All learning is affected by our own personal history; we have a lifetime of experiences, beliefs, values and attitudes about each subject and our ability to learn it. Lozanov, the Bulgarian psychotherapist who de­veloped the Suggestopedic Approach to teaching, calls these bi­ases. He believes that all learning is heavily influenced by all of the biases and the presenters who influence the biases are much more likely to be successful.

Lozanov refers to three types of barriers to learning. The criti­cal-logical barrier gives reasons (usually false) for not doing something, the emotional-intuitive barrier produces constrained reactions like fear in response to new situations, and the ethical-moral barrier restricts learning to those following strongly-held principles like learning is hard work. It is clear that unless we deal with these learning blocks, we can never reach our poten­tial.

I can still clearly remember my Maths teacher in secondary school, for example, more than thirty years ago. Whenever I made a mistake, he would make me stand on one leg facing the wall, holding my tongue between my fingers so the saliva would dribble down my chin. Not surprisingly, this left me with a learn­ing block which has remained with me ever since. It is likely that most of us have similar anecdotes to relate. Experiences like this help to make us into the people we are and perhaps even motivate us into turning to one of the caring professions as a career - not wanting others to suffer the same way that we have.

It is interesting to note that in tribal societies the person chosen to be the shaman or Medicine Man was often a wounded healer - someone who had been through a near-death experience and who was consequently well suited to helping others through dif­ficult times in their lives.

How to deal with the barriers to learning that result from such wounding? The story and accompanying visualisation presented below were designed with this aim in mind.

Stories have always been a powerful tool for communicating information from one generation to the next and for educating the young. And if they were not highly successful for this pur­pose, the art of storytelling would not have survived. Storytelling is also an effective vehicle to deliver messages to the sub­conscious where the "aha's" of metaphor take place. It is our ability to make metaphorical connections that allow us to learn anything at all. When something new is like something we've done before, we take what we know from the first situation and transfer our knowledge to the new situation. Metaphor instills the learning of content or process on a very subtle, often subcon­scious level. When the subconscious is activated or accessed, the material enters the mind with no resistance. As a result, metaphors can affect dramatic change in an individual.

Each time you ask someone to stretch their awareness of time and space you are inducing a light state of trance and each story that starts with "once upon a time" provides an example of this. A story can be called a metaphor if the listeners can relate to it and draw a parallel between the action in it and their own lives. It has been suggested that if a picture is worth a thousand words, then perhaps we can regard a metaphor as being worth 1000 pictures.

According to psychologists, our memories seem to work best when we can see things as part of a recognised pattern, when our imaginations are aroused, when we can make natural asso­ciations between one idea and another, and when the informa­tion appeals strongly to our senses. An imaginative story rich in vocabulary that appeals to the senses which works as a meta­phor and is cumulative in nature clearly fulfils all these criteria. Cumulative tales have definite stages and in each stage charac­ters and activities are added on. The result is a rhythm and a repetition which is hypnotic in quality. This helps to induce al­pha brainwaves and the optimal state for learning and remem­bering. The process can also bring about a form of regression to childhood days and recreate in us that emotional state of curios­ity which as adults we tend to lose.

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