Secrets in FairyTales Way
It is a pleasure to tell you a little about the long journey that led us to discover the hidden paths in Fairy Tales and to conceive and optimize the Fairy Tale Method The Dance of Images©.
But let’s start from the beginning of this path, started more than 20 years ago, introducing ourselves.
Being social individuals, it is unfortunately mandatory to define yourself, to indicate a role with which other individuals can, in two words, get an idea of who we are and what we do.
To fulfill this task, we should present ourselves as scholars and authors of fairy tales.
We certainly love much more to say that we are Evelina Gialloreto and Tiziana Grimaldi, two human beings strongly committed to their own evolution … and the fact that we are two beings belonging to the genus Homo, especially Sapiens, no one can doubt it!
For the rest, precisely for the purposes of our evolution, the oldest, most powerful, effective and concrete tool we have found over the years of research is the Fairy Tale.
But as someone would say … the question arises spontaneously … what do fairy tales have to do with the evolution of the individual? Some may argue that fairy tales are those fictional stories used to amuse children. Someone else would insist that they are an effective ploy to make them fall asleep quickly.
Yes, too.
Fairy tales often serve this kind of purpose but they are much, much more!
Now we need to be a little more serious for a few moments and tell that fairy tales are a very ancient form of storytelling, which has come down to us after a long wandering around the planet for more than an entire millennium.
In 1928 the Russian researcher, linguist and anthropologist Vladimir Propp published in his language a text entitled “Morphology of the Fairy Tale” in which, for the first time, he illustrated the surprising fruit of his extraordinary work. In fact, by comparing hundreds of Russian and European fairy tales, he discovered and defined a scheme, present in all fairy tales, which annulled the idea of narrations occasionally arising from the author’s imagination, without any value or substance. The very fact that hundreds of fairy tales had observable and repeatable sequences, therefore reproducible, placed the fairy tale in a special category in the great river of narration.
Okay, but it is still not clear what the fairy tale has to do with human evolution.
For us who had been reading and subsequently writing fairy tales for years, Propp’s discovery was acquired information, but probably not fully understood.
Writing the fairy tales with some tricks we experienced specific effects,
dreams, intuitions, expansion of sensory perception
We had studied the texts written by eminent scientists and scholars such as Jung, Hillman, Betthleim on the study of the fairy tale in a symbolic key for the use of psychoanalysis.
So, for a short time, we wrote fairy tales for little patients in therapy and it was extraordinary to see how they produced beneficial effects, even physical ones.
But something was still missing, because despite the advantageous result produced by fairy tales as a psychotherapeutic tool, in our opinion they could not be relegated to the area of discomfort, also because the classic fairy tales, written many centuries earlier, were aimed at the entire community.
So, to answer our question, we picked up the classic fairy tales and started observing the scenes they tell without attributing meanings and symbols to them.
It wasn’t easy at all!
But since we are two rams, we insisted and at the same time expanded our studies towards disciplines and texts that apparently had nothing to do with fairy tales.
And in this progress, even apparently a little disjointed, we came across Desmond Morris, zoologist and ethologist and his revolutionary theories and … we finally found the answer!
Already in 1967, this singular scientist affirmed that in the genetic patrimony of every human being, in addition to the biological characteristics, are contained the most effective behavioral suggestions for each individual, those that the species has selected for the best condition of life.
So why, since everything is already inscribed in us, do we not know who we are and we are not happy?
Because, as Morris says, since these are behavioral suggestions, not instructions, the individual can depart from these suggested paths, by doing so … each of us behaves in a very different way from what the species had appropriately suggested.
Of course, this deviation from our ancient and precious behavioral dynamics, that is, from the original individual path, as we have called it, causes the individual to run into a wide range of frustrations and discomforts and … as the song says … evolution stumbles.
And so, how do we find our personal “open sesame”?
How do we discover, find and resume that path abandoned so long ago?
Here the fairy tales come into play
Ancient fairy tales are written using a specific language that goes beyond words. It is the natural language of our species and allows us to read the optimized behavioral sequences, told in each of us. It is a language capable of narrating the Images which are the substance of the story. That’s why we have called it “Language for Images©”.
The writing of one’s own fairy tale, following the ancient rules of the Language for Images, typical of the fairy tale narration, allows everyone to discover their own optimized behavioral sequence, bring it into action and walk again the Original Path given by the species.