PODCASTThe Science of Happiness

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Learn how the stories we tell and hear shape our relationships, values, and sense of belonging.

Summary: Storytelling is more than entertainment. It shapes how we think, feel, and relate to others. In this episode of The Science of Happiness, we dive into how immersive narratives calm stress, inspire reflection, and foster compassion across differences. We also explore how stories of resilience, joy, and tradition leave lasting impressions that influence our relationships and sense of self.

How To Do This Practice:

1. Choose a meaningful story: Bring to mind a personal memory, family tradition, or moment that carries emotion, care, or learning.
2. Settle the body first: Take a few slow breaths and notice your posture, helping your nervous system feel steady and present.
3. Recall sensory details: Gently remember what you saw, heard, smelled, or felt in the moment, letting the story come alive without forcing it.
4. Notice what matters: As the story unfolds, pay attention to themes of connection, care, resilience, or joy that stand out to you.
5. Reflect on its meaning: Ask yourself what this story has shaped in you—how it influences your values, relationships, or sense of belonging.
6. Share or carry it forward: If it feels right, share the story with someone you trust, write it down, or hold it quietly as a reminder of connection and continuity.

Today’s Guests:

SAFA SULEIMAN is an elementary school teacher and author of the new children’s book Hilwa’s Gifts. 

Learn more about Safa here: https://www.safasuleiman.com/

MELANIE GREEN is a social psychologist at the University at Buffalo who has published widely on narrative persuasion and the power of storytelling.

See more on Melanie’s work here: https://tinyurl.com/e5fd8bu5

Related The Science of Happiness episodes:  

How Thinking About Your Ancestors Can Help You Thrive: https://tinyurl.com/4u6vzs2w

Are You Following Your Inner Compass: https://tinyurl.com/y2bh8vvj

How To Show Up For Yourself: https://tinyurl.com/56ktb9xc

Related Happiness Breaks:

A Meditation on Love and Interconnectedness: https://tinyurl.com/ye6baxv3

Our Deep Interconnectedness: https://tinyurl.com/jthxkpjd

Pause to Look at the Sky: https://tinyurl.com/4jttkbw3

We want to hear from you! Take our quick 5-minute survey to tell us what you love, what you want more of, and how we can make the show even more inspiring and useful. Everyone who completes the survey can enter a drawing to win a copy of The Science of Happiness Workbook: 10 Practices for a Meaningful Life. Click the survey link in the show notes wherever you’re listening, or go directly to: https://tinyurl.com/happyhappysurvey. Thank you for helping us make the podcast even better!

Tell us about your experience with this practice. Email us at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or follow on Instagram @HappinessPod.

Help us share The Science of Happiness! Leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and share this link with someone who might like the show: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap

Transcription:  

SAFA SULEIMAN: In 2002 I attended my brother's wedding. It was a beautiful event, full of love, wonderful food, lots of dancing, and the olive harvest coincided with my brother's wedding, and I had never experienced the olive harvest before ever. After the wedding my grandmother and my cousins and my siblings, we all gathered around and harvested the trees in front of our family's home. And so we were fishing out the leaves. We were sitting around chatting. We were dragging tarps full of olives that were plopping down. My grandmother, she would sing songs, we would share our stories, we would talk about our lives sitting around these large tarps of olives that are for the olive press. She taught us what it means to be a good steward to the land. She's the one who showed us how to make sure that they don't get crushed on the way, you know, as we put them in buckets to be delicate and gentle and tender with all the olives that we were preparing for the olive press. And I can remember just having this communal, collectivist experience that left such an indelible mark on me, because we don't hear much about the love and the joy that comes through something so sacred as the olive artist in Palestine. It wasn't until I had children of my own that I started writing the story Hilwa's Gifts. So the idea for it was deep inside of me for over 20 years.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Welcome to The Science of Happiness. I'm Shuka Kalantari. Today we're talking about storytelling, how it affects our minds and our relationships. When we share stories, something subtle happens. We slow down, we listen, we start to recognize parts of ourselves in someone else's experience.

