The stories we tell ourselves can have a powerful influence on how we live and experience our lives. For me, it’s been true that as I change my story; I change my life. I find the short article below helpful in understanding this process and perhaps bringing into a greater awareness how the stories we tell ourselves really matter.
Yesterday, we read the Big Book Story entitled ‘Window Of Opportunity’ that includes a very powerful example of how changing your story can change your life. The author describes this as his first awakening in AA …
‘The speaker said, “If you’re an apple, you can be the best apple you can be, but you can never be an orange.” I was an apple all right, and for the first time I understood that I had spent my life trying to be an orange. I looked around at a room filled with apples and, if I was understanding the speaker, most of them were no longer trying to be oranges.’- Bruce M.
Stuart Brand, famous for The Whole Earth Catalogue, has a new book out, The Maintenance of Everything: Part One, in it he suggests changing the stories we tell ourselves about maintaining things and doing repetitive tasks. For the first he recommends changing the word fixing to caring, for the second he invites us to use a repetitive task an opportunity for meditation. In essence, we are altering our internal stories to shift our experience. When I care for my car, changing the oil goes from labor to love. When my mind is free while I weed the garden, I feel the chore is a blessing.
We are constantly formulating stories to explain, clarify and process our experience. The brain’s is a storyteller not a camera. It has natural propensities to create stories. Always alive in us, the creative process pushes to the surface like crocus in springtime. The narratives we hold are not fixed, they are always open to change. An old Jewish proverb says, The stories we tell about ourselves, reveal more than the facts of our lives.
We are shaped by the stories of our culture, our religion, our family history, our gender, and the stories we make up to make sense of our lives. The parts in our internal system hold these stories and shape the way we experience ourselves and our world. Some are conscious and some underly at such a subtle level that we hold them as unyielding truth.
We can learn to listen for the story/truth that is the theme song of our consciousness. We can speak these stories out loud and have them received by a receptive partner. In doing so, we enter the chamber of the story and alter its impact on our beliefs and sense of self. We can create a new personal parable or we can find the untold story that is at the heart of who we are.
There is no greater agony than being an untold story inside you.
– Maya Angelou