We Are Our Stories
As I stated in my last post, I’m doing a series of blog posts on my interpretation of key teachings from my training with the Pachamama Alliance. Their mission is to foster personal and global transformation and promote an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, and socially just human presence on the planet. This post is on the power of story.
Let’s start with the personal. Almost any process of personal healing or growth sooner or later is about addressing our self-talk… that mind chatter and underlying core beliefs, those conversations that run through our heads, our storylines. Many of us are hampered, sabotaged, even paralyzed by these stories we tell ourselves. Stories that disempower us like “I can’t”, “It’s just the way I am”, stories about insufficiency… “I don’t have enough time, money energy, you name it”, stories about inadequacy… “I’m not enough… good enough, smart enough, strong enough, pretty enough, lovable enough, and so on”.
Psychological theory proposes that many of these disparaging stories are the result of inadequate mirroring and attachment at an early age and/or a core sense of mistrust… that our needs will be met, that we’re safe, that we can have what we want. These stories have power whether or not they are based on the truth. We become defined by and live out the stories we tell ourselves, as if in a trance.
Healing involves becoming aware of these limiting stories, challenging them and then replacing them with new more positive and self-affirming stories. This is one of the ways we transform ourselves. Seeing the power and effect of these personal stories on our sense of self and potential, what about the power and effect of a collective story? What if our whole culture is living in a trance?
Unfortunately, that’s the case. We’ve all become entranced by unexamined cultural stories. Stories handed down to us by parents, society, the educational system, the media, etc. And some of our current cultural stories are literally threatening life as we know it on our planet. Indigenous people call it “the dream of the modern world” and implore us to wake up from the cultural trance.
These larger stories reflect what we value as a culture and drive our actions. For example, do we value and act on self-interest and economic growth at all costs or on equality for all and environmental sustainability? These stories then shape our world. The “meta story” of our modern era is one of separation. Like the personal lack of attachment and mistrust which makes us we feel alone, threatened and fearful; this breeds the “me against you”, “us against them”, “humans against nature” mentality that has led to the social injustice, alienation, and environmental devastation we face today.
Another underlying and destructive story today is that there’s nothing more important than shopping; we have become first and foremost consumers. In fact we have made consumption a way of life. Remember the line, “he who dies with the most toys wins”. This is the result of what’s called “inadequacy marketing”… intentionally designed by marketers so that we need to consume in order to not feel inadequate, and to protect us from our anxiety. Not so different from the personal insufficiency and inadequacy stories except its ramifications are global.
We need a new “meta story” and one that is gaining momentum is the Universe story. This story is about human society’s understanding of its place in the cosmos that has come out of greater and greater scientific inquiry into evolution. We are the products of that dynamic force that placed the stars in the sky and brought life to our planet. We are part of the web of life and an evolving Universe. It’s a story of connection, creativity and collaboration. It values interconnectedness, interdependence, inclusion, and equality for all. It’s a Universe that is friendly and we can trust.
We get to say we’re no longer buying the separation story, and we get to decide what the story is for our time. This is challenging, but doable. It’s difficult to dislodge old stories because they benefit certain sectors of society who are also the ones that wield the power, and because so many of us are still entranced in the old dream. However, as daunting as it may seem, we have only to look to our predecessors, the abolitionists, the suffragettes, and the civil rights movement, to know that it is possible. We just need a critical mass of conscious people committed to building a society that reflects and reveres the sacred and interconnected nature of all life. We can do this!