Читать книгу Change Your Story, Change Your Life: Rewrite the Past and Live an Empowered Now! - Beatrice Elliott - Страница 10
ОглавлениеThe Power of the Parable
Do you remember the stories of your childhood?
I bet you do. Whether the stories were old fairy tales or Disney movies or Uncle George recounting how he eloped with Aunt Freda, these stories resonated with you long after they were experienced.
We didn’t know it then, but even simple stories about a rabbit or a bear or a frog helped us connect to a deeper part of ourselves. We fell in love with a particular character, perhaps one that represented the qualities we wanted to embrace in ourselves. A shaggy dog courageously exposes a cat that wrongfully blamed him for eating his master’s dinner, when, in real life, we were too afraid to confront a sister who wrongfully accused us. A little mouse traps the bully cat in his own trap, when, in real life, our next door neighbor Sam was taunting us with punches in the stomach. We didn’t have the adult perspective to define why we felt good after absorbing a story into our being. We just felt good.
While we know that not all endings are happy in real life, the happy ending of those childhood stories helped us to transcend our childhood suffering and bring a new perspective to our experience. The stories helped to change the emotional emphasis of our traumatic experience from feeling hopeless to resolve it, to feeling empowered at having directly confronted the beast. Although the sister and the bully next door may have continued to wreak havoc on our young psyches, through these stories that were embedded into our unconscious, we felt the possibility of a different ending inside. We felt the possibility of a larger, fuller life.
As a child, my love of stories went beyond books and movies. My mother entertained me by recounting simple stories of her childhood, living on a wheat farm in Idaho. The youngest sister of a big Norwegian family of five sisters and four brothers, my mother loved to watch her older sisters get dressed up for formal college balls. As she described in detail the gowns they wore, I could picture everything she told me. As if peering into a window of my own future with men, I was fascinated with the drama of the dating games they played. I begged for more stories.
I wanted to be enveloped in the world of story. My grandmother, who lived on a ranch in the woods of Northern California, read us pages of Swiss Family Robinson during our summers with her. My brother and I were so enthralled with the idea of a family living in a tree house that we created a makeshift replica in the forest and pretended to be the Robinsons. We lived the story.
By the third grade of my Catholic school education, I began to write and illustrate my own comic strips. I felt a deep fulfillment in writing the words and drawing the images of my characters, much to the chagrin of the nun, who said in front of class, that my heroine, dressed in a strapless gown, was inappropriately attired. But it wasn’t until years later as an adult that I discovered why creating my own stories was so satisfying.
As an adult, I have learned that simple storytelling can have a powerful affect on how we integrate our experiences. Recently, I attended a workshop led by Jonathan Young, Ph.D., who years before assisted famous mythologist Joseph Campbell for several years at seminars. During the workshop, Dr. Young told the story of The Ugly Duckling. It was a story that I’d heard as a child many times, but this time I experienced such a profound connection to hearing the story. I realized that I still felt the same feelings in response to the story as when I was a little girl. Only now, as an adult, I caught so much more of the nuances in meaning. Most importantly, I felt like I was still that ugly duckling that was in the process of discovering she was a beautiful swan. I was still that little girl inside.
In working with clients as a spiritual counselor for many years, I discovered that the little girl or boy we once were, is still very much inside us all and not far from the surface of our lives. Yet it is not a part of ourselves that we consciously pay attention to. We are too busy trying to keep up with the information overload, the work and family schedules, the trips to the doctor for the annoying ailments that just won’t go away. How can we possibly pay attention to our inner child’s longings when the sink is stopped up, the bills are overdue and our own child is tugging at our arm to get him a cookie?
That child part of us is very much alive in our unconscious minds. Our dreams speak to us in a language the child understands: through mythical and fantastical stories. We may dream of dragons or earthquakes or some unidentifiable terror chasing us, but that could be our unconscious speaking to us about our troubled relationship with our spouse. The unconscious memories jarred during the day from simply hearing a familiar piece of music or breathing in a voluptuous scent, can appear as a dramatic story as we sleep. Just when we think we have contained our conscious experience of reality in a neat little box, out pops a trickster like a jack-in-the-box to remind us of what disturbances need addressing on a deeper level. We don’t always want to look at the feelings that seem inconvenient to deal with, but the unconscious mind has a way of nagging us to face what we haven’t yet integrated into our lives. It’s easy for many of us to view our dreams as meaningless entertainment and forget about them. But if we are to truly heal and discover the truth about ourselves, we need to pay attention to these messages from the unconscious.
