It’s a bright sunny day. You are driving on a road that takes you through a patch of woods. A deer runs across the road ahead of you. Wanting to take a closer look at the deer, you slow down as you go by the section of woods that you saw the deer enter. The trees and the underbrush are not too dense, you know it could not have gone far, but the deer is nowhere to be found. You reflect on for a moment on how seldom you get to actually see a wild animal when it crosses the road and enters the woods that way. Then you drive on.
What you just witnessed is the uncanny ability that animals have to instinctively blend into their natural environment.
At some point in our evolutionary journey humans lost that instinctive ability so now we use our intellect and consciousness to create stories about ourselves to unconsciously weave, word by word, the environments that are familiar and comfortable for us. Especially powerful are the words in the stories told by our inner-child.
Without our stories and the memories they contain, we would lose our humanity, there would be no healing, no forgiveness, and no meaning or understanding of the deeper experiences in our lives. We would be like the animals simply moving from one moment and experience to the next.
Without personal stories, we would have no way to talk about the texture and meaning of our life. The personal stories told by our inner-child are especially powerful in creating the environment we will experience in our adult world and every one of us has an inner-child with a personal story to tell.
In the next few issues of the Stonyhill Newsletter we will explore the amazing power of our personal stories, our family stories, and our larger cultural stories to create the physical and emotional worlds we live in.
Let us begin with our personal stories.
More than any other single behavior, they will determine the level of happiness we experience and our success in life.
For example, if our personal stories are primarily about the struggles and emotions of life in the ghetto as a child, there is a good chance that we will emotionally reinforce and physically recreate the ghetto we experienced in childhood.
In other words, if our inner-child stories are filled with poor me and the sense that we are helpless victims to life’s experiences, that is very likely the life we will create for ourselves as adults. We will live life as powerless victims. There is safety in the familiar. Word by word, our stories will create what is familiar and comfortable for us; an environment in which we can almost instinctively blend into and disappear.
If our caregivers believed in us as children and affirmed for us our potential to create the life we dreamed about, our stories will probably focus on our future and our strengths, the insights we have gotten out of our life experiences and our dreams, we will talk about our future and becoming the person we were created to become. Again, we will create what is familiar and comfortable for us.
Our personal stories are always about community and our life as a journey in community.
We tend to tell our personal stories most often when we are introducing ourselves to someone new in our lives, or at mealtime with family and friends. To the stranger we will tell the story of where we were born, where we went to school, where we work, where we live, whether we are married, how many children we have and where we went on vacation last summer. With family and friends at mealtime, we are more likely to tell stories about where we went recently or what happened to us today. “I was walking down the street when suddenly………….”. “You’ll never believe who called me today at work.”
Every event and experience in our life is used to shape the stories we tell about ourselves. Some of our stories are about remembering. Some of them are about our “becoming”. Both are important. The most important thing to remember about our personal stories is that we have the power to choose the stories we tell others. We become what we think about, so it’s very important to stay aware and choose stories that reflect the life you want to live.
When our stories are told out of our inner-child and stuck in the past, we will quickly find ourselves tied to the hitching post of childhood, concretizing or literalizing our stories as inevitable fact. In other words “this is who I am”. I am unable to change because the past happened, or didn’t happen.
The danger of being stuck in our childhood stories is similar to literalizing a myth or a metaphor. We lose the wisdom or learning embedded in the experience because life is no longer a journey, it has become a one-time event.
When we are so focused on the past, the insights and wisdom contained in the event never come into our consciousness. We do not see the strengths that we developed out of those experiences. We do not understand how much we learned from them. When we are emotionally stuck in the past, we are condemned to continue living the reality of childhood. In other words, if we were unhappy and powerless in childhood, then we will be emotionally unhappy and powerless now.
It is important to remember that our past is not simply about our life struggles or the wounds of childhood; it is about the triumphs and struggles we have overcome; it is about the strengths we have developed out of the challenges we have experienced.
If we get stuck in our unhappiness, telling stories about the past, we will find it difficult to grow up and become the person we are capable of becoming. We will have a difficult time experiencing the happiness that surrounds us in the present moment.
