si dawson

I was at a shaman work­shop last week­end, and the con­cept of "the sto­ries of our life" came up.

This makes a lot more sense than merely the sin­gu­lar "story of our life."

Our lives are a mul­ti­tude of lay­ers, thou­sands of expe­ri­ences, all lay­ered upon each other, all com­bin­ing together to make the glo­ri­ous­ness that is us!

So, first thing to do is recog­nise these sto­ries for what they are. How do we find them? Easy, just switch off your think­ing brain, & start writing!

Eg, for me, they'd go some­thing like:

• I was born in Aus­trala (that's a story)
• We moved around a lot when I was a kid (another story)
• I grew up in a lower-middle class family

and so on..

The crit­i­cal thing here is this — when we think about iden­tity, our­selves, who we are, it's these sto­ries that define us. These are the things that we tell our­selves over & over each day, in the back of our minds.

And that's exactly the problem.

The more we tell our­selves these sto­ries, the more they define us.

You get in a trou­bled rela­tion­ship, make the mis­take of extrap­o­lat­ing a bit too much, & start telling your­self "I always fall for the wrong guy/gal", and hey presto, you're going to start doing that in your life. These are self ful­fill­ing prophecies.

Imag­ine hav­ing a guy who fol­lowed you around all day, whis­per­ing in your ear "you suck!" or "you're a fail­ure!". How long do you think before your life really did start suck­ing? (or, per­haps a bet­ter move, you punched him out).

The prob­lem is, this is exactly what our mind is doing to us. It's why shamans delib­er­ately let go of their sto­ries as part of their train­ing. Why bud­dhists learn to detach them­selves from their egos. It's all the same thing.

Now, that's a pretty big goal, so what's a good first step?

Well, how about real­is­ing that a whole bunch of these sto­ries aren't even ours?

90% of what hap­pened before I left home? Those aren't my stories.

Any­thing I didn't directly choose, or was just some­thing I was told? Those aren't my stories.

I didn't choose to move around as a child. I didn't choose where to live, how much money the fam­ily had, & so on. These were my par­ents' deci­sions. Sure, they affected me at the time, but they're only my sto­ries if I choose to make them so. They only con­tinue to affect me if I choose to make them part of the col­lec­tion of sto­ries I tell myself.

Even just chang­ing the focus can help enor­mously. "I'm from a lower-middle class fam­ily" to "I had lower-middle class par­ents" or "My par­ents were lower-middle class." At each step removed it's less & less self-defining, so the story has less power. If you want to keep it at all.

Ditto with rela­tion­ships. How many rela­tion­ships have you been in where this per­son, that you chose, respected & loved has told you some­thing ter­ri­ble about your­self? You're a ter­ri­ble lover, use­less in busi­ness, embar­rass­ing to be seen with, and so on.

Why are you choos­ing to con­tinue telling your­self that story? ("I'm embar­rass­ing to be seen with"). It's not your story, it's just their opin­ion, their story.

We have the choice, we always have the choice not to con­tinue telling our­selves these stories.

Real­is­ing that we have these sto­ries is an impor­tant first step.
Iden­ti­fy­ing which ones we can let go of is enor­mously empow­er­ing.
An easy first step is to chuck out all the ones we have that were never ours to begin with.
When we can finally release them all, then we're well on the way to being truly free to live.