SAFA SULEIMAN: Students can see the map, and they could figure out where places are in the world, but when you actually bring a culture to life, it makes them really curious.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Research shows that when we hear stories, our brains don't just process language. Regions involved in emotion, memory and imagination light up too, helping us make sense of other people's experiences.

MELANIE GREEN: When we're imagining something through a story, a lot of those same brain areas are active, as when we're interacting in real life.

SHUKA KALANTARI: More on the science and art of storytelling after this break.

Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. I'm Shuka Kalantari. Today we're talking about storytelling with Safa Suleiman, an elementary school teacher and author of the new children's book Hilwa's Gifts. Safa shares how she brings stories into her classroom and how they can help us connect and feel a sense of belonging. Safa, it's so wonderful to have you here today.

SAFA SULEIMAN: Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Recently, congratulations, you published your first children's book, Hilwa's Gifts, and it beautifully celebrates like family and tradition through looking at the olive harvest in Palestine. For our listeners out there, can you share with us what Hilwa's Gifts is about?

SAFA SULEIMAN: It is a beautiful story about a little boy named Ali who travels to Palestine and visits his family there during the olive harvest. And Ali has a favorite tree named Hilwa. He's never visited during the olive harvest, and he learns about the many gifts his favorite tree offers through his Sido and through his family. And it is a story of intergenerational love, land stewardship, traditions, and it has the universality of love and family and land that really resonates throughout the story.

SHUKA KALANTARI: You shared that one thing that inspired you to write Hilwa's Gifts, was your own visit to Palestine in 2002 when you went there during the harvest.

SAFA SULEIMAN: Yeah, I didn't know that it was the olive harvest at the time, I was just packing my bags and just so excited for my only brother who was getting married at the time, the olive harvest is so foundational to Palestinian culture and life. The olive trees are the most cultivated trees in the world and one of the oldest trees in the world as well. It has so much connection to us. It has many connections to my family, having an olive grove in front of our family's home in Palestine. So it's more than just the nourishment that it provides. It's very sacred. We take great care of our trees, and it is so much rooted in Palestinian culture and traditions. So yeah, it was just it was so beautiful. I even have pictures of my cousin's kids, who are now mothers, who are also partaking in this great tradition, and the pictures with my late grandmother and my siblings, it was just so powerful. It makes me cry. I wish my grandparents were here to see the story come to life, but I pay homage to them for passing on our beautiful traditions to us. You know, you never really appreciate things in the moment, and the fact that it sat with me for so long I appreciated it as every day passed from that moment and just that experience and that pride in that sacred tradition, I am just bathing with pride and gratefulness and gratitude to my grandmother, who taught us what it means to Care for these beautiful trees, and I feel the impact so deeply now more than ever.

SHUKA KALANTARI: What has it been like sharing stories from Palestine with students here in the US and teaching them about the olive harvest?

SAFA SULEIMAN: Children are curious and teaching Palestine through the lens of the olive harvest, it's been such a powerful experience for me as a teacher. You know, students can see the map and they could figure out where places are in the world, but when you actually bring a culture to life, it makes them really curious. What did you guys learn?

STUDENT: I learned that books from different cultures, they teach you new words from a different place. Yeah, that's right.

SAFA SULEIMAN: What new word did you learn?

STUDENT: Sido.

And what does sido mean?

STUDENT: Grandpa? 

SAFA SULEINMAN: Yes. What about you? What I do, in addition to sharing he was gifts. I actually bring one of the spreads in the story where the family is sitting under hilwa and having a picnic. I actually bring that to the classroom. And we all we have a picnic, and I have this zaytoon, and I have the za'taar and the tomatoes and the cucumbers and the pita bread, and we all come together, and we have our own picnic, similar to the spread in the story, where the family is sitting under Hilwa and having their picnic, and they've been really they've been loving it.

