Change The Story You’re Telling Yourself
“Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become your words, Your words become your actions, Your actions become your habits, Your habits become your values, Your values become your destiny.” ~ Gandhi
The stories we tell ourselves matter. They shape how we feel about the world and how we respond to it. But is the story you're telling serving you?
I have recently emerged from the Void.
For a couple of months, I found myself deep in the Winter energy. The combination of the time of year, the coincidence of a few projects ending at the same time, and a period of introspection was a nexus of different cycles that took me deep into a sense of emptiness. It was incredibly uncomfortable to be in this lull, navigating something of an existential crisis and waiting for, hoping for, something to shift again.
I found myself asking so many questions about where I come from, where I belong, and what I'm doing and there were simply no answers.
All I knew is that my mind was desperately searching to make sense of how I felt and what was happening. There are so many stories I could tell myself.
And those stories matter.
I have an emotional reaction to those stories. Hope, despair and everything in between. Those reactions shape my actions, which in turn shape my story.
Human beings are storytellers; we are meaning-making machines. Yuval Noah Harari describes this beautifully in his book, Sapiens. The foundations of our lives are based in story - the notion of money or nation-states are stories that we've all collectively bought into. We are constantly constructing a narrative about our lives (except for some cases of extreme autism, this narrative mode seems to be a default mode of human cognition).
“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” ~ Steve Jobs
These stories live in our bodies. The way we hold our bodies, move around and interact in the world is habitual; our bodies are a biography. Our embodiment becomes a way of managing and expressing who we are, inseparable from our self-identity. That shaping - our posture, movement and body language - then determines how we experience the present moment and the choices we have available to us to shape our future. Becoming more aware of our own embodiment and our conditioned tendencies gifts us an opportunity to rewrite our stories.
How often do you pay attention to the stories you are writing for yourself?
In a culture of addiction, distraction and numbing, it's too easy to avoid researching our own story, according to James Hollis. When we don't claim our story's paradoxes and contradictions - when we don't own our experience - we miss out on the opportunity to shape our own narratives.
Our stories are defined by the implicit and explicit questions we ask.
"The goal is not a solution to life’s problems - even if one were to exist - but to find one’s story more interesting." ~ James Hollis
And so my questions changed. What if this period isn't something to figure out or find answers to? What if I could simply be interested in the process of asking the questions? What happens when I let go of the need for it all to make sense and encounter myself as it unfolds?
This intention to find my story - my life - more interesting and to get more curious calmed me at a time when I had no answers. The story I started telling myself was that helped create a little more spaciousness around my experience. There’s nothing I have to do, nowhere I need to get to. Nothing needs to make sense.
Let me know how this resonates for you and if you have any questions.
If this has piqued your interest, you might enjoy this much longer piece from The Atlantic.
My questioning state of mind is also being fuelled by the Maintenance Phase podcast, the You’re Wrong About podcast, and If Women Rose Rooted, by Sharon Blackie.