
Story Medicine Leaders and
Teachers:
Meta Commerse, MFA, CWP is the author of 6 books, including Rainsongs, Poems of a Woman’s Life; The Mending Time, a novel; Blues Doula, poems by Meta Commerse, and Womaning, a memoir.
Laura Lengnick
Laura Lengnick is a certified Story Medicine facilitator working to cultivate the resilience of land, people and community through a just transformation of our food system. She has led story medicine circles exploring the lives of those who feed us and our lived experience of climate change. You can learn more about Laura and her work at cultivatingresilience.com.
Chris Wells
Chris Wells is a Story Medicine facilitator whose work focuses on how larger systems and structures within racial capitalism have historically shaped our stories and ways we might reclaim our narratives. Currently, Chris is examining how certain methods of therapy and education reproduce conditions of alienation and oppression while he simultaneously explores examples of healing and spirituality that foster material change and resistance. Chris is also trying very hard not to buy more books than he has time to read while in graduate school. Libraries are wonderful.
Mama Matanah
Mama Matanah (age 91) is a Certified Story Medicine Coach, Nutritionist, and Prophetess. Among her greatest gifts are: writing, photography, interpretation of dreams, book publishing, teaching, and healing.
Mama Matanah is a lover, artist, adventurer and healer. To share healing space with her is to be pleasantly surprised.
Heidi Wood
Heidi Wood is a certified Story Medicine Teacher and mental health therapist. She works to disrupt the status quo at a personal level, helping people change cycles of anxiety and avoidance so they are empowered to make choices based on values instead of fear. She has facilitated story medicine retreats where white people explore white supremacy, strive to break white silence and utilize the power of story to heal. You can learn more about Heidi and her work at www.bravelittlesteps.com and www.atlanta-cbt.com/heidi-wood-l-c-s-w/
Ellane Chandler
A certified Story Medicine Facilitator, Ellane shares this about herself: “The process of healing is fascinating, particularly when you can “go back and get” as expressed by the concept of Sankofa and find language for telling the story.“When I went back to a serious mistake I made and re-told the story as if I had made the right choice instead, I learned that beneath the painful consequences of not trusting my own heart and mind, there was always the wisdom of knowing the right path to take. The healing from this was discovering that although I had been afraid to follow my own wisdom, it had never been lost. It has always been there.”
Uniting Through Shared Stories
An Indigenous healing modality blending ritual with the written word. Medicine begins with words in Indigenous cultures.
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