In listening intimately to my clients, I have found that a problem that has been recurring in their lives is often directly related to a traumatic experience in their childhood. One client found out that the present situation of a boss overlooking her for a promotion evoked the same overwhelming emotions as when, at age seven, she was the last to be picked on a soccer team. She cried, feeling the pain all over again of that seven year old girl inside of her. This experience with her boss only reinforced what she had come to believe about herself: that no matter how hard she worked, she could not measure up.
What we believe about ourselves is the foggy filter of how we experience everything that happens to us. So, uncovering our core beliefs is vital to clearing the way towards the direction of happiness and fulfillment. Whether or not we consciously remember our early experiences, they remain with us and color our beliefs about ourselves. Yet it is a precarious process of developing these beliefs about ourselves. What we remember is a subjective interpretation of what we experienced and not necessarily the objective truth of the situation. We may judge our experiences as good or bad, joyful or painful. If we never go back and review these memories, we may stay stuck in beliefs and behavior patterns that no longer serve us. Our present life may be playing out these outdated stories, resulting in a fatalistic feeling that our lives will never be different. Unless we purposely revisit these stories, we will never be free to live from our truthful core. But when we do revisit them, the possibilities of our life abound again. Our dreams can give us hints at what is really going on inside of us, but we can take a more active role in reviewing the messages of our unconscious by recreating an early traumatic experience through storytelling. By going back as adults into our child self to review these experiences, we not only see our past from a different perspective, but we see how the past connects to our current concerns. By “restorying” our childhood experiences, we consciously “re-store” ourselves to who we really are, free from the stifling box of self-limiting beliefs.
It can feel like a daunting adventure to return to those painful memories. After I’d experienced heartbreaks in my relationships with men, I sensed that this pattern might be connected to my experience of my parents’ divorce. I decided to write about my recollection of this time. But I felt ambivalent about bringing up the past and the painful feelings of how I felt my needs were invisible to my father. I decided that I needed to find a way of rewriting the stories of my past, in a safer, more approachable way. When my parents were going through their bitter divorce, I remembered thinking it would be great to have an invisible animal friend on my side that I could tell all my feelings to. I decided to re-story a particular incident during that time by using storybook characters to guide me through the experience. And so Jasper the Joybird and Zephyr the Wind were cast.
With Jasper the Joybird coaxing me to express what I was really feeling in the moment and take positive action, I felt an inner strength to face my feelings and speak my needs to my father in my rewritten story. With Zephyr the Wind providing a balanced and wise perspective, I could see a larger picture of what happened then and could choose how to feel about the experience. This “Power Posse” was giving voice to my wise, loving self and replacing my overdeveloped inner critic! With the help of these guides, I could see my father as the imperfect yet loving man that he was. And I could see myself as the courageous heroine of my own story who created a different and triumphant outcome by expressing her needs and realizing that she was valued and loved.
Seeing myself in that way had a magnificent impact on my selfesteem and the way I related to friends and loved ones. I felt a different vibration and as a Spiritual Counselor, I knew that it was from this point that I would attract new conditions into my life. I realized that I had stumbled on to what the ancients had been practicing for centuries: the power of storytelling to heal and bring meaning to our lives. Without going back, replacing the old feeling with a new one, we cannot go as far forward.
Without remembering our past and self-reflecting, we cannot fully see ourselves and live from our larger truth in the present. As a child we thought our perceptions were absolutely the truth about ourselves. However when we become adults, if we don’t go back and explore those situations with our adult consciousness and discover a more positive belief, we keep attracting from the old, limiting belief.
It is in recounting our pasts that we have a chance to review how we arrived at our beliefs. I discovered through restorying my life that besides the healing power of remembering, it is in having an active role in creating new beliefs about ourselves that propels our self-healing to a higher level. I saw the connection of rewriting my story with the principles I’d been studying as a Practitioner in the Church of Religious Science.
