Lineage, Liberation & The Practice of Story Accountability

(This is a longer piece—part essay, part invitation. I hope you’ll read it in spaciousness. Or bookmark it to return when you can linger.)

What if the structure of a story itself—its pace, its hero, its resolution—carries the fingerprints of systems that silence, syncretize, or erase?

If you’ve ever felt like your story didn’t “fit the mold,” you’re not alone. Because sometimes the story structures we’re taught—especially in Western writing and branding—simply don’t match the truth we need to tell. These frameworks were often built from someone else’s values, someone else’s worldview—and we’ve been trained to believe they’re the only “right” way.

No wonder it feels off. I believe storytelling becomes liberating when we stop contorting ourselves to fit these shapes and start creating from our own self-sovereignty.

When we re-member, we realize we were always meant to tell stories our way.

(Note: I do work with traditional storytelling structures when they serve the story and the teller. But I also look beyond them—to structures rooted in feminine, Indigenous, and non-Western traditions that offer different rhythms, shapes, and ways of knowing. My approach is both/and: honoring what can be useful while opening space for what has been overlooked. I do this not just to critique dominant frameworks, but to expand our collective imagination around what stories can be and do.)

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The Stories We Inherit

Most of us grew up on tales where the girl gets saved by the prince, the hero slays the dragon, and the problems are resolved in a tidy series of events where everything works out.

We absorb these types of stories from a very young age. The Little Mermaid was one of mine. As a girl, I didn't question the narrative that a young woman should silence herself—literally give up her voice—for the possibility of romantic love. Nor did I question that the powerful, intuitive older woman in the story was cast as the villain.

Looking back, it’s a chilling lesson cloaked in pretty animation: that to receive what you desire requires self-erasure, that women who wield their own power are dangerous, and that being chosen is worth any cost.

We internalize stories like these before we have the knowledge to resist them. And if we’re not careful, we also pass them down in our own work—consciously or not. That enchanted storyline wasn’t harmless entertainment—it became a blueprint for how I understood love, voice, and worth.

I can still see Ariel perched on a rock, eyes fixed on a man she didn’t know—her silence offered as sacrifice, her longing mistaken for strength.

It’s not just Ariel. Cinderella taught me that goodness would be rewarded with rescue, not agency. That waiting quietly and looking beautiful was a virtue. That your worth is proven when someone outside of you—usually a man—sees it.

‍Beauty and the Beast taught me that love could transform even the most violent or emotionally unavailable man—that if a woman is kind and patient enough, she can redeem cruelty with care. Another chilling message wrapped in a romantic fairy tale.

Later, I began to notice how those same messages were repackaged in more contemporary forms—modern myths that felt new but echoed similar core dynamics. These weren’t princesses in towers, but their lessons were familiar: individual struggle over collective care, self-sacrifice for approval, and transformation through suffering.

Stories like Erin Brockovich, where the heroine must fight tirelessly—alone—to be heard and taken seriously, often at the expense of her personal life and well-being. Or Rocky, where success comes through individual grit, violence, and perseverance, not through communal care.

These stories don’t just teach us about characters. They teach us about values—about who gets to be centered, whose pain is honored, and what kinds of endurance or self-denial are framed as heroic. For writers, coaches, and cultural leaders, recognizing these patterns isn’t just theoretical. It’s foundational. Because the stories we’ve inherited often become the templates we reproduce in our own work.

When we see how these myths have shaped us, we begin to question the narrative blueprints we’ve been given—and to imagine new ones that align with the values we want to amplify in the world.

These dominant story structures don’t arise from nowhere. They were shaped by colonial, patriarchal, and consumerist systems that prioritize domination over collaboration, valorize rescue narratives over mutual aid, and center linear progress over cyclical wisdom.

As bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and others have pointed out, these frameworks often erase interdependence, emotional labor, and the nonlinear nature of healing and transformation. They reward control and conquest, rather than care, reciprocity, and relational truth.

