Journal

Related Practices:

See Tell Your Story. To tell your story is a form of storytelling, a meaning-making about your own identity. This is really a curated self-awareness practice, so in certain ways it is connected to all practices in the category of Meditate. (Self-Care sub-menu at the My Dashboard home page). Specifically, these include Meditation, Meditate in Nature, Sit Spot, and Quiet Your Mind. Each of these practices creates conditions for us to notice our stories. There is a level at which telling our stories is about noticing the stories we are creating in our minds, which is about being able to see the way that our minds create narrative from our experience. We have, in addition, discernment about what aspects of our experience we cast the net of story around, and how this shapes our self of where we've been, where we are, and where we are headed. In Polyvagal Theory, we say that story follows state. You can learn more about listening to the story of state. We sometimes think that we have feelings about the stories in our minds, but often it is the feelings (deep, primal feelings) that drive the stories we tell ourselves. The film about the Polyvagal Theory explains this more deeply. And developing this capacity to witness our thoughts, to notice the stories we tell ourselves is crucial. On the creative side, at the level of actually writing a story, getting some training in creative writing can be useful. See Finding Your Voice Artistically. As we tell our story, it helps us to discover the Shape of our Yearning for Connectedness. This can be a form of tracking, a non-cognitive ways of knowing.