Our Core Stories

Our Core Stories

Our core stories repeat themselves over and over again in our daily lives.

In part, this is because there are only a handful of human experiences that fit our biological wiring and cultural shaping. But more importantly, it’s because we recreate these stories. Subconsciously seeking them, day after day, interaction after interaction.

Like echoes from our past, we expect the same shapes to appear again:

The success

The loss

The abandonment

The embarrassment

The love

The unworthiness

The wonder

We scan our lives for them, lazily expecting this moment to match the last. Superimposing past wounds or past joys over the freshness of now. Transplanting weariness for trust. Pessimism for possibility.

These stories carve ruts in our minds and our bodies. They lay down grooves, self-fulfilling, until we’re no longer living life, but reliving it. Prisoners of the past, locked in a cell we can’t even see.

But there is a way through.

We can learn to see the walls of the cell. To name the stories. To notice their choreography before we dance them again. We can catch the habit as it rises, and trace it to its root.

Start by questioning your beliefs. Find the core story playing out behind your reactions. Watch how it seeks to fulfill itself again. Then watch play all the way through. Notice the beginning, the middle, and the end. You have seen this story before.

Just that is enough.

Awareness is the first step in change. Seeing is the beginning of the end. And it opens the door to a fresh, raw experience of today. An experience not written by your past.

Keep looking until the searching falls away. Until the seeing is natural. Effortless.

Slowly the seeing begins to happen all by itself. There is no action, only watching. Laughing as the stories repeat themselves over and over again. Dancing with themselves.