Stories of the Journey Home: Recent Episodes
Leo Sofer
Stories of the Journey Home presents
Storytelling for the Spiritual Journey
Saturday 6th July, 7.30 to 9.30pmPlymouth Unitarian Church
Notte St, Plymouth PL1 2HG
Weaving Gold from Starlight features a farmer who discovers treasure beyond price buried in one of his fields; an old man who finds a chest of gold coins, only to find that his head is on each one; and a wealthy heiress who leaves everything behind to marry for love, only to find a deeper love calling her into the wild and stormy night.
Storytelling has the power to draw us into deep soul-enquiry. Using symbol and metaphor it encourages us to dream big. This story will explore the theme of love.
Who is the lover here?
Whenever we feel empty of love, we are probably asking the wrong question. Love is our essence, and at core we are loved unconditionally. But this truth is usually covered over by all the strategies that we have for “getting love”.
Love is not everything we think it is
Love is not only to be found “out there”. The deepest love is within, and is a wellspring that never ends. Accessing this love, and finding out how to share it with the world is one of the main themes of this story.
Feedback from recent performances
I was blown away by the story, it was magical. I was spellbound, and feel myself in this moment completely transformed by it. The words and music wove in so beautifully together, and I was transported somewhere else…. and it was very healing. I left feeling so inspired and uplifted. The evening reconnected me with that impulse to surrender and let spirit carry me.
Neesa Copple
Leo Sofer has been telling stories since 1989. Sundara plays handpan to accompany the story. They have been setting stories to music together for over 20 years.
Weaving Gold from Starlight£12.00
Weaving Gold from Starlight quantityAdd to basketCategory: Storytelling Event* Description
DescriptionStorytelling and Music with Leo and Sundara Sofer
Saturday, July 6, 2024
7:30 to 9:30pm
Plymouth Unitarian Church
Notte St, Plymouth PL1 2HG
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Stories of the Journey Home presents
Storytelling for the Spiritual Journey
Saturday 4th November, 7.00 to 9.30pm
OpenHouse Hall,
The Old Painswick Inn, Gloucester St, Stroud GL5 1QG.
The Man with Empty Hands features a King overwhelmed by the demands of ruling his Kingdom; a carpenter losing touch with his love for his craft; and a fisherman who rows into the centre of a lake one morning to find a huge golden fish swimming beneath his boat.
Storytelling has the power to draw us into deep soul-enquiry, using symbol and metaphor to allow us to dream big. This story will explore the theme of self-acceptance.
How much do you accept yourself?Have you twisted yourself out of shape to gain other people’s acceptance?
This story takes a deep dive into the theme of self-acceptance.
The more we accept ourselves, the more we can open to our divine potential.
Our true nature shines forth when we are meticulously loving and kind towards ourselves.
Feedback from our last storytelling show for adults
I was blown away by the story, it was magical. I was spellbound, and feel myself in this moment completely transformed by it. I don’t know where that will take me. The words and music wove in so beautifully together, the setting also really helped – I was transported somewhere else…. and it was very healing. I left feeling so inspired and uplifted. The evening reconnected me with that impulse to surrender and let spirit carry me.
Neesa Copple
Leo Sofer has been telling stories since 1989. Sundara plays handpan to accompany the story. They have been setting stories to music together for over 20 years.
Event time is two and half hours, with an interval.
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I’ve been having some very challenging times recently. I won’t go into the details, because they are very personal and involve other people, but I can say that the experience has yielded some fascinating insights into what happens inside when … Continue reading →
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The King was desperate. His family suppers were driving him to distraction. All the bickering, backstabbing and rivalry. When would this family learn to start treating each other with consideration and respect? He had tried putting things in the food, … Continue reading →
The post The One Life We All Share appeared first on Stories of the Journey Home.
