USA — Taom: The art of meditation app is your only guide where two magical worlds meet for your mindfulness journey for the first time: Storytelling and guided meditations. Taom tells stories and leads you through guided meditations, both of which will help you become more aware in your daily life.
The Creative Lead at Taom Explains How It All Started In Her Own Words
As the Taom: The Art of Meditation team, we wanted to create unique, intimate, but rooted content when we started this journey. In a sense, without ignoring dynamic elements of the future, we wished to unearth the legend whispered to us by the past. So what was that legend? That was the charming land where Alice was running after a white rabbit… Fairy tales, legends, archetypes, those powerful images that have existed in our collective memory for thousands of years… Well, as Taom, we have endowed guided meditation to the safe arms of two prominent art genres, music and painting. Gently added small, powerful, and healing stories to them.
How did I begin?
At the end of my long collective work discipline, I knew what I had to do as a writer! It was all about creativity and being able to do the right thing. And then, looking at a painting, I thought about what I would tell people with it. The answer was simple: Life itself!
Of course, this writing process carries instinctive traces of creation at certain points. And strong! However, my readings, research, and academic background were directing me in the way I had to go. The Epic narrative, which even impressed Homer, and the Dramatic narrative, which Aristotle put into shape, were my compasses in the writing process.
If you like, let’s refresh our memory and remember the unique properties of these two narrative types. In doing so, let’s use Hegel’s drama and epic wholeness theories. First of all, the epic narrative, based on a slightly more modern version, narratives like novels, stories host situations, stories, and moments. In a way, it can use an infinite number of characters or objects that describe the situation without caring about the action. For example, by taking a break from the main character’s journey, it can transfer to a tree, a door, or a person through pages. At the same time, all people and events in the dramatic narrative have a unique wholeness that clashes with each other, creating dialectic. So the “integrity of movement” is foregone. We can see this easily in a theater play or a movie. The entire story is given through the main action that hosts the motion. Despite the novel and story using more than one character, we find the main action meaningful throughout, following the main character in the dramatic species.
Here is our magical formula, which is made by mixing the power of epic narrative and the heroic act of dramatic one.
Why did we make a formula like that?
On the Taom application, all friction stories had their own meaning. First, however, I had to remember the main points of these stories: “All of them must be opening doors to the powerful world of meditation.”
Moreover, people wouldn’t read it from a book they picked up. First, it would become a flesh-and-blood by a voice artist and then be kneaded by music.
So this collective creation and interpretation process should have been created by the text synthesized by epic and dramatic species to be successful. The stories that we focus on a hero prepare us for mental thinking that suits the purpose of the meditation and allows the existence of other creations…
The first story I wrote for this purpose was converted into a test record with our art director and other team members. How should we start stories, how long should the texts be according to their intended purpose, and how the music and text should be merged? We’ve asked over and over again, arranged content, changed it, and started again. And finally, we got results that we all felt good about.
So I want you to know that there is a well-designed, long creative process behind every story you hear in the Taom app.
Why did we add Archeetype’s Magical-Realistic World?
The whole world is now at the edge of a strong bend. We are beginning to change physically and mentally. Getting tired more, suffering more than we should be, or we can feel that our feeling is getting duller. The point where technology brings us is enormous! We’re all in a global network, fast, dynamic, and ready for change. In short, we’re all exposed to both the positive and negative effects of this sudden and global change that we’re experiencing.
Yet, at the end of the day, when we return home or lie down in our beds, we remember again that we are human beings. We feel tired, angry, happy, sad, or hopeful. But most of all, we remember once again we belong to the nature that we are surrounded by. For example, astronauts, who spend a long time in space, answer the question, “What have you missed so much?” the answer like: “The sounds of birds.” Or they mention they miss the blue sky. So, they mean their home, the world they belong to! Just like we miss playing games, going to a concert, singing and screaming, or lying down in the grass and watching the sky without thinking about anything…
Nature has given us a second chance to resolve all the missings; our imagination. Because of that reason, we want to meditate and remember the feelings we missed. Globally, the world needs stories, believing the fairy tales told to itself, and the need for doors to a magical-realistic world is another consequence of this desire to remember actually…
As a writer of theater plays, cinema, novels, and stories, I have been searching for the roots of this “storytelling” passion for years. Every trip I have ever gone on has led me to the archetypes produced in the collective memory. And with the needs I was talking about above, I knew I had to reach the origins with conscious awareness of stories’ healing and transformative power. So, exactly at this point, I directed to the “theory of the monomyth,” a story theory.
Monomyth and Our Infinite, Cyclic Journey
I have read long enough about Freud’s concept of “self-conscious” and Carl G. Jung, which adds “collective consciousness” to this concept. Then, finally, I met Joseph Campbell.
Campbell’s monomyth theory, fed by strong roots, made the hero’s journey universal and showed the archetypes as the cornerstone of this journey. Because every person’s mind has the fingerprints of people who lived before them personally or collectively. Years and years of the background show me that “the hero is going on a trip when their journey begins. When this journey is over, they now have passed through a door, and are ready for change, even if they are back where he began”
So, every story I write for Taom should align with this cyclic power. It occurred to me that all fairy tales, old stories, and legends begin with “once upon a time.” This pattern was the best example of the timelessness and universality of the archetypes used by thousands of years of storytelling tradition…
In this way, we hear all the stories of Taom as the hero’s own adventure. And the most enjoyable part is that all of these heroes follow the same journeys that we do. So now we can talk about the power of change…
We continue by caring about diversity…
Another critical process that parallels the methods we discussed is “diversity.” Instead of people who look alike or have common problems, we wanted to talk about the stories of people from all walks of life, just like in reality.
From the struggle of an abused overweight woman to the problems of little people, from an ex-soldier who lost his leg after the war to the social pressures on young people, we added every color to our palette. We will continue to add it in the future.
Because, as we always advocate, we want Taom to be a brand new experience where real life is blended with art.
And Last Sentences…
The first question an old shaman man asks patients when they come to him is: “When was the last time you listened to a story? When was the last time you danced to a song?” Because we need these to heal, change and find the power inside us…
So, to put it in perspective, as the storyteller of the Taom app and from a subjective perspective as a writer, we believe that the entire content of the Taom application has magical but realistic power.
After all, this adventure isn’t just Alice’s story; it’s all of us, collectively and universally…
“Once upon a time…”
Devrim Pınar Gürbüzoğlu
Scientific Sources
- Tecimer, Ömer (2008). Sinema – Modern Mitoloji, Plan B Yayınları, İstanbul.
- Lukacs, György (2010). Tarihsel Roman, Epos Yayınları, Ankara.
- Campbell, Joseph (2013). Kahramanın Sonsuz Yolculuğu, Çeviren: Sabri Gürses, Kabalcı Yayıncılık, İstanbul.
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