For the last year or so I’ve been lightly studying Buddhism, mostly through author Pema Chodron. I fell in love with the intersecting ideas of both diving deep and remaining detached. It is such an interesting way to live, if one can master it, and it really all comes down to the stories we tell.
Something happens, you allow yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling, and the work you do is to witness it from a detached position, not emotionally investing in what is happening, not telling a story about what is happening, and you respond from a place of love and kindness, for yourself and for others. On the surface, this approach to life can feel like spiritual bypassing, but that’s not it at all. The idea is to feel all of your feelings, but to stop telling the stories that keep us stuck in those feelings.
Feel It. Just Don’t Move In With It.
You may have heard the advice to feel your feelings, just don’t set up camp and move in to your feelings? It’s like that. If we can manage to simply hold space for however we’re feeling and get curious about why we’re so upset, so sad, so angry, etc., perhaps we can work toward not getting so upset in the future, gifting ourselves with more long term inner peace. And who doesn’t want more long term inner peace?
“Whoa, whoa,” you’re thinking. “Now is not the time for inner peace. Now is the time for all out war.”
Right, I’m just some hippie high on pot and love and throwing up peace signs, ignorant of all that is going on in the world and the necessity for us to armor up and get explosive. I’m sitting pretty and privileged, removed from the real dangers of Covid 19, from the economic implosions, from the major atrocities being enacted by our governments and by our fellow humans.
Um… kind of.
I don’t smoke pot, but I am an advocate of unconditional love. I am not ignorant to what’s happening in the world around me, but I am sitting privileged, fortunate to be largely unaffected by the coronavirus in my small rural Oregon town. But I am not unaware or unaffected by the dangers of the atrocities enacted by our governments and by our fellow humans.
My husband is a Mexican immigrant out working an essential job during a time of rising unemployment in an area inhabited by mostly white people. For all of our progress and forward thinking here in the Pacific Northwest, anti-immigrant sentiment rises everywhere during times of economic crisis.
I’m also a hardcore liberal in terms of freedom, equality, inclusion, and individual rights, but I am not in favor of a lot of the moves the liberals are pushing right now, namely the extremes of social distancing and the wearing of the masks.
The Boxes Don’t Work Anymore. The Stories We Tell Don’t Work Anymore.
So, you see, I don’t really fit into any solid box anymore. I could go on about the boxes I’ve challenged and broken out of, but the point here is that it’s all a story.
Who I am is a story I tell, a story you tell, and a story we use to understand, to act, and to react.
The stories we tell can hold us firmly in place, move us backward, or launch us forward. And it really does come down to those stories. We manifest what we believe, and we hardwire stories into our brains. They become the things we know for sure, and because what we know is backed by stories, we often cannot be convinced otherwise. We don’t need evidence, right? We have our stories.
We can look back at the past and see how long we’ve held those stories, the situations that have held them in place, and how our history has shaped us. That is not easy to undo or unlearn.
The Stories We Tell About the Past
My hubby and I watched the first episode of a new Amazon show, Hunters, last night, about Nazi hunting Jews in the 1970s. At one point, Logan Lehrman’s character, Jonah, scoffs at Al Pacino’s character, Meyer, for telling stories of the concentration camps: “you rich people have the luxury of living in the past. We had to survive in the present.”
Meyer responds with something so profound it inspired me to write this piece today.
“Son, the past is all we have. We keep replaying the past over and over, different times, different players, but each of us hoping to change the outcome this time around.”
Stories.
So much of what is happening today, we’ve seen before, and before, and before, and before. So much of what happens in our own lives, we repeat over and over.
Stories.
Abraham Hicks would say it is because we are so focused on the stories and how they played out that we can’t change the story. We are simply reliving the only lives we’ve been conditioned to know.
So, how do we change the outcome this time around?
We change the stories.
I first learned about stories when I read Don Miguel Ruiz. He helped me see that I had been conditioned to think or believe certain stories (making assumptions) and that those stories were limiting my growth.
The Story I’m Telling Myself
Then, I discovered Brene Brown, who talks about how she and her husband, when getting into a heated discussion, will now say to each other, “the story I’m telling myself is…” which helps them clear up the misconceptions and misunderstandings before they launch into a full blown fight over… maybe nothing?
I’ve been using this tool for a couple years now, and it works.
