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    Gretel's Story: Finding the Way Home
    Gretel's Story: Finding the Way Home
    Gretel's Story: Finding the Way Home
    Ebook143 pages2 hours

    Gretel's Story: Finding the Way Home

    By Jean Reynolds

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    About this ebook

    Gretel is a homeless and hungry girl in a tale that was already old when the Grimm brothers wrote it down almost two centuries ago. But the story of her abandonment, imprisonment, and ultimate triumph is still meaningful in the way that all old, well-told stories are meaningful.

    The themes in Gretel's Story are still vivid and powerful today. People continue to find both love and hatred within their families; evil and goodness still struggle to destroy each other; and our lives endlessly repeat the archetypal cycle that begins with the loss of innocence and ends in wisdom. The parts of ourselves that we fear the most may be the hiding places of our deepest truths and greatest strengths.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJean Reynolds
    Release dateSep 10, 2011
    ISBN9781452447056
    Gretel's Story: Finding the Way Home
    Author

    Jean Reynolds

    Dr. Jean Reynolds is Professor Emerita at Polk State College in Winter Haven, Florida, where she taught English for over 30 years. She is the author of eleven books, including three books about writing, and she is co-author (with the late Mary Mariani) of "Police Talk" (Pearson). She has taught basic education to inmates and served as a consultant on communications and problem-solving skills to staff in Florida's Department of Corrections. At Polk State College she has taught report writing classes for recruits and advanced report writing and FTO classes for police and correctional officers. Jean Reynolds holds a doctorate in English from the University of South Florida and is an internationally recognized Shaw scholar. She is the author of "Pygmalion's Wordplay: The Postmodern Shaw," and the co-editor of "Shaw and Feminisms: Onstage and Off," both published by the University Press of Florida. She is an accomplished ballroom dancer. She and her husband, garden writer Charles J. Reynolds, live in Florida, where they enjoy reading and traveling.

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      Book preview

      Gretel's Story - Jean Reynolds

      Gretel’s Story

      Finding the Way Home

      Jean Reynolds, Ph.D.

      The Maple Leaf Press

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      Copyright 2011 Jean Reynolds

      Smashwords Edition

      Print edition available from online sellers

      License Notes

      This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please return to www.Shashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      Chapter One: Emptiness

      Chapter Two: Abandonment

      Chapter Three: Brother and Sister

      Chapter Four: Illusions

      Chapter Five: Survivors

      Chapter Six: The Wrong Food

      Chapter Seven: The Wrong Home

      Chapter Eight: Witchcraft

      Chapter Nine: Feasting

      Chapter Ten: Imprisonment

      Chapter Eleven: Powerless

      Chapter Twelve: Sight and Insight

      Chapter Thirteen: Victory

      Chapter Fourteen: Good and Evil

      Chapter Fifteen: The Homecoming

      Acknowledgments

      About Jean Reynolds

      Introduction

      They say that if you want to be an author, you should write the kinds of books you want to read yourself. This is one of those books.

      For a long time I wanted to read a book about why we are so often unhappy and what we can do about it. The books I looked at offered an abundance of excellent advice about happiness and mental health. But something vital always seemed to be missing, and gradually I realized what it was: Attention to the deeper and darker parts of ourselves where so much of our energy is stored and so many of our mysteries lie hidden.

      This is a book about the secrets buried in the depths of our souls, where they often languish in darkness because we do not understand their perplexing language of images and feelings. Contemporary models of healing, despite the wealth of wisdom they offer, may not be able to speak to these depths and secrets, for reasons I suggest below. In this book I offer a different way of looking at and thinking about the enigmas within us that have the power to transform our lives.

      Gretel and Her Story

      Gretel is a homeless and hungry girl in a tale that was already old when the Grimm brothers wrote it down almost two centuries ago. But the story of her abandonment, imprisonment, and ultimate triumph is still meaningful in the way that all old, well-told stories are meaningful.

      Witches and woodcutters have largely disappeared from modern life, but the themes in Gretel’s story are still vivid and powerful: People continue to find both love and hatred within their families, evil and goodness still struggle to destroy each other, and our lives endlessly repeat the archetypal cycle that begins with the loss of innocence and ends in wisdom. Many of us can tell painful stories that echo Gretel’s tale of betrayal and desertion, and we have all experienced the hunger pangs that tormented Gretel’s family, although our hunger may be more emotional and spiritual than physical.

      Most important, we can identify with Gretel’s yearning to come home. Like her, we may feel that we are restlessly searching for the special place where we can settle in and finally become ourselves. Disappointingly often, though, the sugarplum cottage that looked perfect in the beginning is actually the setting for a soul-shattering encounter with darkness and suffering. Discovering the meaning of that encounter—and finding the way back home to our true selves—is one of the purposes of this book.

      A Different Kind of Homecoming

      Hansel and Gretel, struggling for survival in a hostile environment, yearn for the security of a loving home. Like them, we too long for a homecoming, but our quest is more likely to be focused on our need for healing. We hunger for fulfillment, inner peace, and a meaningful connection to others.