I’ve been aware of my tendency to over-plan my life for a while now, but lately it’s becoming clearer to me what sits at the root of this habit. The deepest longing I know is to give to life: to … Continue reading →
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Once upon a time the North Wind and the Sun were having a huge row. The North Wind angrily declared that it was perfectly obvious that he was more powerful than the Sun. Could the Sun flatten houses, devastate forests … Continue reading →
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When I was just nineteen years old, I found myself having a very unusual phone conversation. What made it so memorable was that at its conclusion I found myself immersed in something exquisite that I had never consciously experienced before: … Continue reading →
The post When Love Makes Time Stand Still appeared first on Stories of the Journey Home.
“There’s one thing you are forgetting,” said the Goddess in the woman’s dream. She’d been having these dreams for months now, wandering in the pleasure gardens of the Goddess and feeling, with every touch, with every sight and sound, that … Continue reading →
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The day my father died was like no other. I was woken by the sound of my mother crying downstairs, having just discovered him. It was 4am. The day from that point on was a frenzy of activity as paramedics … Continue reading →
The post Sharing My Father’s Journey appeared first on Stories of the Journey Home.
My friend Annika walks the slack line. It’s a length of flat webbing strung between two trees in her garden and it teaches her all about presence. Why presence? Because Annika struggles to meditate. Sitting still makes her nervous, but … Continue reading →
The post The Challenge of Balance appeared first on Stories of the Journey Home.
I spent my eighteenth birthday in the Austrian Tyrol. It was the first day of my life that I spent entirely on my own, and it was the beginning of something really special. I had brought into the mountains enough … Continue reading →
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The attic in our house is pretty small, and yet we’ve managed to find space up here for a little office, a craft space for Sundara and a place for our double bed. I have come to love this little … Continue reading →
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There’s a bank at which we all have an account, and it’s called The Bank of the Future. This bank is very suspect, however. Its vaults are actually empty, although its employees will insist otherwise. It has no stock to shore up its valuations. It has nothing to convince you to keep investing your time and attention in it except one vital thing: your hope!
As long as you look at life and want it to be different, you have hope. In popular culture hope is considered a virtuous thing, and I’m not suggesting that people in oppressed or life-threatening situations should abandon hope (although I’ll get onto that later). Rather, I’m shining a light on a less positive fact: hope keeps us tethered to the mind.
So, what is in front of you isn’t quite what you would like. Something is difficult, or challenging, or painful, and in your mind you reach into the future. “One day, I hope this thing will disappear from my life.”
Or, what is in front of you is wonderful. Maybe it’s so wonderful that you have a hard time taking it all in. Again, you reach into the future with the thought, “I hope I get more of this again.”
Do you see what’s happening? In each circumstance you are not staying with what’s actually here. You are investing your time and attention in the Bank of the Future.
Remember, the Bank of the Future has no reserves, nothing in the vault. It never actually pays out because, did you ever actually arrive in the future? Did anyone? All debts can be deferred, because hope is a currency that can be endlessly minted. This is what allows the Bank of the Future to maintain its deception.
The tragedy is that you actually have enormous wealth in an account at another bank, The Bank of Now. This bank has limitless reserves, because it is linked to the abundance of All That Is.
But access to your account is blocked whenever you are not actually present. So, whatever is coming to you right now is vital. It might be challenging, it might be pleasant, but the most important thing is that you are fully available to it. This tendency to drift into the future with our preferences and plans is what brings us out of the present.
And what of those facing life threatening situations, or crushing circumstances? Life brings us what we need to wake up to the abundance within. Sometimes this wake up is intense, other times it is gentle. We all get what we need. Staying fully present with it allows us to see the beauty and perfection of what is coming to us, and to know what to do next.
The Bank of Now has all the treasure. The Bank of the Future is bankrupt. Where will you bank?
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My wife Sundara and I had planned something special for my 40th birthday. We lived at the time in Findhorn, a fishing village in Scotland with a fantastic new restaurant.
I’d already booked a table for 8pm, but predictably our timing was sliding. Getting our two small children ready for the babysitter was not going to plan.
I called the restaurant at 8.10pm, asking if they could hold the table for me a bit longer.
“Sure”, they replied, “but you should know that a large party has just turned up. Even if you get here soon, you could be waiting a long time for your food.”