This value system is deeply embedded in how most modern stories are written and received—and it influences which stories get uplifted, funded, and believed.

One of the clearest illustrations of this can be found in the work of Joseph Campbell, who famously described women not as heroines or journeyers themselves but as the prize at the end of a man’s journey. The hero's journey (the narrative structure he is famous for naming and which is clearly visible in franchises like Star Wars) isn’t limited to ancient myths—it shows up everywhere: in fairy tales, films, business branding, and yes, even in the books we write.

But here's the thing: Just because we've inherited these story structures doesn't mean we have to keep telling them the same way.

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Storytelling as a Tool for Liberation

I believe that finding liberation through our stories means telling the truth—not just about ourselves, but about the systems that have shaped our stories and the societies that we live in.

As Matthew Salesses reminds us in Craft in the Real World, writing is not neutral—it’s cultural. The expectations we hold about what makes a “good” story (like stories that build tension through confrontation or ones that center a single, heroic main character) often come from white, Western frameworks.

These norms can marginalize BIPOC, queer, spiritual, disabled, and feminist storytellers who come from rich traditions that don’t fit the shapes we've come to know and recognize.

And yes—part of why those shapes feel so satisfying is because our brains have been trained to respond to them. Familiar arcs can trigger a small dopamine hit, a reward for recognizing the expected pattern. But that doesn’t mean they’re always the most honest, inclusive, or liberatory shapes.

Not every story is meant to be extractive, formulaic, or performance-based. Sometimes the deepest truths live in seasonal rhythms, the spiral, the pause, the collective voice.

In the storytelling spaces I help to create, we work to dismantle our assumptions with care. We invite stories to emerge from somatic truth, ancestral knowing, communal memory, and the messy brilliance of being human.

Sometimes these stories don’t fit tidy arcs or marketable beats—not because they’re broken, but because they carry a power shaped by grief, healing, memory, and truth. They speak in rhythms our bodies remember, even when our culture has forgotten. They’re the kind of stories that make us feel less alone in our becoming. And when we tell them, we magnetize others to our cause.

This kind of deeper power echoes in ancient story arcs—like the myth of Inanna’s descent into the underworld, where transformation comes not through conquest, but through surrender, loss, and return.

Or the stories of the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades, which trace cosmic lineage, protection, and collective memory.

Or the Cailleach, the fierce and ancient hag-goddess of Celtic lore, an elder untamed woman whose bones are the mountains and whose breath stirs the storms—one with the land, the weather, and the wild memory of winter. These are not stories with a single hero or clear victory.

These ancient story shapes are layered, symbolic, and relational—whispering truths that lived before colonial conquest flattened mystery into moral.

These stories—and others like the Two-Spirit and gender-shifting deities found in many Indigenous and non-western traditions—invite us into truths that are expansive, inclusive, and nonbinary. They remind us that transformation does not always follow a linear arc. That identity, like a story, can be fluid, sacred, and multidimensional.

While I draw on these older, often feminine, nonwestern, or Indigenous-rooted mythologies, I feel I am following the breadcrumbs left for me by the great tradition and ritual of storytelling.

I believe in curating story shapes that meet the teller where they are and whatever truth is being revealed in that moment. A different way of storytelling lives in the bones of these older myths. Whether linear or cyclical, quiet or epic, a liberated story is one that honors its lineage and its living purpose.

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Honoring Our Lineages

Liberation isn’t a destination—it’s a practice of remembering. And one of the most radical acts of remembering is to honor where we come from. The stories, teachers, rituals, and rhythms that formed us. In a world that insists on urgency, individuality, and productivity, returning to our lineage is an act of resistance. It is a way to reclaim not only our stories, but the pace and place from which they arise.

For example, in my live writing workshops, I honor the work of my work with Ixchel Lunar, an Indigenous Time Ecologist, who teaches that time isn’t linear or urgent—it’s cyclical, ecological, and relational. They helped me reclaim the concept of flow from the. common "bro flow"—practices that extract productivity from presence, turning spaciousness into hustle. Instead, I learned to honor flow as an embodied rhythm: a state that arises from enoughness, not urgency.

