What stories are you embodying?

Knowledge is only a rumor until it’s in the muscle.

New Guinea proverb

I've been writing about the stories we tell ourselves, and how these stories can lull us into the Trance of Scarcity and take us out of the Circle – that magical place where life flows, and we are inspired, purposeful, creative, enjoying a pervading sense of what Victoria Castle refers to as “glad assurance.”

Delving further into her book, I learned that those stories don’t just live in our thoughts, they inhabit our muscles, our nervous system, our very cells - we literally embody their messages.

Think about it for a minute. Picture yourself walking down the street slumped over, eyes down cast, forehead scrunched, your footsteps shuffling. Your breathing is tight and shallow, your jaw is clenched. Not exactly the stance that is going to enable you to go out there and change the world, right?

Now imagine yourself walking with a spring in your step. Your shoulders are back, your chest is open. Your breathing is deep and comfortable. You are wide-eyed and alert to what is around you.  Now that is telling a very different kind of story. You are ready to step into your life. Life is good. Life is full of opportunities.  I can do this!

But change, it turns out, is not just a matter of thinking new thoughts. That’s probably why just layering affirmations over a negative mindset is not usually very effective, at least in my experience. 

The change has to happen on a physical, body level.  And it seems that in this culture, we have lost touch with our own bodies in a very profound sense, trapped in our heads and trying to exert control of mind over matter by sheer willpower.

It. Just. Doesn’t. Work.

“The Greek word Soma refers to the living body in its wholeness – mind, body and spirit as one”, explains Castle. The path to regaining our wholeness and inhabiting our bodies, and hence our aliveness, our connection to all of life, it turns out, lies in becoming aware of our bodies’ messages. Without awareness, we are numb. We are cut off. Estranged from our own life force.

So, step one. Be aware. Just observe what is going on in your body from your head down to your toes. What is constricted, what is relaxed? Where is it contracted? Where is it open? What feels numb? What feels more alive?

I’ve perfected the look of shoulder earrings over the years.  So now I am learning to be aware of when my shoulders are creeping up to my ears. And I can tell by how high my shoulders are how my day is going to go – the higher they go, the more I see life as stressful and fraught with challenges. So I just observe. And then I allow them to let go. I relax and take a deep breath. And now life looks brighter, challenges become opportunities. I have stepped back into the Circle and left behind the Trance of Scarcity.

Is it a once and for all exercise, this body awareness and letting go? Not at all, in fact I might have to practice it dozens of times a day, especially some days. But as they say, practice makes perfect, and as Castle reminds us, we literally become what we practice.

So my dear… take a few minutes and tune into your body. Just observe. No judgment. Be curious. It’s amazing what the simple act of awareness can do.

P.S.  In case you missed my earlier posts about Victoria Castle's book, The Trance of Scarcity, you can check them out here :

Stepping into the Circle

The Power of our Stories

Critical upgrade notification: your story is out of date!

Critical upgrade notification: your story is out of date!

If you’ve been following along, you know I’ve been reading Victoria Castle’s book The Trance of Scarcity.  In yesterday’s post, I reflected on some of the stories I have been unwittingly telling myself, and realizing how they are just not serving me.

Kind of like an out of date computer program running in the background that is making everything crash and slowing things way down. I bet you know what I mean. When that happens, and there’s a bug in the program, the solution is hopefully simple – we install an update.

So I realized it is time to update my stories. Like, seriously overdue time to update my stories!

Following Castle’s road map, here’s an example of how I am upgrading one of my old stories.

What is one of my prevailing Stories?

There’s not enough time

What are my actions and behaviors that keep that story alive?

I am often in a rush

When I sit down at my computer, I feel overwhelmed by all the tasks that lie ahead of me

I take on too much and then feel pressured because I can’t do it all

My shoulders start creeping up around my ears

I am not present in the moment

Given what matters to me, what is an upgraded Story I could choose?

I have the time I need to do what I love

What are my actions and intentional practices that support that new Story?

I leave with plenty of time to get to my appointments

I choose one task at a time to focus on, and give it my complete and loving attention

I say No when it is appropriate to do so

My shoulders are relaxed, and my chest is open

I breathe deeply

I am fully present to whatever I am doing

I trust my ability to choose how to spend my time

How about you dear reader, do you have an outdated story you would like to upgrade?

The Power of Our Stories

“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.

Stepping into the Circle

I had the delightful experience on Sunday of listening to Victoria Castle, A Master Somatic Coach, speaking about embodied abundance, which she describes as living in a state of ease.  As opposed to the wound up, shoulders up to the ears bodily stance that often seems to be the price we pay for life in the modern world. 

She invites us to imagine stepping into the Circle, joining the great flow of life and just breathing a huge sigh of relief. Imagine that your place in the Circle is assured, that there is nothing that you need to do to earn the right to be here, because you already belong. Your very existence, and your consent to be here, is all that is required.

“The Circle,” states Castle,” is home to a flow of satisfying relationships, meaningful work, inspired learning, endless resources and opportunities, laughter and creativity,  and a prevailing sense of ….. glad assurance.”

I love this concept. Here is the choice. We can operate from the premise of some form of not enoughness, or what Castle calls the Trance of Scarcity. From this perspective, we embody life as a struggle, with all our senses in a state of perpetual high alert and life as a series of obstacles to overcome. We are stuck playing the role of either victim or hero/martyr – both of which keep us in a state of separation.

Or, we can awaken from the trance of scarcity and step into the flow. We join the River of life where we draw from its “juice and vitality”, and make our own unique and joyful contribution to it.

Intrigued? Tune in tomorrow as I explore her take on how the stories we tell ourselves create our world.