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Judy Lubins Guiding the Journey will give you a complete audio guide to these tales, as well as an audio guide on how to use folktales as a tool for childrens growth and development.
The three tales in this collection deal with quintessential growing-up issues. Cinderella is the story of an ugly, deformed outcast who uses her inner strengths to bring herself into a state of belonging. The Wildman teaches us how to befriend our chaotic, raw emotions rather than suppress them. The Water of Life takes us on a journey deep inside our emotional life in order to bring about healthy growth and change. Cinderella In the 1700's, an author named Charles Perrault modified several folktales so that they could be used as entertainment at the court of the King of France. Before this, folktales were used as the common person's lessons in the trials and tribulations of ordinary life. Folktales were the literature of a pre-literate society and were used the same way that good literature is used today - to meet oneself and explore what it means to be human. In their original form, the tales are deeply symbolic and are meant to be met not on the literal level, but at the deeper metaphorical and moral levels. And at this level, they take on challenging issues. When Perrault turned them into entertainment, he stripped them of their deeper lessons and brought the focus up to the literal level. Cinderella became a beautiful girl who was miscast in ugly clothes and sat patiently waiting for a fairy to change those clothes. Since Disney used the same version for the same entertainment-focused purpose, its no wonder that todays parents have forgone folk tales in search of something with more a empowering message for their children. The entertainment version of Cinderella entertains - it was never meant to empower. When a folktale is turned from a piece of challenging literature into entertainment, as Cinderella was, the whole message can be flipped on its head. It is simply not very entertaining to look within oneself and face feeling like an ugly outcast. But that is exactly the purpose of the original story - to give guidance on how to handle those times when we feel we dont fit in. In Grimm's story, Cinderella is a deformed, ugly outcast who learns to come into the mainstream of society, and even to take on a leadership position, by enacting a self transformation through the use of intuition and good judgment. Needless to say, shes very empowered. Of course, that understanding of the story is not fully visible at the surface. Part of the message comes from the medium itself. When we watch a story transcribed literally onto a screen, it is hard to imagine that it is anything but someone's else's story and someone else's business. But listen to a story (or read it) with no accompanying illustrations, and suddenly, it becomes your story. Children naturally imagine themselves as every character in the story. When adults are encouraged to do this, we can see that the characters all represent aspects of the way an ordinary human being approaches life. The story, then, shows its hidden symbolism. In Cinderella, the hazel tree is a symbol for true nurturing. In ancient times, the hazel tree represented wisdom precisely because the new flowers move away from the parent flowers before maturing - just what a wise parent would encourage in a child. The tree is also associated with the mother who understands the true nature of nurturing and supporting. By connecting herself to this true understanding of nurturing, Cinderella is able to find help from characters that symbolically reside within herself. The sparrows represent intuition. In folktales in general, birds represent spirit because the birds eye view is analogous to the broader perspective that the higher self has over ones life. Sparrows, however, are earthly birds. They represent a very grounded sense of a broader perspective - intuition. The intuition is symbolically used to complete a task that sounds unusual at the literal level - pick good beans from bad. At the symbolical level, of course, the task is simply to distinguish good from bad - to use judgment and to know how to affiliate yourself with the good and move away from the bad. Each time she learns to distinguish good from bad, Cinderella grows on the inside. Her new dress is a reflection of this inner change, not the cause of her change. When we change on the inside, it will show on the outside. Even our own family members may not know us after we have undergone a transformation. The step mother and step sisters, however, do not know how to change on the inside. They are beautiful on the outside, but empty on the inside. All along they fail to accept Cinderella because of her differences on the outside. When they realize that she is about to become powerful in the outside world, they mistakenly attempt to change themselves so that they will look like her on the outside - they deform their own feet to match Cinderellas! But it does them no good, because inner beauty is what counts in this story. After her transformation, Cinderella understands this. Because her intuition understands that they cannot change on the inside, she chooses to live the next stage of her life without them. The
Wildman The Water of
Life
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