In their guidance, flow is not a performance but a practice of alignment—working in 90-minute deep flow sessions is now built into the work I do with writers and tellers. Ixchel showed me how stepping outside the push for speed and productivity is a way of returning to rhythm—to breath, body, land, and spirit. So when I teach or write slowly, when my groups pause or spiral or rest, we’re never falling behind.

I also incorporate the somatic justice teachings I learned from Staci K. Haines, who reminds us that liberation must be embodied—that it must live in our tissues, not just our principles. Stories don’t live in the mind alone—they live in the body. They are shaped by breath and tension, by how we brace or soften, by what we’ve had to survive.

Trauma, power, resistance, and belonging all leave imprints, and those imprints shape how we write, speak, and show up on the page and in the world. When we create space for these embodied truths to move, we begin to tell stories that do more than inform—they transform.

Naming the lineage that shapes your work is more than gratitude—it’s a portal to a different way of being. It allows us to write at the pace of integrity, not urgency. When we speak the names of our teachers, we aren’t just acknowledging influence—we are naming the relational fabric that holds our work.

We’re reminding ourselves and our communities that wisdom is never self-made. That every story we tell is threaded with others: known and unknown, seen and unseen.

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Your Role as a Storyteller: Accountability, Lineage, and Reclamation

This is where story becomes a practice. Where remembering becomes action. Where your voice becomes a thread in the larger tapestry of liberation.

If you’re a writer, a healer, a visionary leader—you are shaping a narrative ecosystem. You're not just telling stories. You are enacting an alternate worldview.

That means you carry responsibilities—yes—but also invitations. If you’re shaping stories in this world, you’re not just crafting content. You’re participating in the weaving of culture, memory, and meaning. And that makes your role sacred.

True accountability is not just about avoiding harm. It’s about knowing where we come from, honoring the lineages that shaped us, and being in right relationship with the teachings we carry. It’s about naming the sources of our knowledge, the ancestors and living teachers who gave us tools to tell truer, deeper stories.  

When we do that, we don’t just tell better stories—we begin to decolonize the process itself. We move from extraction to exchange, from performance to presence. We invite stories that spiral, resist, rest, and remember.

Here are some of the practices I invite you to re-member:

If you’re shaping stories in this world, you’re not just crafting content. You’re participating in the weaving of culture, memory, and meaning making. And that makes your role sacred.

• To see accountability as lineage work. Every idea we share comes from somewhere. Crediting our teachers wherever possible—those who shape our thought, our practices, our ethics—is a form of honoring our elders. Accountability, in this sense, isn’t just about avoiding harm; it’s about building trust, belonging, and continuity through respectful acknowledgment.
  
  
• To honor the lineages we reference and not teach what is not ours. Cultural appropriation often begins with good intentions but lacks informed boundaries. When we borrow from traditions or teachings without deep relationship, consent, or proper credit, we risk extraction—turning sacred knowledge into stolen content. Honoring means being in right relationship: asking permission, citing sources, and sometimes, knowing when to step back and uplift rather than interpret. Add to that the deeper understanding that consent is not a one-time checkbox—it’s an ongoing process of relationship and reverence. What’s welcome in one moment may shift in another. Right relationship means returning, checking in, and respecting boundaries as they evolve.
  
  
• To cite and uplift the culture-bearers who teach us. This means acknowledging not just where our teachings come from, but who has held and protected these traditions over time. It asks us to speak their names, invest in their leadership, and credit their wisdom in every retelling. Uplifting culture-bearers is a practice of resistance against erasure—and a living act of reciprocity.
  
