In 2010, the Universidad Nacional Autònoma de Mexico (UNAM) and the Fundacion Terapia de Reencuentro from Spain, initiated a research and service proyect named “Wisdom Stories (Cuentos de Sabiduria) for the education, transformation and good treatment” which main objective is to create community spaces where people can express their emotions and experience resilient ways of confronting conflicts. We do so through wisdom storybooks that address basic human emotions.

Faber Residency gave me the opportunity to share with a group of educational agents a wisdom story about our right to grow and change at our own rhythms and time. We started the workshop talking about some of the traditional storybooks we grew up with, which lead us to dialogue about how those type of stories usually led us to believe that problems are solved by magic or by someone else not ourselves.

We then went on to construct basic norms to build trust in our group and be able to share our emotions. After this, we were ready to listen to the story with our hearts and minds and then share how this story related to our own lives as persons and as educational agents. What followed was a rich conversation about our capacities to overcome obstacles through selfknowledge, accepting our possibilities and difficulties, knowing the environments in which we live, listening to our desire to change, finding allies and perseverating in our goals.

At the end we all felt grateful for the opportunity of sharing our emotions and our wisdom and thinking of how we can use storybooks as in our work with diverse populations.