Working with Stories
You are a story carrier. The only question is which stories are you carrying? Are you thoughtfully selecting the stories you consume? Or are you mindlessly gobbling up whatever the internet puts in front of you? Are your stories empowering your growth and flourishing? Or are your stories distorting you into a person your grandmother would not be proud of?
Good stories are about relationships, challenges, transformation, beauty and truth. Martin Shaw asks what kind of animal are your stories telling you you are? What kind of weather pattern?
Good stories have enough room in them, enough breathing space, to hold many different interpretations. A good story doesn’t try to force one point of view down your throat and tell you exactly how the world is. Instead, it wakes you up and shakes you out of your old patterns. It cracks open doors to new ways of being and opens windows so you can see new worlds.
We don’t need stories that everyone can memorize and repeat like a robot. We need stories that teach us how to think for ourselves and how to deeply engage with the world. We need stories that provoke questions, not stories that provide all of the answers. We need stories that show us paths to wisdom and depth.
Curating your own stories is fairly simple. You just develop the habit of turning off something you’re consuming if it turns too dark or violent or unhelpful. They say your unconscious mind remembers everything you see and hear. And then it draws on that information to help you make sense of the world. There are a lot of stories that you don’t want your unconscious mind drawing on when you try to understand the world.
Another way you can curate your stories is to put some healthy variety into the types of stories you consume. An excellent source of diverse stories is the natural world. There are countless stories going on there all of the time. Before modern times all cultures used to send young people out on their own into the wild so they could get away from the stories of home and hearth and learn to listen to the stories of the living world.
The natural world rarely speaks in human languages. It speaks in metaphor and myth. As you spend more time in the natural world listening you can begin to understand that there are conversations going on all around you all of the time. Bringing some of those stories into your being will help you develop depth and wisdom that is difficult to obtain in any other way.
Biology is telling us that our DNA does not hold enough information to build the complex structures of our bodies, like our brains. So where is the information coming from? Where is is stored? The latest thinking is that it may be stored in a field of some kind outside of our bodies that we tune in to and download information from.
How do we access it? Every molecule in your DNA can vibrate at different frequencies. Like a guitar string. Your DNA can play an extremely large number of vibrations (notes). It may be tuned, like a tuning fork, to resonate with specific songs in a field outside of our bodies. Your songs. Those songs could contain much more information than your DNA itself. A spoken story is also a form of song. Different stories might set up different vibration patterns in your body. This is more than just information, it is energy and information. For more information see: Iain McGilchrist, Michael Levin and Richard Watson conversation 5