  
• To name our own positionality. As a white Western woman, I acknowledge the harm I’ve caused in my years as a storyteller (especially in my 15 years of being a humanitarian storyteller)—where stories were often taken without ongoing consent, and shared without a full understanding of the context, trauma, or complexity they carried. I now see how my work, however well-intentioned, sometimes replicates the very dynamics of extraction I seek to dismantle. That recognition lives in me daily. And still—I know I am likely doing things now that I will one day look back on with new understanding. That’s the nature of growth. Of being in a body, in a culture, in a constant state of learning and unlearning.
  
  
• To create space for stories that spiral, resist, rest, and reclaim. Because not every space is safe for every body. And the safety we seek isn’t about comfort—it’s about integrity. In the rooms we shape—whether on the page, in circles, or in classrooms—we must design for consent, nuance, slowness, and care. These are not passive spaces. They are intentional sanctuaries for truth-telling, where complexity is met with curiosity, not correction. Where stories are allowed to arrive whole, not trimmed down to fit. Where power is shared, and impact is considered. This is where transformation begins—not just for the story, but for the storyteller.
  
  

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This is What Honoring Your Lineage Looks Like

To liberate our stories, we must first remember they are not ours alone.

In a culture that tells us to create from scratch, to claim originality, or to find our 'unique voice,' this remembering is radical. Naming our teachers, mentors, and lineages is a way of disrupting the colonial myth of the self-made storyteller. It is a way of weaving ourselves back into the web of relation, of interdependence, of ancestral and collective wisdom.

Lineage work is liberation work. It reminds us that creativity is not about domination or ownership—it’s about relationship. About tending what has been passed to us, and choosing—with care and courage—what we pass forward.

It is through honoring lineage that we begin to decolonize the stories we carry. It is through naming our teachers that we push back against the patriarchal myth that knowledge lives in the individual genius. And it is through remembering that we belong to something larger than ourselves that we loosen the grip of extractive, consumerist storytelling—the kind that turns stories into products and people into content.

Before this work was mine, it belonged to others. I carry the words, rhythms, and truths of the storytellers who have come before me—keepers of myth, of memory, of resistance.

Their voices echo through my own: the poets, wisdom-holders, trauma-healers, land-listeners, grief tenders, and craft-shapers who made space for nonlinear truth and taught us that liberation lives in the body, in the land, and in the stories we choose to tell.

This is how I honor them—in breath, in page, in process:

• Ixchel Lunar – for teaching relational time, decolonial flow, and sacred reciprocity.
  
  
• Staci Haines – for grounding liberation in the body through somatics and trauma-informed justice.
  
  
• Matthew Salesses – for challenging craft assumptions and offering a more inclusive, culturally-aware approach to story.
  
  
• Tricia Hersey (The Nap Ministry) – for framing rest as resistance and a portal to ancestral wisdom.
  
  
• adrienne maree brown – for teaching emergent strategy, radical imagination, and visionary fiction as tools for transformation.
  
  
• Layla F. Saad – for modeling ethical leadership, rooted spirituality, and global anti-racism.
  
  
• Resmaa Menakem – for showing how trauma lives in the body and how healing can be collective.
  
  
• Amber McZeal – for teaching narrative healing through spiritual ecology and Black liberation frameworks.
  
  
• Robin Wall Kimmerer – for offering a language of reciprocity with the more-than-human world.
  
  
• Toko-pa Turner – for restoring the sacred art of dreamwork and belonging.
  
  
• Rev. angel Kyodo williams – for guiding us toward spiritual clarity in justice work.
  
  
• Joanna Macy – for linking grief, activism, and the sacred work of world renewal.
  
  
• Elizabeth Gilbert, Martha Beck, & Glennon Doyle – for modeling brave voice and personal truth-telling.
  
  
• bell hooks – for offering foundational frameworks on love, pedagogy, and liberation.
  
  
• Maya Angelou – for embodying storytelling as cultural bridge and soul medicine.
  
  
• Clarissa Pinkola Estés – for mythic storytelling as feminine reclamation.
  