I have not only been able to stop myself from spinning out with my own new stories as well as digging into old stories and doing my best to remove them from my emotional and mental database, but I have also been able to, thanks to Pema, detach myself a bit from what others are saying and doing and get curious about the stories they tell. It is, as Pema says, truly an act of bravery to sit with yourself and dig into all your own bullshit.
It’s hard and painful and terrifying and fracturing. When you realize that you have spent 20, 30, 40 years or more living by a set of stories that don’t serve you, and that all it takes to change your life is to change your stories, holy shit, what a blow to the old ego! You mean all I had to do was control my own narrative?
Yea, right. “All you had to do.” It’s work. Every single time you get triggered by something, you get angry or frustrated, you have to ask yourself why. Why am I so pissed?
“It’s an injustice!” I would shout. “It isn’t fair! It’s an abuse! Someone must say something.”
Hmmmm… maybe. But does it have to be you? Does it have to be now? And does it have to be said like that?
It’s Not Personal
For example, when a close friend of mine posts something offensive on Facebook, instead of taking it personally, feeling attacked, and getting my feelings hurt, I can remind myself that she is telling a story around a particular subject. I’m only hurt or offended depending on the story I’m telling around the situation.
Indeed, even if my friends are aiming their insulting memes and news articles directly at me, I can see more clearly that those attacks are based on their own stories in their heads.
Often, our stories are interwoven, complex, and complicated, which makes them difficult to extricate from one another.
For example, I have a long history of witnessing men abusing women. My stepfather, my uncles, husbands and boyfriends of my friends, and on and on.
So I began telling myself a story from a very young age that men were either abusive or weak.
I also absorbed and internalized stories around white people, particularly around white men.
So for much of my life, I dated men of color who were enamored with me. That way I could be safe.
It took me almost 30 years to begin to undo those stories, and I still have work to do. (Just ask my husband.)
Global Politics. Local Change.
In the world today, we see a clear division between people who believe we should all be sheltering in place, keeping all “non-essential” businesses closed, and wearing masks everywhere we go, and those who believe that we should not be social distancing, we should reopen America entirely, and we should not wear masks anywhere. And so much more! The economy, the racism, the classism, the xenophobia, the unleashed capitalism, the rising violence and isolation, and it’s all interconnected. It’s a fucking jungle out there right now.
The stories these two sides are telling about each other and about themselves are like runaway trains, and the media only serves to heighten the tension, the vitriol, and the divisiveness.
As someone who does not fall firmly down on either side, not even close, I can see from a detached perspective that both sides have their reasons for feeling the way they do, and like with most issues, they likely share more in common and are less extreme than we imagine. Of course, even aware of the storytelling aspects, I’m still stuck in my own stories albeit working my way out.
If only we could all get out of the stories we’re telling.
The solution? How do we bridge the widening gap between the two polar opposite political sides in this country?
Honestly, I don’t know if it’s possible on a large scale. Collectively, we may truly just be on a highway to hell.
But, on a micro level, in order to “be the change we want to see in the world” we can do things like support our community through reaching out to our neighbors, shopping locally, buying from small businesses, and listening to people we wouldn’t normally. We can turn away from our screens and toward each other.
If we could realize that we’re being force fed an ongoing diet of stories about who “we” are and who “they” are, we might be able to stop consuming.
Thus, we can change the stories we tell.
Social media has its uses. It can be a great place for connection, but it can also be the cesspool for humanity. It can turn sister on sister, brother on brother, man on woman, and conservative on liberal.
Same goes for the news.
Pay attention, close attention, when you are plugged in and consuming information, to manipulative language, to divisive language, and to rhetoric that is telling you who “you” are and who “they” are.
If you’re feeling emotional, tired, amped up, or in any other way pulled energetically by the news or social media, chances are you are being manipulated.
Bottom line, chances are you are being manipulated.
It’s a good idea to start scaling back from your phone and computer screen and sit with the people you can, read a book, take a walk, sleep more, smell the flowers, do anything that is not information driven.
It’s time to create a healthy, balanced diet of intelligence, emotions, and, if you will, spirituality on our journey toward unlearning old stories that no longer serve us and building strong, loving, peaceful stories that truly empower us.
Perhaps, if we do that, we can, for the first time in history, change the outcome before the inevitable, infinitely repeating tragic ending.