Reflection_On Stories

On the uses and limits of storytelling

Hello, Frequency Friend!

What’s your story?

I have encountered storytelling in a variety of contexts carrying intentions from venting or personal sense-making to community building, from lessons-learned sharing to increasing sales. I personally use ‘storytelling’ as the telling of the experience, with the story being the stage and additional roles that enable a learning moment. In comparison, I understand the stories I tell about myself and the world as the pattern I am seeing the world through; in other words, the assumptions I hold about myself and life. I recently shared a reflection about meeting limiting assumptions with 'I don’t know’.

While appreciating the sharing of one’s experience as a beautiful human activity, I have wondered about the way we engage with our own stories, and the effect the different approaches have ~ inner mono- and dialogues I share with you here¹.

I am curious, how do you relate to storytelling?

The story as the backdrop and props to a play: the stage for your experience that you call in and co-create. That’s it. The story (meaning-making) you construct around “data” is what creates the learning opportunity. It is a web of frequencies you weave for you to have a certain experience. You maintain this web in place by the energy you give it (e.g., your attention, emotions or thoughts). By discovering the learning and integrating the experience, you can let go of this web to repurpose the energy for another experience. Imagine all the sets you have to maintain if you don’t let go of your stories!

Don’t get stuck in the same play. When telling the story with emotions, you recreate the frequencies you wanted to learn from. At the end of the hero’s journey tale, make sure you allow yourself to be the hero ~ and walk on from there, inhabit this image of yourself. Don’t keep the storytelling, as you will keep yourself in the state you were in.

When you’re telling a story, are you perpetuating it? Exacerbating it? Are you going in, engaging with the story, re-living it, re-traumatizing?

Or are you sharing it from a place of having integrated the learning? Where all the emotions are listened to and welcomed, all lessons learned and ties (e.g., to others) are released to resolve the energy into your own field?

When I am making myself dependent on the story (e.g., for my marketing, sales, identity understanding), it means I cannot integrate it. When the emotional charge of storytelling is what makes people lean in, I am obliged to hold onto my emotions for the stories to be juicy and captivating. When will I ever integrate them? Learn the lesson? Stories are just past sense-makings designed as learning material for myself & others. Don’t let them trap you.

A common storytelling map:

Normal Truth -> Disruption -> Transformation -> New Truth.

                               X don’t get stuck in here X           ! tell the story from here onward

When sharing a story ~ who I was, what happened and how I resolved it, in what way, who I became ~ I don’t get stuck with inhabiting the image of either who I was (so to tell the story again, or with more emotion) or who I became. This helps me to stay current. Inhabit the you|now. I come back to seeing life including myself and others from who I am now this very moment, or the potential I see/feel myself to be.

Which means I am not sharing the emotion of the disruption or transformation state when telling the story. I don’t mind not spreading these frequencies. Instead, I live those for seizing the learning opportunity, to then share my learnings as the ‘New Truth’ from my here-and-now state.

What it boils down to, I guess, is the question: What state of being am I telling the story from?

If I don’t let the story go, I am susceptible to attracting others undergoing the same or a similar learning process ~ which increases the likelihood of getting in touch with the same experience again. If I still identify with a past experience (e.g., by remaining in the emotional state to tell the story more convincingly), I keep the door open for the same experience to enter my life, I attract it by holding the story in my field of awareness, even if I have learned the lesson.

How I see myself turns me towards a certain direction. Having lived in aśramas (places of Hindu spiritual hermitage), I have met swamis (Hindu monks who have taken the vow of renunciation or sanyās) who don’t talk about their life before taking sanyās. They do so not to run away or avoid their past but to allow for their own storyboard to be empty. I could see them engage within themself: learn and integrate, then come back to the here and now and the other story they choose to experience by choosing their vow of renunciation as a storyboard to guide them into a certain direction.

The story as a puzzle that always awaits me with that one fixed shape for me (the piece) to fit in. Who am I allowing myself to be if I keep telling my experiences of the past with conviction?

May I arrive at the one beyond the stories

remember the one before the first story

live as the one after past stories

As I am fine-tuning this piece that first came up a while back, with the next contemplation already in my fingertips, I realize a pattern in the past reflections:

The post on the blessings of ‘I Don’t Know’ contemplates how to meet and integrate the stories I live about myself and the world.

Reflections on how to integrate the experience (the storytelling) can be found in this post ‘On stories’.

And how to integrate the entire infrastructure that enables the learning and the stage that was prepared for it (the story) to the here and now, to tell all that wants to be viewed or shared without re-living it, can be found in the upcoming post of ‘Make it current’.

I am curious, how do you relate to storytelling?

Thank you for being here and making sharing more meaningful.

Vanessa

1. As I have experienced the context to have a potential co-creational influence through my experience being on different lands and in different cultures, I share that these reflections have developed across the US west coast, Egypt and Ibiza, which is shown in the thumbnail.