The Church of Religious Science, or Science of Mind, was founded circa 1927 by Dr. Ernest Holmes, a self-taught philosopher who studied all the spiritual paths and discovered a powerful synthesis of the working principles in all religions. Science of Mind is based on the theory that there is One Infinite Mind which includes all that there is. It teaches how to use the Mind Principle for helping ourselves and others to overcome problems such as despair, poverty and sickness.
The Science of Mind defines the highest potential of each human being by stating that everyone has inherent God-like qualities within. Each of us is a co-creator with the Divine. It is this divinely creative capacity of our true nature that enables us to create a life for ourselves that is completely fulfilling in its every aspect. But it starts with identifying our objective circumstances as originally stemming from the quality of our thoughts.
The Science of Mind describes negative consequences as stemming from wrong thought which leads to wrong belief. We believe that in order to have positive changes in our life, we need to change our thoughts about how much good we can experience. We believe that in changing our thought’s stream of consciousness, we can produce a corresponding change in our environments. The Science of Mind technique for change is based on thinking right thoughts, which leads to right beliefs and behaviors which then produce the right conditions in our life. This is also known as the Law of Attraction.
By re-storying our lives, we are going back into our pasts and feeling how we experienced a traumatic incident; we can often find the root of a belief that has grown into a tree in our adult lives, whether for good or bad effect. Part of the task of discovery is to ask ourselves specific questions about the incident, so that we can find the thoughts and beliefs behind the actions and feelings. These questions have been included in the workbook section at the end of this book. Since each of us experiences our lives through the filter of these long-held beliefs, we can see how our stories have influenced our self-esteem, ethics, work life, relationships, values and spiritual life. By having swallowed these childhood beliefs whole, they have become a part of our cells. We think this is the reality of life, when in fact we have just created a story about reality of which we are living proof. Through rewriting our stories, we can now choose new choices to counter our negative beliefs and replace them with the positive thoughts and actions of the heroes and heroines of our story: ourselves.
We can also go a step further and observe the thoughts, feelings and beliefs we hold of our friends and loved ones. How much has our belief about the “bad guy or girl” in our stories continued to limit our perception of this person and keep us stuck in an estranged relationship? Or how much of our negative belief have we passed on to our own children? The “sins of the father” syndrome can be played out subconsciously. This is a big motivator to get straight with ourselves, isn’t it? As we are restored to the truth of ourselves and learn to love ourselves unconditionally, we can then bring that generosity to our relationships with others. I found that through rewriting my own story, I was able to move beyond blame and powerlessness to forgiving my parents and embracing them, as whole and complete, despite their weaknesses. I was able to pass that type of positive thinking on to my son. He could see that his Mom and Dad weren’t perfect either, but really only human, doing the best we could with what we had at the time. He was able to arrive at this conclusion after reading my story. This is another real gift of rewriting your story and sharing it with your kids, they can discover your pearls of wisdom themselves.
In the workbook section you will be asked questions that prompt memories of your past. As we return to those early experiences and rewrite them, we can often see the connection of the past filtered experience and how we continue to use the same filters in similar circumstances in the present. With this new perspective of our past, we can then choose to process information in the present in a healthier, more informed way.
Our values help us decide what is good or bad, right or wrong. We make judgments about ourselves based on these values, so it’s important to identify what our values are, and their hierarchy of priorities. Our values are the result of our internal model of the world. If our model of the world differs from our values or someone else’s, there’s conflict.
Beliefs are what we have presupposed about the world. They can either empower us or destroy us. The important task in re-storying our past, is to find out the disabling beliefs that get in the way of the magnificence of who we really are and attaining true and lasting happiness and success. Our memories are responsible for coloring our present and our presence.
By rewriting our stories, we have a chance to explore the language, images and feelings that encompass our experience. We can then choose to open our perception beyond our filters to see a larger and more empowering story.
By modeling a successful person, we can apply this element of modeling in rewriting our stories with ourselves as the heroic character. If we have been teased by other children because we are dyslexic, we can go back and choose a different way to respond to the teasing. We can even take our actions a step further and make friends of our tormentors by educating them about dyslexia.
Another way to rewrite your story is to embody positive traits in other characters that represent different empowering parts of the self, as has been done with the characters Jasper the Joybird and Zephyr the Wind. For instance, in the childhood incident I rewrote as Bea Wished, which I present in chapter three, I couldn’t ask for the understanding and reassurance I needed from my father, who was consumed by his own sadness during a difficult divorce. But Jasper and Zephyr encouraged me to take the steps to get my needs met. Zephyr represents the voice of my higher wisdom, so that I could see that despite my father’s self-absorption, he really loved and valued me. Jasper represents my empowered self that takes positive action to be heard and get my needs met.
