“Born fictioneers, all of us, we quest for causes and explanations,
and if they don’t come readily to hand, we make them up, because
a wrong answer is better than no answer.”
Diane Ackerman
Our story telling abilities are hard wired into our genes –
back in our cave days, we had to think and act quickly to avoid danger - our
survival depended on our ability to instantly assess and interpret what was
going on around us. So we created a story about whatever it was, and
acted accordingly. And this is what we still do, day in and day out. The
trouble is, as Victoria Castle points out, “Sometimes the story is useful, and
sometimes it isn’t. “
I’ve been thinking about this, and pondering the stories I
have unwittingly told myself over the years, and realizing that somewhere along
the line, some of them have graduated to becoming Truth with a capital T.
Here are some examples from Castle's long list of
Impoverishing stories I can relate to....do any of these sound familiar?
• You have to work hard for everything
you get
• If I have this, others won't
• There's not enough time
• You can't have money and live a
spiritual life
Or maybe you have your own versions....
• I should be different
• I must never disappoint anyone
• I can't ask for help
• Nothing ever works out for me
So here's the question - what if we are unknowingly
perpetuating a life of scarcity and tension because of the stories we are
telling ourselves?
Who knows how we came up with our stories....no doubt they
made sense when we first adopted them, a survival mechanism given the physical,
emotional, psychological terrain of our early years.
The problem is, these default stories, which we endlessly
replay, end up trampling our reality, zapping our life energy and creating our world.
So, what can we do? Well, first of all, Castle suggests, the
question to ask ourselves is not "Is
this story true?", or "Is
this the correct story?". The most helpful question is "Is this story useful?" "Given what I care about, what I want to
contribute, and what matters to me, is the story I'm telling myself a useful
one?"
Given that I care about living a life of embodied joy, that
I want my own life experience to serve as an inspiration for that possibility,
that I am deeply concerned about the tension that we all live under, is my
story of "You have to work hard for
everything you get" useful?
Knowing that it is very important to me to create financial
peace in my life, is it useful to tell myself the story that "If I have this, others won't"?
And also being profoundly aware of how much I value living a
spiritual life, is it useful to believe the
story that “You can't have money
and live a spiritual life”?
Well, it certainly doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure
out that the answer to all these questions is a big NO. These stories are not useful.
So, what do I do? Beat myself up? Moan and groan? Feel
hopeless? Tell myself yet another impoverishing story about the story?
Castle has a better answer. It’s probably very familiar to you. What do we
do when our computer programs aren’t performing? You guessed it – we get an upgrade!
Tune in tomorrow to find out how I am upgrading my stories
to reflect my values and my dreams.
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