The Woman With a Stone in her Throat

A Therapeutic Fable.

A woman has carried a stone in her throat for as long as she can remember. This is a fable about what happens when the weight finally becomes too great to ignore, and the unexpected beauty of what gets released when we find the courage to speak our truth.

There once was a woman who had a stone in her throat.

She tried to ignore it, but its weight was too great. Her shoulders drooped, her head hung low. It was hard to rise in the morning, and almost impossible to speak.

She visited countless therapists, hoping someone might help. But they simply looked at her quizzically and told her to gargle with salt water. This baffled and dismayed her: how could salt water possibly dislodge something so old, so embedded?

Limited in what she could do, she took a job at the local quarry, shifting stones. Her slow, heavy gait seemed to suit the work. What difference would more stones make when one already lived inside her?

Then, one day, what she called her final attempt to heal, she visited a different therapist. This one didn’t suggest salt water. She didn’t look at her like she was lying or annoying. She tried to listen. She couldn’t always completely understand, but she truly tried.

The stone didn’t vanish, but it wasn’t quite so uncomfortable. She found it a little easier to rise in the mornings. Her gait lightened. She began to wonder if the quarry work still served her. Now that she walked taller, stacking stones began to feel… wrong.

One sunny Monday morning, she set down a particularly large rock. She looked up, stretched to the sky, and, without planning, shouted, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore!’

Everyone turned. Everyone heard her.

The stone in her throat dislodged. She held it in her hand, astonished.

It was beautiful.

She’d always imagined it as ugly; hard, grey, unwelcome. But in her palm was a painted stone: streaked with magenta, soft pinks, and white. She took it to her healer.

‘I’m surprised it’s so lovely,’ she said.

‘Of course it is,’ she replied. ‘It came from you. It didn’t serve you inside, but perhaps it’s worth keeping, so you can look at it now and then.’

So she did.

She placed it on her mantelpiece as a reminder of the day she finally spoke her truth.