Is there someone that you respect and admire and would like to emulate? We can incorporate this person’s belief system, mental syntax (the way a person organizes information) and physiology into our childhood character. By going back into the childhood incident as the empowered child with an informed adult perception, we can experience the incident anew, using all our senses to filter the experience in a more positive way. When you rewrite your story, project these qualities in your own personal wise guides; you are not locked into using Jasper and Zephyr.
We have discussed the importance of understanding our beliefs and the way we filter information, but we haven’t addressed the very important element of our physiology. The stories locked in our unconscious not only affect our memory, belief systems and the way we filter our present experience, but they can live in our bodies. A friend of mine who is a body worker includes the following slogan on her business card, “Our issues are in our tissues.” We are living out the decisions we made in childhood about who we are and the possibilities and limitations of our lives. These unconscious decisions and beliefs have also affected our physical health. Often, re-storying our early experiences can help us restore our bodies as well.
The Mind/Body Connection and the Chakra System
Have you ever awoken from a dream of falling off a cliff? Do you remember how your breath quickened and your heart beat furiously? The fact is our bodies don’t know the difference between an imagined event and a real one. Conversely, if we had a pleasant dream of swimming in a tropical island lagoon, we can feel peace and relaxation as we wake up to greet the day. Stories have the same powerful effect. Other cultures know the power of storytelling and give it due respect as a healing modality. In Islamic societies, loved ones tell a sick person an uplifting story. It helps the sick person imagine their own triumph over circumstances, which then empowers the immune system to heal the body.
Hindu physicians employ fairy tales to help emotionally troubled patients because they understand their mysteriously powerful effect on the subconscious.
Because of my own struggles with Epstein-Barr Virus and breast cancer, I felt it was crucial to address the connection of my emotions and beliefs to my physical health. As I began to study books on the mind/body connection, I saw examples of how certain beliefs based on childhood experiences positively or adversely affected physical health years later. It seemed that going back to rewrite these childhood traumas might also improve our health as well as our attitudes. I incorporated into my story the ancient Indian system of the chakras and gave Jasper a rainbow colored tail of feathers representing each of seven chakras.
Chakra means “wheel.” Chakras are energy centers or vortices. They are used to understand the way energy is processed by the human being. The “Lower Triangle” chakras focus on elimination and reduction and are balanced by the “Upper Triangle” chakras which accumulate, create and refine. The fourth chakra, the heart chakra is the balance between the two, where we experience shifts from “me to we.” A seventh chakra represents the aura or magnetic field of the body. It is said that cosmic energy flows down from the eighth chakra and collects in the other chakras. The chakras affect our perceptions, feelings and choices. They affect the flow and types of thoughts we have. They affect the relationship between the conscious and the subconscious. There are many practices and healing modalities, such as yoga, Tai Chi, acupuncture, etc. that address balancing the energy of the chakras and clearing blockages that lead to mental, emotional and physical distress.
Each chakra has a particular location in the body and has organs and glands associated with it. There are positive qualities of each chakra when balanced and negative qualities when they’re out of balance. For instance, the first chakra, or root chakra, is located at the end of the spine between the anus and sexual organs. It concerns security and survival issues and governs the organs of elimination. The color associated with this chakra is red. The positive qualities of this chakra are a feeling of being grounded, security, stability, loyalty and healthy bodily functions of elimination. When out of balance, we feel fear and insecurity. Life can feel like a burden. We can feel out of touch with our families or culture. Physically there are problems with a weak constitution, elimination problems and lowered resistance. In the Appendix a chakra chart has been included for your reference, which identifies each of the chakras and their qualities.
When rewriting our stories, it’s important to pay attention to how you feel in your body. How does it feel in your gut? If you were hurt physically, where was the wound? Did you feel grounded in your body during the experience, or were you in your head? By re-experiencing the emotions associated with the event, we can often find the reactive patterns in our body that stem from those emotions. Feeling an emotion in a certain chakra can also give you insights into the unconscious issues associated with that chakra that need addressing.
