Giving up your story
To give up our story means taking responsibility for our life, for all that has happened to us, and for all that we have made out of it. To do this, it is often necessary to broaden our perspectives from the level of the personality to that of the soul, which is the higher plan that guides our fate.
To see the events in a new light, you must give up your story. The first step is to trace how you produce the events that happen over and over again. This requires some practice, especially when your life’s guiding principle is that others are responsible for your suffering.
The second step is to find out how you produce the situations that happen to you over and over again. People tend to evade the answer to this question by making general statements. The devil sits in the details, particularly in the feelings that are connected to the details. Feelings are the glue that holds together painful and unpleasant memories. We would like to bypass them by making general statements.
The third step is to move back into the situations that lie at the root of the ‘evil’. In my sessions with clients, I invite their Higher Self to join me. The Higher Self is a bridge between soul and mind and is an expression of the True Self or core of the person. It is closer to the truth than our Ego, for whom it is more important to save face than know the truth.
I ask the Higher Self to lead us back into the situation where we can find the key for the present experience. This key opens the door to what lies underneath the outward symptoms, diseases or problematic life strategies. Such a situation could be a familiar repetitive incident from childhood, which now appears in a new light, or a traumatizing experience that has been repressed from consciousness or classified as unimportant.
One such example is the story of a young man who felt that his mother had restricted his spontaneity and vibrant self-expression to the point where he had physical sensations of paralysis and being crushed. In an inner image, this situation presented itself as a large round stone that had been rolled over a tiger and buried its body. As we looked closer, the stone changed into topsoil, which carried a new germ, the germ of a large tree, which was now ready to grow. All the oppressive and constricting forces, which the stone symbolically represented, were at the same time the mother-ground for the unfolding of his potential.
You cannot recognize this side of the story if you look at it from the perspective of the victim. Only if you put the story into a larger context, if you shift your perspective, can you value the gift that is hidden in it. When you acknowledge and appreciate the positive intent, you can liberate yourself from the entanglements of the past.
In cases where the experiences cut so deeply and were so painful that they are repressed from consciousness, it will take longer to reach the source. You will probably need some guidance, or undertake your own training and practice. Our inner wisdom opens the door to the unconscious only when we are one hundred percent ready to see the truth. A part of the work is just bringing our resistance into conscious awareness. Resistance is another word for fear. Fear has many faces: Fear of the unknown, fear of responsibility or of being held responsible. We are afraid to change our life and to let go of attachments. And we fear that we will not know who we are without our familiar story.
All these fears are legitimate because they carry a grain of truth. It is important to acknowledge and appreciate them, without getting trapped by them or surrendering our power to them. If we dare to look at them, they lose their power and terror. Upon closer inspection, we find out that underneath the threatening fantasies are events which, seen in the light of day, are human. The knowledge relieves and liberates us.
A child interprets events according to the mental capacities that are available at the time when traumatic experiences occur. As adults we are more able to accept human limits. To the degree to which we develop understanding and sympathy for our own weaknesses, we can also accept that our parents or the other important people of our childhood were not perfect. At this point we allow ourselves to see the larger truth and say good-bye to our story. At this point we attain the freedom to bring about overdue changes, to dare the new and to take responsibility for our life.
If you want to larn more about it, check out my Ebook ‘Beyond Suffering’
It will help you to discover the four pillars of how to grow joy in your life