Helen Luke, the well known Jungian story teller reminds us that our personal stories have life and depth only to the degree that we have wrestled with opposites and have come to a middlepath place between them. She is essentially saying to us, be careful not to get stuck in an unhappy, powerless, poor me part of our story or we will lose the potential to become the person that we were created to become out of those experiences.
On the other hand, she would also caution us not to get stuck in the wonderful utopian place of happiness, hope, and peace on the other side of life’s path and lose the insights and strengths that always come from life’s challenges and struggles.
If our personal story has depth, meaning, and wholeness, it will contain memories and experiences from both sides of the path. To live an abundant life and experience the happiness that comes from wholeness means that we have to be willing to be open to experiencing all of what life has to offer, and our personal stories need to reflect that wholeness.
That we become what we think about is a powerful truth.
We will explore the power of stories within families in the next issue of the Newsletter.
(Readers can go to www.stonyhill.com for in-depth articles and past Newsletter discussions on the subject of our inner-child’s primitive ego, happiness, and authentic spiritual growth.)
Personal Thoughts
Years ago I offered workshops to people interested in personal growth. One of the exercises I would have them do was draw a straight line across the middle of a large piece of paper. The left side of the line would represent their birth date, and the right side of the line would be the date they thought they would die.
Then I would as them to think of all the great positive things that had happened to them in their lives and put them by date on the time line above the line. The I would ask them to do the same thing for all the struggles, all the painful experiences and put them by date below the line.
When they were done listing all the experiences they could remember and putting them either above or below the line, I would have them connect all of their experiences with a line that went from positive experience to negative experiences along the time line.
Then I would ask each of them to tell the others in the group their timeline story and what they had learned from the exercise. The first and obvious response was how there were as many experiences above the line as below, and secondly, most would share how the ups and the downs in life moved back and forth across the time line like a sine wave as they moved from birth to death.
The real insight came when I would ask them to remove any of the experiences that had not taught them something, or given them specific strengths or gifts that were not important in the formation of who they were as persons.
In all the years that I conducted that workshop exercise, no one was able to throw out a life experience that had not contributed to the strengths and wisdom of who they had become.
The greatest joy and happiness in their stories always came when their life “story” intersected with the needs of the world or with the needs of persons around them. Sometimes it was teaching others, sometimes it was caring for someone sick or elderly, for many it was simply helping a friend in need.
I would end the exercise my asking them if any of this exercise would have been useful or helpful if there had not been persons who were willing to listen deeply and carefully to their story as they each shared with the group. This was a part of the exercise that almost always brought tears and healing. For many it was the first time they had experienced someone willing to really listen to their story.
It is important that we tell our stories, but it’s even more important that others are willing to listen. It is the listener that enables the humanity and grace embedded in our story to become visible. In 25 years as a therapist, I am certain it was more my willingness to listen to my client’s stories that brought them healing than it was my “insightful feedback”.
A good friend of mine told me one time that our stories dwindle away when we sense that others are disinterested or unwilling to listen to us. It can be a painful experience when the story we are sharing has deep meaning for us and no one is willing to listen.
Without listeners, there would be no stories.
Quote:
Watch your thoughts; they become words.Watch your words; they become actions.Watch your actions; they become habits.Watch your habits; they become character.Watch your character: it becomes your destiny. Frank Outlaw
A Spiritual Practice
What are the stories you tell others about yourself ? Do your stories tend to be stuck in the past? Are they focused on poor me? Do they lift up a sense of powerlessness? Are they happy or unhappy? Do they speak of fully accepting responsibility for the consequences of all your choices? Do your stories imply that you own your own feelings or do they tend to blame others for how you are feeling? Is your life ruined because of what you have experienced or not experienced………or do you speak about the strengths, the learnings, the insights, and the wisdom obtained by all the experiences in your life?
Take the time to listen to yourself when you tell your stories to strangers, family, and friends. If you have a friend or family member you trust, ask them what they hear when you are telling your life story.
We become what we think about. Our stories create our reality and the universe always gives back to us what we send out. If we believe we are unhappy and powerless; we will be. If we believe we are wise, strong, and happy; we will be.
The choice is ours when we become self-aware of the stories that define our lives.
Authentic spiritual growth and happiness come only from growth in self-awareness.
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