SHUKA KALANTARI: You know, story based learning engages multiple brain regions beyond just our language centers, and storytelling can help with like prediction, with problem solving, emotional reasoning, and it really can foster a sense of connection between people. And you said something powerful to me when we were on the phone before this interview, which was, every child has a story worth telling. 

SAFA SULEIMAN: Absolutely. 

SHUKA KALANTARI: How old are these kids that we're talking about? These students that you work with.

SAFA SULEIMAN: These students are first, second and third grade, between six and eight years old,

SHUKA KALANTARI: And so how do you help your students find their own voice and see the value in their own stories?

SAFA SULEIMAN: I think that's the power of education. It's the power of the teacher in the classroom to see each of their students. And so the way I bring that to the classroom is engaging them with the stories that I bring in, but also for stories of students that are in my classes, that they can see themselves in the stories as well. And so the fact that they could be seen makes it much more of a powerful experience for them, and it makes them more engaged and more willing to share their own story, but also invites them to listen and to open their hearts and minds to other cultures that they may not have been exposed to. And that's where the power of picture books comes into play. Storytelling is so foundational because it connects people and ideas. It's foundational to communities, and it's a way for us to offer windows of worlds beyond our own. It's a way for me to inspire them to learn more outside of their own story.

SHUKA KALANTARI: When you were on a flight to Seattle to do a reading of Hilwa’s Gifts, you were informed that the reading was canceled because the book was too political. What was going through your mind at that time? 

SAFA SULEIMAN: I was in shock and disbelief. I went to Seattle to launch the book with my illustrator, and my first school visit was at the only Arabic and Hindi language elementary school in the state of Washington. I was so excited to share this story, because I never saw myself in children's books growing up, and I was about to share my story with children who may never have seen themselves in children's books either. And so I cried. I couldn't believe it. The story has nothing to do with the political climate. It's a story about love and joy, and a Palestinian family tending to the land. And so I felt like my very existence was erased in that moment, and the existence of the students I was about to present to was also erased. And it hurt deeply. It still hurts just talking about it, the school just decided I would be a disruption to the learning environment and canceled the visit. So here was an opportunity to share and to uplift and to do what I do in the classroom as an educator myself, and to be met with such hate was actually very, is so shocking, but love is resistance, right? The story is an act. It's a statement of resilience. It's a statement of resistance, and it's a statement of love that we can all if our heart works, we can identify with. The olive harvest this year has been the most destructive to Palestinian farmers in decades. With the uprooting of these 1000 year old trees, I'm constantly imagining a life where these trees will continuously thrive, that a community will continuously thrive, and I think that resistance is in our imagination too. And I think that our ability to continue writing in the face of such horror, to continue to stand and rise in the face of such destruction, says a lot about our community. And so this story is a statement of what our community is such loving, joyful, generous people. And so when we talk about my students and bringing the storytelling to the classroom, my hope is that it instills compassion, that they will never forget the stories that Mrs.Suleiman shared with them, and so that it inspires them to not only write their own stories, but to be able to say that they stand in solidarity with communities around the world.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Safa Suleiman, thank you for writing Hilwa’s Gifts, and thank you for being a guest on The Science of Happiness.

SAFA SULEIMAN: It's been a privilege and an honor. Shuka, thank you so much for having me.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Up next on The Science of Happiness. Psychologist Melanie Green shares her research on how stories can spark empathy and connection.

MELANIE GREEN: What happens when we're transported into a story is we have our cognitive focus on it. We're thinking hard about it. We also have our emotions involved, and we tend to have some type of mental imagery.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. I'm Shuka Kalantari. We know that stories can transport us into different worlds, but how, why and what kind of stories change us. Truc Nguyen spoke with psychologist Melanie Green at the University at Buffalo.

TRUC NGUYEN: Melanie Green has always been into books, a lot of science fiction and fantasy.

