The Power of Story – Write Your Story, Create Your Life
Stories. As children, we are read stories by our parents and told stories by our living ancestors. As adults, we sit by the fire, listening to and telling stories. Stories come in many forms, yet every good story has an underlying meaning, or many layers of meaning. We tell stories to impart a message, a feeling or a belief.
My high school college prep English teacher, whom we called Judy “Vogue” (yes, we were young, but she was indeed a former Vogue model.), taught three levels of story interpretation that always resonated with me – the literal, interpretive and applied levels.
The Literal level was the story on its face, what in legal terms is often referred to as the “black letter of the law.”
The Interpretive level is what it means to our life under the surface, below the obvious.
The Applied level is more of a philosophical or higher level of what the story’s message is for humanity.
I like to think of this as also akin to the parts of our self, or even of our soul, breaking it down into three levels as well, to gain greater understanding of ourselves and our stories. There are so many ways to look at it, and I like this one because it is simple, easier to gain understanding and can be used to look at so many different things about ourselves.
The first part is our Middle Self, which would be our personality self, or as Sigmund Freud would refer to it, our Ego. This is akin to the Literal level of story analysis from the English class.
The second level is our Lower Self. This is akin to the Interpretive level of story analysis, and in Freudian terms, it is our Id. You might also call it our subconscious self. This is what is below the surface of the story and the intuitive part of ourselves.
On the third level is our Higher Self or super-conscious self or divine self. This is akin to the Applied level of story analysis, seeking to look at deeper and applied meanings for humanity, and also from a Freudian standpoint akin the Super Ego, which is that higher level of consciousness. (As you can tell, I also have enjoyed my psychology classes through the years!)
Stories have the power to bring understanding. Stories also have the power to shape our life and shape us as a living being. They have the power of creation. We all have the power of creation, to create our lives, shape our life. Stories are a vehicle of creation.
Every day we tell stories. We define and shape our lives through the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell others. Just like we all have our own truth, yet there are many truths. We have our own truth and our own story. Others have their truth and their story, and it may be different than ours. They may have a different story of us or about us as well.
But the key is to find and listen to your own story. And then rewrite what you want to change and what you want to create.
To do this in the best way, we must be aware from the perspective of our higher self of what our story is, what our truth is. Then we can determine if our current story is in keeping with our true will or our truth from that higher perspective…and if we choose to keep our story or rewrite our story.
To make this shift or make changes in our lives to align with our true self, we can use the power of story. We can write and rewrite our own stories. We can do this mentally, through affirmations or literally through writing a new story on a situation or about our life, thereby integrating it into our heart, body and soul – writing our story and our destiny, creating our future.
Many cultures use the power of story, and of course, we all use it every day. Tribal cultures in general, and cultures/societies such as the Toltecs and the Druids, handed down unwritten stories as a way to pass their cultural heritage and spiritual teachings down to new generations. As one example, in Toltec teachings by don Miguel Ruiz, author of the popular The Four Agreements among other books, he talks about the Dream of the World. The dream is the story that each of us is telling in creating our own Dream of the World.
I participated in a don Miguel Ruiz live online Course in Mastery where he talked about story. To paraphrase his words, here were some of his messages on the power of story:
We are programmed to be what we are from the moment of our conception, but every individual is unique and perfect just the way we are. Imperfection is in our mind because we do not understand our own perfection. We are programmed to create a whole story. But only we can change our story. We all create the story of our lives. We can shift our story and create a paradise for ourselves. You are not responsible for the creation of anybody else or the story of anybody else. They are responsible for their own creation and story, not you.
I would also add that the stories of others or their Dream of the World does not define or create or program us or our story. That is unless you allow it and are not actively writing your own story. You can create your own life, by creating and writing your own story. Story has the power of transformation.
I wrote an example of the power of story under my blog post The Power of Story – The Story of Jessie, so check that out for an illustration to help inspire you to write your own story of transformation!