The word “Companion” is derived from the Latin: com= “with” and panis= “bread”. In medieval times, a companion was one you met with on your life’s journey.
A person on the journey of life and self-discovery would meet on the road another on a similar journey. They would stop and break bread together (and probably share a pleasant red) and tell stories of their life, their personal discoveries, since they last met. Then they would  move on along their individual paths, planning to meet again. Sometimes they moved on together. They realised that the journey of life is an individual thing and it is a delight to share it with others.

Sharing what nourishes life, and especially the stories of one’s life, is what makes companionship. In sharing the stories of personal discoveries we discover more. We discover more about ourselves through the interest and attunement of a listening other. We discover more about ourselves by attentive listening to the stories of the other.

A fascination with stories of living. . . .

rather than an obsession with
information about personalities

Our culture is not so much interested in the story of A Life’s journey in this world. Western society today is obsessed with information about others–“famous” and “infamous”–and with possessions. Information is part of the possessions that are thought to be a measure of one’s worth. One easily loses one’s soul and is caught up manufacturing and circulating information about others. This is legitimized as “gossip”.

I quote Rolf Jensen, because I agree with him. He writes in The Dream Society:
    “In today’s Information Society, we prize those who can skilfully manipulate data....
         ..... In tomorrow’s Dream Society, we will most generously reward those who can tell Stories.”

Jensen is Director of The Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies. Of all the ages of human history and evolution, the information age is the shortest, and already, he says, the sun is setting on it before we had time to adjust to it. He claims that the business world is already realising the importance of the story, it knows that products from different manufacturers are of equal quality. To a great extent, people buy a product because of the story that shapes their feelings about it.  In the future, he says,

 “... what people buy will be mostly stories, legends, emotion and lifestyle. Poverty will be redefined as the inability to satisfy more than one’s material needs. In the future, people’s focus will shift from material to spiritual needs, from technology and science to emotions and storytelling.”

The most important story of all, I think,  is the story of a person's own individual life. An individual life cannot be defined or identified. To identify it is to reduce it to a set of beliefs and judgments, that is, to create an identity. The greatest suffering of our life is in how this has happened to us. The only way to celebrate and communicate the meaning of a life is by telling stories–the feelings, the fantasies, the memories of experiences and the learning.

Perhaps we don’t think our life story is all that interesting. However, we are interested in someone who finds our life story really interesting. People are becoming more interested in discovering and telling the story of their life.

We will be most interested in those who can tell their own stories. And those will be "most generously rewarded"  who can assist people to tell their own stories.

Discovering the story we have been living–to a great extent we live it subconsciously–is needed to resolve the conflicts and blocks in our life. Because of all the denials we learned, assistance is needed. For thousands of years, this assistance was provided by “spiritual guidance”. It is needed today, even more extensively, and this is why the Three In One approach to assisting another is so extremely valuable.

One of the most commonly un-nourished human hungers today is for intimacy. It is fear of feelings, our own and those of other people, based in self-doubt and self-rejection, that feeds the obsession for information about personalities. Feeding that obsession doesn't bring the peace and joy that the intimacy of companionship does.

What nourishes the hunger for intimacy is story telling, sharing the stories of one's experiences, one's feelings, one's desires. This requires a vulnerability, to one's self first, that one allows oneself to be aware of one's feelings and desires, to acknowledge them and to trust and accept oneself. It requires the willingness to reveal what we are aware of to the other. It requires a willingness to trust ourselves with the awareness of other peoples' feelings and desires, especially those they have toward us.

For more reflections on these themes, see the Gala presentations: Integrity and Responsibility