The Stories in our Head

(For Podcast, click here.  For ITunes version, click here)

I wanted to share some of the wonderful teachings by Pema Chodron from a retreat that Nancy Bean and I went to last year.  The retreat was entitled, Smile at Fear, which might sound like a difficult thing to do.  But what is fear?  What do we fear the most? What do you fear the most?  Pema gave an interesting statistic that a large group of people were asked about what they feared most, and when given the choice between physical pain and uncertainty, an overwhelming majority of people were more afraid of uncertainty than they were of physical pain.  It seems that when faced with not knowing, most of us become fearful.  We’ll make a decision too quickly or become paralyzed with inaction, just to avoid that feeling of uncertainty.  Training our minds to sit with uncertainty, with not knowing, is a critical component of responding more skillfully to whatever situations and circumstances arise in our lives.  In fact, on the eightfold path, it is the very first step, Right View, Clear Seeing.  We train our minds to sit with uncertainty, so that we can more clearly see what is and make better choices. 

What is happening in our brains when faced with uncertainty?  When presented with a new experience, our brains try to find something to relate it to, something in our past experience or what we’ve been told.  We are continually trying to reinforce whatever current view of the world that we already have.  If we think life sucks, then we look for reinforcement that life sucks.  If we think that we are unlucky in love or in life, we unconsciously reinforce that story.  Lama Surya Das calls these responses the dysfunctional myths that we live by.                                          

How we experience life is based on the stories that we make up about it. So what are the stories that you tell yourself about you and your life?  Think for a moment about how you describe your life to others.  What do you tell others, and, most importantly, what do you tell yourself about you?

There’s a book by Dan P. McAdams on narrative psychology, entitled The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self.   In it, he describes identity as a personal myth we create in order to construct a sense of meaning, unity and purpose in our lives. He argues that we consciously or unconsciously compose a narrative that integrates our 1) remembered past, 2) our perceived present and 3) our anticipated future in a way that illustrates essential truths about ourselves.
This is what we all do.  We make up stories to fill in the blanks of the things we don’t really know.  We look at life from the lens of our past experiences and look for reinforcement of what we already think is true.

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." -Henry David Thoreau

It is a choice, conscious or unconscious, that we allow ourselves to be influenced by our past experiences or by what others tell us to be true.  There was an economic downturn a few years ago—people lost their jobs and their homes.  Yes, that is true, but each of us has a choice with what we do with that information, how we process the information around us, how WE respond to what is happening.  On Wall Street, it is a common understanding that bad news is infectious.  In stocks, a lie can be just as damaging as the truth.

Interestingly, this phenomenon is not new. Researchers have documented that women at the turn of the 20th century commonly reported a specific set of symptoms, including leg paralysis, temporary blindness, and facial tics. These symptoms happened to fit the well-publicized and accepted definition of something called “hysteria”.  Researchers found that “patients unconsciously try to produce symptoms that will correspond to the medical diagnostics of the time,” Shorter explains. “This sort of cultural molding of the unconscious happens imperceptibly and follows a large number of cultural cues that patients simply are not aware of.” 

So what stories are we telling ourselves that are forming our experience of living?  Each of us gets to choose how we live.  No matter what.  What if your life going forward from this moment was a blank sheet of paper?  Could we live by a value of getting comfortable with uncertainty?  Allowing life to unfold and making decisions that may not be based on our old way of thinking?

How can we have the courage to examine the stories that we are telling ourselves, try and see more clearly, and let go of the need for a story at all?  What are the stories that we make up about ourselves, about our family, about our partners, about our friends and about our enemies?  Some things are unchangeable, but regardless, choosing how to perceive a situation is always changeable. This is the powerful tool of curiosity and non-preference.

"Whenever something negative happens to you, there is always a deep lesson concealed within it." -Eckhart Tolle

So, each of us can have the courage to question these stories that we have made up, and in doing so, we might feel the fear of uncertainty that arises when we don’t know.  If we don’t have our stories, what do we have?  The truth is, that If we can sit with not knowing, our world can be enriched with the fullness of possibilities.  Last week, we talked about being courageous choosers. So this week, we can examine our stories, embrace our fear, smile at our fear, and go forward into this holiday season with a sense of curiosity and not-knowing.  We can let go of our stories by being open to the question, then courageously choosing more skillful responses.  Clear seeing, right view, is the first step.