      Often our quest takes us inward. Why do we feel alienated, restless, lonely, sad, or angry? There is no lack of answers. Due in large part to the wisdom and hard work of contemporary psychological experts, many of us have attained an extraordinary capacity for insight. Words like codependency, abuse, ego, and therapy are part of our everyday vocabulary, and we can call upon an impressive array of communication and problem-solving skills in our interactions with our loved ones.

      But the sad truth is that the results often disappoint us. We can read a hundred self-help books and spend years with the best therapists on the planet, only to find that happiness still evades us. After a vast expenditure of time, energy, and money, we may still collapse inside every time Mother telephones—or continue to get stuck in disappointing relationships, or repeatedly fail to meet the expectations we have set for ourselves in some other important area of life.

      In this book I suggest that our traditional approaches to inner healing have—despite their vast usefulness—significant limitations. These approaches might be called the medical model, the educational model, and the spiritual model.

      The medical model is based on the assumption that our psychic pain is caused by traumatic past experiences that can be cured through medication, psychotherapy, group therapy, psychodrama, primal scream, and various other methods. The educational model urges us to seek greater happiness by learning enhanced communication techniques and other life-enriching skills. The spiritual model challenges us to seek happiness by overcoming our weaknesses and faults in order to create a higher, better self.

      These three avenues to healing—insight, communication skills, and spiritual growth—have much to offer and have helped huge numbers of people. But everything human has a dark shadow, and these models are no exception. All three, in my view, bypass the wisdom that lies hidden within the depths of our souls, urging us instead to look for a doctor, teacher, or guru who can fix whatever is wrong with us.

      Certainly professional help can be important—even lifesaving—when problems and painful issues arise. But too often we forget that there are healing powers within our souls, and the symptoms we are so eager to eradicate may actually point the way to inner peace and fulfillment. To put it a different way: The parts of ourselves that we fear the most may be the hiding places of our deepest truths and greatest strengths.

      Viewing the Soul through a Camera Lens

      Images will be an important theme in this journey inward, so perhaps it will be helpful to begin with an image familiar to everyone: a snapshot. Pretend you’re peering through a camera lens at an intriguing scene you wish to photograph. You tentatively take a step back, still looking through the lens, and find that the image has become larger, more complex, more interesting, and more beautiful. You step back once more and watch as the scene again expands in front of you, revealing more wonders and more beauty.

      I invite you to think of this book as a camera that can help you create new images from the familiar details of the life you are living today. Your tools are your capacity for imagining and wondering, the unique story of your life, your intuitive sense of truth, and the events from the wonderful old fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel. With their help, you can plunge into your own secrets and mysteries to explore your deepest self and uncover your hidden destiny.

      How Should a Fairy Tale Be Read?

      Fairy tales have long attracted the attention of folklorists, sociologists, and historians. For example, it has been suggested that the story of Hansel and Gretel was invented at a time when child abandonment was a common practice. Contemporary psychology continues to show a keen interest in fairy tales. The psychologist most famous in this area is Bruno Bettelheim, who analyzed many fairy tales in Freudian terms.

      In his interpretation of Hansel and Gretel, Bettelheim noted that many children go through a period of imagining themselves abandoned by evil parents—a necessary stage in the movement from childish dependence to individuation and maturity. For him, fairy tales reveal the inner workings of a child’s mind.

      But there are many ways to read stories like Hansel and Gretel, just as there are many ways to read our own very personal histories. The opening sentence of Bettelheim’s book about fairy tales demonstrates that he was open to an approach that transcends Freudian theory: If we hope to live not just from moment to moment, but in true consciousness of our existence, then our greatest need and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in our lives.

      We will find inner peace and fulfillment only when we discover the purpose of our lives—the unifying thread hidden behind events that at first may have seemed random and accidental, cruel and hurtful. At that moment we, like Gretel, will have come home.

      We value stories like Hansel and Gretel because they have the power to awaken our imaginative powers. As we enact the story in our own minds, playing each role in its turn, our thoughts and images create a kaleidoscope of new patterns and possibilities. I invite you to peer through that kaleidoscope, twisting and turning it in your imagination as you read this book.

      Signposts

      Every journey requires maps and signs, and our story is no exception. Gretel and her brother try to follow first a path of pebbles and then one of breadcrumbs to find their way home. But as so often happens in our own lives, the two children discover that the guideposts they had trusted just worsen their problems: The first path only delays their abandonment, and the second vanishes before they have a chance to follow it. Similarly we are likely to be disappointed when we try to follow guidelines and principles that no longer work for us. Logic, willpower, and positive thinking may turn out to be dead ends in our quest for a homecoming.

      When the trip is over and we look back at our adventures, we are likely to find that our truest guides were the thoughts and feelings that had frightened us the most—the secret yearnings that we tried to banish through rationalization and sheer grit. Exploring these mysterious

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