What to do? This was my 40th birthday. I didn’t want to spend it endlessly waiting for food in a restaurant. So we decided to cancel and take a walk on the beach. That wasn’t a poor second choice, because we could already see it was going to be a special evening. The tide was out and it was unusually warm and sunny.
The beach at Findhorn slopes so gently that when the tide goes out, it stretches far, far out to sea. If you are lucky enough to be there at low tide on a pleasant evening (a relatively rare conjunction), it can feel quite heavenly, with the sky reflected in pools and wet sand as the sea retreats ever further and further out.
Most people stroll along the length of the beach, but Sundara and I could sense magic in the air and headed straight out to sea. We wanted to see how far out we could get!
More than a hundred metres out, we felt we had reached the furthest limit. Neither of us had ever been so far out before, and yet suddenly she said, “look!”
Just ahead of us, surrounded by fast-flowing currents of water, a little spit of land had just opened up. We had to step over streaming rivulets to reach it and walked to its furthest extreme, surely now at the water’s edge.
And that’s when the tide literally turned—that very moment. My 40th birthday surprise was to be right there as the water flowed out, ebbed, and then flooded back in.
We spent a few moments just admiring it and then realised that our route back home was disappearing fast. Those little rivulets had become floods of flowing water, now too wide to jump.
We got very wet, but we made it back and then did what all the sensible people were already doing and walked lengthways along the beach until the sun had set, blabbering about what had just happened. That little piece of the seabed had only been exposed for a few seconds before disappearing beneath the water again, and we’d been right there!
I’ve always seen this moment as symbolically marking a turning point: a momentous switch in the whole direction of my life. And the key to making this switch came a few months later when I learned to meditate.
I took the train to Inverness and spent the weekend learning this simple yet subtle art. It was a beautiful couple of days, but at the end of the weekend, something really disturbing happened.
I boarded the train back to Findhorn to find that it was so crowded that I needed to stand. Wanting something to pass the journey, I pulled out the book I was reading at the time, a grim but compelling account of the Stasi, the secret police of East Germany.
The book had come to an especially disturbing passage, in which the author visits the cells where political prisoners were brutally tortured. It was a gripping account, and I spent the whole journey clinging on to a handrail to keep reading it.
When I got home, however, I was full of regrets about what I’d done. Why had I read such a disturbing book on the way home from such a lovely weekend, spoiling the good feelings that I’d left with?
That vivid juxtaposition has remained with me ever since, and I couldn’t help wondering about the message it had for me. Only in the last week, however, has the fullness of that message been revealed.
Although I don’t want to shut my eyes to the horrors taking place in the world, the subject of torture is not one that I’ve intentionally focussed on since. But then last week I was watching a television drama which featured a scene of torture of the same incredible cruelty and enormous suffering that I had been reading about in the Stasi’s prisons all those years ago.
It stayed with me for days. It haunted my meditations. And then it showed me how reading that book was the perfect ending to a weekend that gave me, for the first time in my life, the key to escaping the prison of my own thinking mind.
Thinking is a kind of self-torture. I begin with peace, love and beauty. I am born with these things; they are an inherent part of who I am. But the thinking mind creates facsimiles of reality that beguile me into believing that just by thinking about a thing, I am in touch with its reality.
I am not. I am in touch with a facsimile. But this basic delusion spawns a spreading addiction to this world of mental forms that draws me further and further away from my grounding in peace, love and beauty. Soon I fully believe that when I plan to have more of these things in my life I am doing something reasonable.
As a result, I put myself in the torture chamber of the thinking mind. Even as I scheme to recover more of what I most long for, I drive myself further and further away from it. I have gotten so far out from reality that I don’t even register what I’m doing as self-torture any more. It just feels normal because everyone else seems to be doing it.
Seeing this can really be a turning of the tide. No longer trusting the world of mental forms, you turn and start walking home, back to the peace, love and beauty that was always yours. Nothing can deny you what you were born with except the torturing clutches of the thinking mind.
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