You Can Change Your Story After You Discover It
How many stories have you lived in your life? I do so much key therapeutic work in my practice focusing on establishing with clients what presents as the real meaning to uncovering identity, history, and real choice as the elements to self-healing and development around telling one’s “stories” – and considering how fluid they can be to support desired transformation.
Native American spirituality speaks of the power of changing your story. One is renamed after earning one’s “coming of age” as a description of meaning and power.
Carl Jung, in his work with archetypes as reflecting our real and spiritual essence, linked these symbolic universal “characters” – as does Carolyn Myss in her bestselling books, Anatomy of the Spirit and Sacred Contracts - with our core challenges for healing and development in the unfolding odysseys of our life. Here are some key inner reflective and journaling exercises I have created to find and open up higher awareness and actualization, through uncovering/creating your “stories”:
Seven Steps to Creating Your New World
1. Settle back into a comfortable, supported position, close your eyes, and count ten full, deep, easy breaths to yourself. For these next several breaths, say to yourself the following phrase each time you breathe: Free the story of my spirit.
2. Imagine you are taken on an inner journey into this “story”, allowing all that unfolds and draws you in to carry you in its way to its own “place” of completion. As that occurs, gently and easily return to full waking consciousness, open your eyes, and write/draw your experience.
3. Take a few moments and read all that you’ve written. Now consider: does this describe the “story/stories” of your life?
4. Journal about your sense of what is the same/different – and consider why – record whatever additional insights occur.
5. Now reflect in a way that feels visionary (by that I mean free, without condition/expectation, compelling) what you would like the present and future story of your life to be. When you feel complete with that vision, once more record your experience.
6. What, if anything, stops you from choosing/creating this vision? Journal your answers – and then, as you once more read through this part, title it My Faulty Belief Systems.
7. Rewrite all of the above as its exact opposite. When you are finished, title this piece My New Story.
What choices can you now make each and every day to live your dream and see what happens? Try this for the next 45 days – as I’ve said in previous articles, the time it takes to break limiting and self-destructive habits – and let the results become a springboard for experiencing a new, freely chosen story.
Namaste, Marjorie