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We all tell ourselves stories about our lives. It is a constant in our stream of consciousness. If you can step back for a moment from your story, allow yourself to become curious, if you will, about how worn the path in your story has become. Imagine a slightly different story, not untrue but different. If you allow yourself to tell a different story, a story that has a good portion of positive words and write your story with compassion for everyone in the story, including yourself, you may find yourself experiencing relief in unexpected ways.
This is hard work for sure.
But it is so important to change the way you tell your story to yourself and to others. “Some researchers believe that by writing and then editing our own stories, we can change our perceptions of ourselves and identify obstacles that stand in the way of better health.” http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/19/writing-your-way-to-happiness/…
Telling and retelling your story in fragments, the bits and pieces of it flowing into your consciousness throughout the day, actually creates your world. You may note that sometimes you live in the world of your head instead of the word of your senses of smelling, seeing, hearing, tasting, touching. The implicit story in your head filters the story of the world as you know it explicitly by listening to that story more acutely than hearing the child speaking in front of you or the birds outside.
By shifting your focus from what happened to you and how you feel about it, to what is happening in the actual world outside, moment by moment, you will really live in the present without filtering it through the lens of your trauma. Why is this important? As bits and pieces of our story surface in our thoughts, we try to connect them with a previous fragment and the next one after that. This takes a lot of resources away from supporting our optimal wellness. Synapses that fire together, wire together because for one thing they are on a constantly surging supply of adrenaline or another stimulant our own bodies provide to prepare us for fleeing or fighting.
Here's where language, story, and mindfulness come to play a part. By being mindful of the negative language and tone of our story, we can shift to more balanced language, using a more compassionate perspective, a shared humanity, we observe with loving kindness and compassion. It is important to be curious about the language and how word choice and tone may express self-compassion with language that is quite different from language the expresses self-sorrow, self-pity.
Once you notice your language without judging, simply observing the recurrence of a thought or a feeling, you can shift your emotion by shifting the language and the running commentary in your head. Create a saying that helps you refocus. "Everything will work out in the end. If it hasn't worked out, we are not at the end." The magic is in the breaking the cycle of response by observing something in nature, something a close to you as your breath. Notice your story, the language, tone, feelings, accept its presence, and deliberately choose to pay attention to something or someone outside of yourself. Take a deep breath to break the cycle of retelling your story through fragments.
This is not to say that you ignore the fragment of the story, but simply be aware of it and watching it pass. Thoughts come and go when we are mindful of them as thoughts. But they linger when we receive something, some kind of reward, self-congratulation, for being right about how we were hurt. We might say, "So that explains why I can't ... " or Now, I know why I don't trust." Write about what it looks like to trust. Write about how you know when you trust.
Perhaps you will write about where you are now in relation to your body, living in a home you love, doing the work that has meaning for you. Write about what values will you be honoring if you love the home where you live, if you love your body? What values would you be stepping on if you don't live in your body? Write about what will that look like to you if you get back in touch with your body? ? What is it like to hold this clearly in mind? Be curious about what happens as you write this out and reflect on that.
When negative memories surface from the old story, be conscious of replacing them with your new story, and let me know what that is like for you to change your story.
