Telling with your heart

There are two ways to tell a tale: you can tell with your head, or you can tell with your core.
It feels obvious that one way is bound to be better than the other, let's see why...

What does it mean to tell a story with your head?  

This is actually what we are trained to do: we listen to a story, focusing on the facts, then we concentrate on not forgetting any element of the story.  We try to remember everything as we tell it to someone else.
This form of telling focuses on:    facts    and   memory
When telling in this way the teller might find it useful to have a few notes close by, in case memory was to fail him or her, and the teller usually feels that he has succeeded if s/he has managed to tell the whole bit without forgetting anything.
The only major differences between telling with your head/mind, and reading a story is that you can get more eye contact, and achieve more fluent delivery.

If we think of a story as a light, your head is a mirror, it tries to reflect the story as faithfully as possible. When telling with our heads, we hope that our listeners will have the same experience we had when we first read or heard the story.

Telling with your heart/core is very different:

Unlike the mirror of your mind, your core is a stained glass window of the kind one finds in cathedrals.  In France these are called 'rosaces'.  Notre Dame has a huge round intricate 'rosace' of colorful glass over 9 meters in diameters, and when in the darkened cathedral, all of a sudden the sun hits it, and the light shines through, everything is transformed.  The light is filtered, the cathedral magically comes to life and the visitors grab their cameras.
This, to me, symbolizes perfectly what happens when a story is told from the heart:

The story is slightly different, like the light, it goes through the filter of your perception and comes out tinted by your core, the cathedral which is your heart lights up, and the listeners are bewitched.

How do we do it?

Instead of focusing on facts and memory, the storyteller must focus on sensation, the more personal it gets, the more the story will light him up.
Not content to imagine "what it must feel like" to be in bed with a wolf dressed as one's grandmother, the storyteller literally feels this moment, so strongly that it imprints itself in his or her memory.

A tale told from our core is so deeply experienced that looking back the storyteller has a hard time differentiating it from reality.  He'll find himself wondering: "did this really happen to me?"

And in a way it did!

Storytelling from your core is so powerful that it is healing both for the teller and for the listener.

Next time you tell a story, let it shine through the stained glass window of your heart, experience it with all your senses, and watch then how while lighting every last dark corners of your self, your listeners mouths drop in awe of the marvelous light.