MELANIE GREEN: A lot of the science fiction and fantasy that I read as a kid, kind of, you know, shapes how I look at the world.

TRUC NGUYEN: When she got the chance to study how stories work in our minds, she drew on the concept of narrative transportation.

MELANIE GREEN: This idea of getting fully immersed in a story. So when you're reading your favorite novel, or you're binging something on Netflix, and like you should go to bed, but you watch just the one more episode. So basically, that's like you're mentally transported to a different place.

TRUC NGUYEN: We might feel like we're in another world, but stories activate the same neural pathways as real life experiences.

MELANIE GREEN: Motion areas are active. The memory areas are active. Stories can help focus our minds. Help take us away from our everyday stresses and struggles. Okay? I'm just gonna put my regular world aside and step into this other world. We also Have our emotions involved, and we tend to have some type of mental imagery, either imagery that we create in our own heads based on what an author's put on a page, or imagery that's in front of us.

TRUC NGUYEN: All of these things come together to create an immersive experience. And the cool thing about that?

MELANIE GREEN: That makes it more likely if we're transported into a story, that we take something back from that story with us, that it's more likely to change how we look at the world, how we think about a particular issue. We're less likely to argue against things, and we're more likely to consider them and potentially accept them.

TRUC NGUYEN: Green wanted to understand which kinds of stories are the most effective at helping people connect. So her team looked at something called restorative narratives,

MELANIE GREEN: And that's a type of story that basically involves people overcoming some kind of hardship or difficulty. And this grew out of journalism, where there's a lot of attention in news media on the bad stuff that happens. So we were looking at restorative narratives, where it does show that process of going from a negative place or a negative event through sort of recovery and doing better in life.

TRUC NGUYEN: They measured how different kinds of refugee stories changed people's attitudes. Nearly 600 people read one version of a story showing a refugee as either resilient or struggling with either a hopeful or sad ending, then they shared how they felt about refugees.

MELANIE GREEN: One of the things that we found is that sort of any story is helpful. So having a character that has that happy ending or those character strength helps, but it also helps to just see that person's situation in general. Then when we looked at the data, we could look across the conditions, but also compare it to people who hadn't read the story, and we found that the story ended up shifting people towards a more positive view of refugees.

TRUC NGUYEN: So it doesn't really matter what kinds of stories we hear. They don't have to be tragic or show us a happy ending. What matters is that stories are being written and told.

MELANIE GREEN: One of the ways I think that stories can really work well is by helping connect people to each other, helping people empathize with other people's circumstances and find commonalities despite the differences. So maybe we live in different countries, maybe we've had different life experiences, but things like family, things like nature, that bring us all together, I think stories that highlight that common ground can be really effective.

TRUC NGUYEN: Common Ground like what Safa Suleiman wrote about in her book, Hilwa’s Gifts.

SAFA SULEIMAN: Ali forgets all about his long trip. He darts straight for his beloved tree, the tree Sido planted with his grandfather. Ali climbs on hell was branches and sits.

TRUC NGUYEN: In Hilwa’s Gifts invites us into a moment, a family reunion, a beloved tree, a book to preserve cultural memory and transport us.

DACHER KELTNER: On our next episode of The Science of Happiness, we explore a lab tested practice that dates back 1000s of years and originated in China, Qigong.

ACE BORAL: It was more of like a peaceful feeling, like I stopped worrying so much about the world or what my errands were, or, you know, the things that were just really been stressing me out. That's what it felt like to me mentally. I mean, like, but when I think about it, the mentally side and the physically side honestly feels so hand in hand.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Thanks for joining us today. Our associate producers are Emily Brower and Tarini Kakkar. Our producer is Truc Nguyen. Our sound designer is Jennie Cataldo of Accompany Studios. Our host is usually Dacher Keltner. I'm Shuka Kalantari, executive producer. Have a great day.