Tell Your Story
Tell Your Story
If you want to understand yourself, tell your story. And not the obvious one. If you want to understand yourself, begin an Archeology of Shadows. A good starting point: When did you first realize you were different?
At the origin of consciousness is a crime scene. When did you first realize you were different? No one is normal. Not a single one of us. Cada cabeza es un mundo. Translation: Each mind is its own world.
When I say tell your story, I don’t necessarily mean with pen and paper. You could do that. But you get to tell your story how you choose. You could tell it to your partner. You could make a FILM. You could DANCE your story. What would that look like? You could tell your story through a PHOTOGRAPHIC ESSAY. You could PAINT your story. SCULPT it out of clay or WELD it out of metal. The form is less important than the process. What are the points along the path? The critical moments, decisions, triumphs, failures? What changed your direction along your path? What confirmed it? What happened unexpectedly?
There doesn’t need to be an audience for your story, in any formal sense, but a story is told, in part, to be received. It is told to be told, and it is also told because your story carries something in it that may be connected to my healing. And because your story, deeply told, in addition to being your story, is also our story. The story of us. Because we are all part of a larger, shared story. The story of the human family. If you'd like to see our impression of the original story of the human family, check out The Origin Story.
Related Practices:
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.Video: Distill | Photography: Stein Egil Liland | Licensed from Pexels.com, used with permission.