What were your initial reactions to the question, “Are you stuck in your stories?” Was it an immediate no? Or a, I don’t know? Or a – oh probably? If your answer was a straight up no, I’d like to challenge you on that. I think to some extent we are all stuck in our stories. Those things we say so often that we’ve become to believe them as fact, even though they aren’t.
Separating FACT from FICTION
I’ve been trying to sort out fact from fiction in my own life since I started my yoga training 5 or 6 years ago. The interesting thing is that sometimes it’s easy to notice your stories, other times it takes an experience to help you realize what you’ve been saying as fact, actually isn’t. And I had one of those experiences this week. Where I came to the realization that a couple things I had long since decided were, “just the way things are” actually aren’t. In my case, it was physical things about my body (my issues with my ear and nose especially) that I believed were things I just had to live with if I didn’t want to go through surgery, and now I’m seeing that I could have found relieve from them years ago had I not been stuck in my own story.
Are you STUCK in your stories?
And that’s why I’m challenging you, the next time you notice yourself saying that something is a certain way because it has to be, or that you’ve accepted that something has to be hard or can’t be done another way – is that fact, or is it fiction? Are you stuck in your story, or it is really true.
As I mention in the video, if you’ve lost a finger, saying that you no longer have that finger clearly isn’t a story, it’s a fact. But saying that you will always be broke because you always have been – well that isn’t necessarily true.
Where are your stories keeping you stuck?