In my own case, it was no wonder that the accumulated hurts and emotional pain I’d experienced caused an imbalance in my heart chakra, which then manifested as breast cancer. During my recovery I attended a breast cancer support group and the psychologist leading the group asked me if I knew the profile of women who experienced breast cancer. I replied that I did not. He informed me that these women were very competent about taking care of other people’s feelings but not as competent in taking care of their own. Hmm, I definitely identified with this group. Therefore, I decided to approach my recovery with the best of western and alternative medicine, while addressing the emotional and spiritual causes of such a disease. As part of my treatment, I chose to rewrite my Bea Wished story again. This time, I delved deeper into the experience than before and concentrated on what I felt in my Heart Chakra. The Heart Chakra rules subtle feelings and the ability to touch others with our purity of feeling. It is also about boundaries, both on the physical and emotional levels. When it functions well, it knows how to discern when something is foreign and needs to be examined, versus when something is a part of you and can be accepted in. It can also help you determine what people are worthy to enter your heart space and when to protect your boundaries. In rewriting my story about feeling abandoned because of my father’s emotional absence, I allowed myself to feel kindness towards him and the possibility of his warmth and love in the moments I most needed them. I started to feel my heart opening. I could feel that the healing taking place in my emotional heart was also healing my breasts.
During that time, I also discovered another avenue of healing: sharing our stories with each other. When we are really listened to, we feel cared for, respected and heard.
When we really listen to one another, we are actively and creatively engaged in opening ourselves to new places, people and experiences. We give our energy to the storyteller and can even heal the storyteller through our loving attention.
Family Story Sharing
When you, as a family, share your stories with each other and by asking each other “what can we learn from this?” you are encouraged to draw your own conclusions and consider how the story feels to you. The story then becomes a lesson that you can use in your lives. I encourage you to dive into the workbook section and give yourself and your family the gift of exploring the depth and richness of your inner world.
There was a time, as a society, when we gathered together to share stories. Storytelling was a nightly event that helped to synthesize and bring meaning to the events of the day. Now we live in a world that feeds us constant information via media which keeps us isolated from human interaction. Yet we still are famished for the words that would deliver a deeper connection to our experience of the world, of each other, of ourselves. By getting in touch with our own life stories, we offer to ourselves and each other the possibility of deeper, shared understanding, compassion and the possibility of a true and lasting experience of peace.
How to Benefit from this Book
I would like to suggest that you first read the stories. Each story gives you a brief synopsis of the adult whose story you are about to read. Of course, the name and locations have been changed to protect their anonymity. If you have children or grandchildren, read the stories together and discuss what they would do in the same situation, and if anything like that has ever happened to them. You will find out a lot about each other’s thinking. Share the story with your partner and the same revelations will take place. By reading the stories first, you will get a good feel of the positive voices that you will want to incorporate into your own personal parable.
In the part of the book, Now It’s Your Turn, the questionnaire will ask you thought provoking questions that will bring up past incidents that are ripe for reworking. These incidents can be from your childhood or any part of your past that you would like to revisit and to rewrite. Find a quiet space that is free of distractions and where you can be alone. I would suggest stopping here, but if you feel like you are on a roll, move into the Writing Your Own Personal Parable section and begin rewriting your story. You will probably revise your story several times. This is a loving process, so be gentle with yourself. It will take as long as it takes. Journal your dreams after writing your story, as many insights can appear. Observe your life situations in the six months after writing your story and note what changes are taking place. I suggest sharing your story with a loved one, and be sure you let the person know up front if you want feedback or for them just to listen. Share your story with children; they are so attuned to stories, and to think that this is your true story just makes you that much more real to them. It also gives them permission to share incidents that are currently going on in their lives. I hope that your family can begin to share their personal stories with each other at family gatherings; think of the small talk that will be replaced with transformative dialogue. Have fun making covers for your stories and keeping them as a family memoir to be passed on from generation to generation. Now good healthy perceptions can be passed on rather than the old limiting beliefs.
My wish for you is to enjoy this process, to gain a new life enhancing perspective of the true you, and to have your life attract all that you know it so richly deserves. Of course, being an educator, I want you to also remember to share your story with a child; you are remembering your past, while they are actively living it in the present. Let’s all rewrite our stories so our children can live a healthier NOW.
