What's Your Favorite Story?

​When someone asks you this, you probably think of a story from your childhood, a book with pretty illustrations that someone read to you.  Or one of Disney’s many movies (Bambi?  Mary Poppins?  I’m showing my age…)  Maybe it was a Greek myth (winter is the result of Demeter’s grief over the loss of her daughter Persephone).  Or La Llorna, the Weeping Woman from the Southwest, who drowned her children in a fit of rage and now her wails are heard in the wind or along rivers at night. What about the Scottish tale of the man who stole the selkie’s skin and thus made the seal-woman his wife?  How about the Star Wars or Marvel comics never-ending sagas? 

​Humans love stories. Not only are we tool-makers—we are storytellers.  Which brings me to another question: How many of us are aware of the stories we are currently starring in?  One of my own favorites is the one in which I’m like Cassandra, the woman who was given the gift of seeing the future but because she was also cursed, no one believed her prophesies. “If people had only done what I told them to do, this bad thing wouldn’t have happened.  But no-ooooo, they wouldn’t listen to me.”  

​Pause for a moment and think of your own story.  The one where it’s your mother’s fault that you’ve never found the love of your life. Or because your father made you get a job instead of going to college, you could never pursue your true passion and have never amounted to much.  Or “I have to stay stuck in this marriage-job-house because of X-Y-Z.” Or, “I’ll never be good enough, because my older brother got everything he wanted.”

​It’s not that there isn’t some truth to the details, although the results might be surprising if we investigated the facts.  And some stories are so deep and dark that we need a good therapist to help us unravel them.
 
But there are lots of little stories running in our heads all the time that create a fair amount of suffering in our lives.  Why?  Where do they come from?

​My favorite explanation comes from a Deepak Chopra novel:  

We spend most of our life cooking up all kinds of untrue things.  Why? So we won’t be afraid.  The mind likes to soothe itself with stories, and after they get made up, we run around under their spell.

​Humans really don’t like uncertainty.  We want to know, to predict, to have an explanation—it’s a good survival strategy. We want to know when to plant crops, or to understand that someone got sick after eating this plant so we don’t do it again.  We want someone to read us a good bedtime story so we can forget about the monster under the bed. 

​But let’s examine a popular saying:  “Everything happens for a reason.” We need to believe this, because otherwise we would be left with the yucky feeling that this particular experience produced.  If we can somehow believe that this unpleasant event had a purpose, that it wasn’t just a random coming-together of events that have nothing to do with us personally, then we don’t have to feel yucky and fearful that it might happen again.

​So, we create stories to explain things, because any explanation is better than the deep, dark, scary place of uncertainty.  Then before we know it, we believe the story—which might eventually evolve into a nightmare—and we keep telling it over and over, letting it control us without ever remembering that we’re the ones who made it up in the first place.

​Whew.  What funny creatures we are.
 
What if we could stop telling the story?

​We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or to hate, to see or to be blind.  Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning.  The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then to become the storyteller. (from The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit)

​I’ve had fun lately with a little awareness trick.  Say, for example, someone says something to me that triggers my “I’m-not-good-enough story.”  I feel my chest tightening, my jaw getting hard, and I hear myself thinking “FINE.  I’ll just pull in my sails and never show YOU anything about myself EVER AGAIN.”  And then I catch myself and think, “Ohhhhhh, THIS is the part in my story where I become small and resentful and passive aggressive.  I’ve seen this episode a b-zillion times before.”  It makes me chuckle and creates just enough separation between me and my story that the situation loses its energy.  I might actually be able to be curious about the whole scene and try rewriting it.  “What did this person actually say?  Was it really about me personally?  What’s actually true?” Or I might quickly lose interest in it, and I can move on to whatever is now happening in this moment without bringing along that negative charge from an experience that is rapidly receding into the past.  

​So now the challenge gets a little harder.  Can we allow for the possibility that our beliefs and opinions are also stories that we made up to fill in the void of uncertainty?  “What?!” you cry.  “My beliefs and opinions define me, help me navigate through the world, help me take a stand!”   True, but if we’re too rigidly attached to this particular compass that we’ve created, we suffer because we want everyone else to follow the same course.  

​One of my favorite quotes (from the Buddha through Jack Kornfield) is, “People with opinions just go around bothering one another.”  Watch how many times you or others are bothered  during the day by opinions.

​If someone said to you, “you can stop suffering.  You can really stop suffering completely right here and right now.  All you have to do is give up. . . your opinions, your beliefs . . . and you can be completely happy, free of suffering, forever . . .  For most people this would be an unacceptable bargain  . . because if we are not willing to find out that what we believe isn’t really the truth . . . there’s no way we can find our way out of suffering.” (from Falling into Grace by Adyashanti via Geneen Roth)

What if you could do this, right here, right now with just one little belief, one simple story? Trust me—you won’t disappear in a puff of smoke if you look with curiosity and kindness at one tiny drama and ask, “Is it true?  What would I have to feel if I just dropped it?” 
 
I encourage you to try it, and let me know how it goes.  (And yes, this post too is a story . . . )

Donna