Critical upgrade notification: your story is out of date!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Kind of like an out of date computer program running in the background that is making everything crash and slowing things way down.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How about you dear reader, do you have an outdated story you would like to upgrade?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.

It takes a tribe – More musings on caring for an aging parent

I bet we’ve all heard, and probably experienced, the truth of the adage that it takes a village to raise a child. Well you know what? In my experience, the same is true for caring for an aging parent.

Until recently, I’ve been in the rather unusual situation with both my parents that whatever care I could provide, was via long distance support and involvement over the phone and Skype and occasional trips since they were both more than 6,000 miles away in their later years. My dad, bless his heart, decided at the age of 83, with early onset of Parkinson’s, and despite my impassioned pleas to the contrary, to sell his beautiful home a short drive from where I live, leave behind his friends and family and the life he had built here since retiring from his worldwide travels as a plant manager for Goodyear, move with his wife to Italy and turn an old ruin in an isolated village into their dream home. Sadly, although they did manage to build their dream home, my dad’s health deteriorated rather rapidly, my step mom went through a rough patch with her own health, and her kids, who live in her native Sweden (well, actually she was born in Denmark), had to rescue them and help them get set up to live in Sweden, where they had access to much needed medical care and support services.

So I spent a lot of time on the phone with my Swedish siblings during those years – strategizing, decision making, dealing with financial and practical matters, doing what I could on this end, knowing they were bearing the brunt of my dad’s care and needs for support. I am so deeply grateful to my Swedish family for all the love and care they provided to my dad in his last years…  and of course it was hard having him so far away, and not being there. My one trip to Italy and my several to Sweden were bittersweet, lovely to spend time with him and so sad to see his health and mind deteriorate from the ravages of Parkinson’s.

When he passed almost 2 and half years ago, I felt like I had been saying goodbye for the previous 5 years.. as his Parkinson’s affected his vocal chords, I strained to hear him over the telephone, mostly undecipherable whispers on his end, so I learned to have “yes” and “no” conversations with him, and to do a lot of chatting on my end. Email became mostly unintelligible from his end. I was blessed to spend two weeks with him just before he passed, and he would hold my hand, I’d feed him chocolate ice cream, and I played Sinatra for him on my iPad. It was summer in Sweden, and I remember the birds singing outside his open window. My stepmom, when she called me to break the news of his passing once I was back home in California, told me they had flown away the day he died.

I was going to write about caring for my mum, but somehow this is where I ended up. I guess this piece of my story with my dad needed to be told, for today’s story with my mum is woven into yesterday’s story with my dad…. A different ending, as this time I am the sibling on the ground, bearing the burden of care, but way more importantly, enjoying the blessing and privilege of midwifing her through the end phase of her journey, with the help of my California tribe.