about
The story behind the story.
Hello …
I’m Elizabeth McCain. I believe that story matters – how we tell our stories, how we live our stories, and how we make meaning about our stories really matters.
As a spiritual counselor, energy therapist, shamanic minister, and transformational storyteller and story coach I help women and the LGBTQ communities share, heal, and change their life story, their personal narrative. I can guide you through a dark night of the soul through loss and transition. I can help you embrace your story with compassion, change or reframe your story with courage, and tell your story with a community. Whether I am counseling, coaching, ministering, or performing, I believe that sharing our reframed stories touches hearts and changes the world.
Performance Bio
“Sharing stories in community is one of my greatest passions- whether on a porch, at a dinner table, or on a stage. I believe that stories are the soul’s medicine for healing just about anything, especially for healing and growing with others through loss and transition.”
I hail from a long line of Southern Gothic storytellers in Mississippi, “Bless Their Hearts!” In 2006, I discovered storytelling as an art form when I took a storytelling workshop from a beloved internationally known storyteller, Connie Regan-Blake, when my spouse, Marie and I lived in Asheville, NC. When we moved back to the Washington DC area a few years later, I began taking storytelling classes from a respected storytelling organization, Speakeasy DC, (now Story District), and fell in love with storytelling … read full story
“My mission in performing is to support and inspire the LGBTQ communities and our allies in sharing and reframing their stories of coming out/living out, loss, and transition for personal transformation, growth and community building.”
my personal journey
through loss
In addition to my professional training and experience, I have had my own share of dark nights of the soul with the deaths of many family members and friends. I experienced a great deal of painful family estrangement after I came out as a lesbian in 1994. (Many of these stories are in my one-woman play, “A Lesbian Belle Tells…”). Some of these estrangements continue. I have created my own family-of-choice with my spouse, Marie, and close friends, but I am no stranger to deep grief and despair. I have sought support through many years of psychotherapy, grief counseling, grief support groups, energy therapy, acupressure, shamanic breath work and rituals, retreats, mindfulness meditation, and on-going spiritual direction.
Each time I surrender to grief, loss, and uncertainty, I learn to accept emotional difficulty as another opportunity for growth and transformation, or as my shamanic teacher, Linda Star Wolf says, “This is another place on the sacred medicine wheel of life which we all travel over and over again throughout our lives…the light, the dark, no difference… Breathe deeply, until you are surprised.”I believe there is a greater force of love and light and supports us. We just need to slow down to feel this love, this Great Mystery that connects us all. We can lead a soul-directed, rather than an ego directed life, by being present to ourselves and our self-care, and by listening to the our inner wisdom of the soul. We need companions for this journey, soul friends-a tribe with whom we can share our joys and sorrows together in person, as we travel around the sacred wheel of life. Loving relationships and community connections, (beyond social media), can sustain us, especially during such violent and challenging political times in our culture.
All of my challenges and losses in my life have cracked my heart wide open, and have enabled me to be a more compassionate counselor, minister, and healer, as well as a more authentic storyteller. It is fair to say that I walk my talk. And I am grateful for all of my experiences.
Coaching, Counseling,
& Ministry Bio
I have over twenty-five years of experience working with people as a healing professional in body, mind and spirit. For twenty years, I was a psychotherapist and grief counselor. I have a Master’s Degree in Community Counseling from The George Washington University, and a Bachelor of Arts in English from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia. see complete bio
Schedule an Appointment