What stories are you telling yourself?

Are you listening to the stories you are telling yourself?

Do you spend time alone each day? If so, do you listen to music during that time? Or are you someone who turns the TV on when you get up in the morning and leaves it on until you go to bed each night? If so, you might not be aware of what stories you are telling yourself. Yet these stories are running your life. 

Listening within brings freedom

I enjoy spending time in quiet each day. Whether this quiet time is spent in meditation or journaling or silence doesn't matter as much as that I'm being with myself in the silence. In this silence I can hear what I am saying to myself.

How our stories affect our life

Hearing our own thoughts is important because these "stories" create our feelings which in turn create our experiences in the world. Research has documented that 80% of the thoughts we think are the same day after day, throughout our whole lives. I believe this is because we are not listening to our thoughts. I believe that when we listen to our thoughts, we have more choice about what we think. After all, how can you change something if you are not even aware it exists?

An example from my life

I often heard my mother tell me that I was "too big" to be held. Intellectually, I knew she said this because she was required to wear a brace while pregnant with my sister when I was three. This brace supported her from having pain while her belly pinched a nerve from weight and it prohibited her from lifting more than a few pounds, including picking me up. Yet even with this understanding, I repeatedly experienced being "too big" throughout my life. I realized this story was operating for me when i did an exercise at an International Intensive Training in Nonviolent Communication, at the age of 49.

Trusting another to support us brings freedom 

In the exercise, we were instructed to lean into another person with our full weight, as they leaned back toward us, seeing if we trusted them to support us. I reluctantly created a triangle by leaning in, until the man I was partnered with said to me something about my reluctance. I was both shocked by his honesty as well as grateful for the information.

After that exercise I decided that it was safe for me to join "puppy piles" and snuggle with others and allow myself to be held, something that until then I had thought was for others but not for me. I realized that, in fact, I was not "too big" to be touched. I shifted my story from being "too big" to allowing myself to surrender to another and know that I could trust them to support my weight. This has increased my ability to be intimate in many ways.

Choosing the stories we tell ourselves empowers us

I hope you are empowered by this sort of thinking. It certainly has empowered me. I have, on more than one occasion, discovered a thought that surprised me. By becoming aware of these thoughts, I've seen how telling a "story" resulted in frustration and how that frustration was e a direct result of telling that story. By becoming aware of the story, I was able to change it to something I wanted instead. My point here is that you cannot change what you are not aware of and that by becoming aware of your thoughts you can have more choice about your experiences in life. 

What's your experience with "stories"?

Is there a story that you are becoming aware of? How can you change this story so that it empowers, rather than disempowers, you? I welcome your comments below! 

Acceptance and beyond (part 1)

Water flows to the sea.  Attempting to stop it is futile and creates unhappiness

Acceptance. Ah, just the word allows me to breathe easier. It creates peace and freedom inside my body. This peace and freedom create spaciousness in my mind and comes from not wanting things to be different from how they are. It comes from the mind slowing down the "if only's". The "if only's" are those thoughts that start out "if only…" (fill in the dots with something you wish were different). For example, if only my cat would sit in my lap, rather than climbing on my shoulders, if only my rent was $200 less each month, If only the democrats (or republicans) were in control of the Senate, if only I were 20 pounds lighter (or heavier), and on and on and on. The list never stops. We can either accept things or try to change them. Our choice determines how much peace we experience.

What can we change, really?

The only thing we really have control over, or can change, is our own attitude. Attempting to change anything else or anyone else, is going to rob us of peace and freedom. Trying to change others will likely lead to resentments and power struggles which will definitely take away our peace.

If we try to change things we could be in for a battle. If we accept things as they are, there is nothing to battle, nothing to fight, no struggle. There is peace, inside our heads and our bodies as well as in our relationships with self and others.

Except when our values need to be fought for…

There are times when choosing to do battle with/for something will create more internal peace than accepting it for how it is. Fighting injustices, for example, may allow us to experience more peace because we are aligned with our values but that is a subject for another blog post.

Beyond acceptance...

Years ago, I made a decision that I wanted to be able to not just accept but to celebrate things I had thought were unacceptable. I decided that I wanted to live my life celebrating the unexpected and the "undesirable". Specifically, I wanted to see if I could have a flat tire and shout "yes!" in acceptance and celebration of the experience. My decision was to not spend my time or energy lamenting what was and instead accept what is. The goal was to trust and celebrate what was happening, rather than try to change it. It was a grand experiment to see if acceptance would increase my peace and happiness. I believed if I could do accept and celebrate the things I had avoided or feared, I could create peace in my life on a moment-by-moment basis.

I knew when I made this decision that it would be a challenge. My thinking had been programmed in terms of "good" and "bad" and this way of thinking was a deeply ingrained habit that I knew would not be easy to break. I had been socially conditioned to want more "good" and to avoid "bad". Yet, I knew that if I could become conscious of these unconscious habits of judging everything into "good" or "bad" I would experience the peace I longed for which would make it worth the effort.

Breaking the judgement habit

I eliminated the "black and white" thinking from my thoughts and my speech by learning Nonviolent Communication (NVC), also known as the "Language of Compassion". It took me several years to break the habit of judging each thing that happened in my life as either "good" or "bad" but the peace of mind was so exhilarating I wanted to share NVC with everyone I met.

Yet there was still something missing-I was still not celebrating those flat tires! More about the missing piece in my next blog.

For today, please share how judgments affect your attitude. Also, have you made friends with your judgments-if so, does that shift your experience and if yes, how so?