Ever wonder if you should write down and publish your personal story (and then go out and speak about it)? Here’s a thought for you that may make you want to run off and begin writing and speaking about your personal experience or writing whatever stories you have running around in your head.
A Hasidic teaching says everyone should tell stories–even personal stories. Additionally, if you hear a story, then that story was Divinely intended for you to hear. As you listen to the story, or after you hear it, you are supposed to ask, Why am I hearing or why have I just heard this particular story? So as the story teller, you play a Divine role. You tell the story the listener is meant to hear so they learn something or become inspired in some way. You become a teacher and a change agent.
If you know nothing about Hasidism, here’s some info: The Hasidic movement started in the 1700’s (CE) in Eastern Europe in response to a void felt by many average observant Jews of the day. The founder of Hasidism, Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov was a great scholar and mystic, devoted to both the revealed, outer aspect, and hidden, inner aspect of Torah, or the Old Testament.
You don’t need to be Jewish to look at storytelling in this manner. You don’t have to be super spiritual, and you don’t have to be religious to sense that when you write an inspirational story or a book with any type of personal element to it, that you touch your reader’s lives and in some way change them.
Someone out there needs to hear your story. Are you ready to tell it?
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