  
• Sylvia Brinton Perera – for her deep mapping of spiritual descent and archetypal healing.
  
  
• Jean Shinoda Bolen – for reclaiming goddess psychology and feminine archetypes.
  
  
• Sonya Renee Taylor – for radical self-love as a political and embodied act.
  
  
• Kimberly Ann Johnson – for somatic healing and nervous system restoration.
  
  
• Susan Cain – for honoring quiet power and internal truth.
  
  
• Emily Nagoski – for reclaiming pleasure, wellness, and body trust.
  
  
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – for naming the complexity of feminism, identity, and story.
  
  
• StoryGrid – for offering a technical lens on narrative structure and form.
  
  
• Kurt Vonnegut – for exposing the absurdities and patterns in traditional story shapes.
  
  
• Maureen Murdock, Victoria Lynn Schmidt, and Sharon Blackie – for their work in reclaiming mythic and feminine narrative arcs.
• Megan Hale – for modeling trauma-informed, relational business leadership and introducing me to the “B for Belonging” in DEIB work, rooted in teachings from Dr. Nicole Robinson via Lisa Kuzman’s Trauma-Sensitive Coaching Certification (2021).
• Mariah Coz – whose community guidelines helped inspire Megan Hale’s inclusivity practices, which in turn informed my own.
• Trisha Teig – for introducing me to the concept of Brave Spaces and the work of Arao & Clemens, which informs how I shape dialogue-centered spaces today

These are the names I carry. This is the lineage I bow to. The river I pour back into.

I’ve also been shaped by programs and communities that have held and guided my practice.

• Muse Storyfinding Course
  
• The Story Skills Workshop by Akimbo with Bernadette Jiwa & Seth Godin
  
• Narrative Healing with Lisa Weinert
  
• Written in the Stars and Star Powered by Leslie Tagorda
  
• Whiteness at Work course with Desiree Adaway‍
• Smart Body, Smart Mind with Irene Lyon – my introduction to personal somatic work‍
• Dream Money with Megan Hale
• NGOStorytelling where I served as co-editor with founder Laura Elizabeth Pohl—learning alongside a global community of ethical storytellers and humanitarian professionals. The conversations I co-curated there shaped my early understanding of consent, narrative power, and cultural humility in deep and lasting ways
  
  

Through the Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy Certification at The Embody Lab, I learned from:

• Arielle Schwartz, PhD
  
  
• Nkem Ndefo, MSN
  
  
• Scott Lyons, PhD
  
  
• Staci K. Haines
  
  
• Deb Dana
  
  
• Lisa Dion, LPC
  
  
• Manuela Mischke-Reeds, LMFT
  
  
• Ruby Gibson, PhD
  
  
• Karine Bell
  
  
• Pat Ogden
  
  
• Albert Wong, PhD
  
  
• Nikki Meyers
  
  
• Fran D. Booth
  
  
• Ruella Frank, PhD
  
  
• Farzana Khan
  
  

Note: We won’t always remember perfectly. Our memory, like our storytelling, is shaped by what we’ve lived, what we’ve lost, and what we’ve longed for. But even in the forgetting, there is an invitation to return. To trace the thread. To make space for reverence where recollection may falter. Liberation doesn’t ask us for perfection—it asks us for participation. For repair. For reimagining. And when we tell our stories from that place—not of certainty, but of care—we don’t just reclaim voice. We become part of the wider remembering.

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A Practice of Lineage Keeping

As you approach your next piece of writing—pause. Before you begin, take a moment to reflect:

• Who are the teachers, elders, or voices that shaped this insight?
  
  
• Whose ideas live within your own?
  
  
• Whose labor made this knowing possible?
  
  

Write their names. Speak them aloud. Place a line of acknowledgment at the top or bottom of your page. It doesn’t need to be formal or perfect—just true. Even one line of gratitude can shift the energy from ownership to honoring.

This is how we tell stories of liberation. With presence. With reverence. With a simple act of remembering.

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