Your Courageous Life

(From last week’s Next Step workshop)

Last weekend, I got very scared about money. I started to cry. Then I started to heave as I was crying, shaking. I was really stuck in a Story about money and that Story went something like, “You’re supposed to have a set income, with a set paycheck, and you know exactly when every single thing is happening.” And then that Story quickly became, “What the hell did you leave behind steady paychecks for? It was so much better when you didn’t have to worry!”

Now here’s the thing: There’s plenty of money in the bank. There was no actual money problem that prompted the crying.

Stories don’t necessarily wait for the good old sh*t to hit the proverbial fan before they run like an endless, infinite loop.

To use another example: Back when Andy and I first started dating (almost five years ago! We have an anniversary coming up!) he was perfectly sweet and kind and wonderful. And I remember he invited me to go to a ball game, impromptu when some tickets became available, and I said yes, and then I learned that one of the people in the group going that evening was someone that he had once had a tiny crush on.

I called up a friend and began bawling. “He’s going to see me next to her, and realize that he really doesn’t want to be with me!” I wailed.

I mean, Andy hadn’t done anything. I was just totally caught up in Story. Money in the bank, awesome new relationship–yet, Story Story Story.

(P.S. It’s Belief & Story time over at The Courageous Year, so the subject of Stories in particular have been swirling about my head).

Sometimes my Stories are so conditioned that they passively influence my behavior, like walking around with an assumption that someone won’t like something, when in fact they could care less. Then I forget that I devoted all of that energy to an assumption until I clue myself in next time or when that moment of clarity hits. Other times my Stories hit me smack in the face–like when I’m suddenly crying or wailing (I’ve always liked Elizabeth Gilbert’s description of that kind of crying: “Double pumpin’ it”) and then it’s like “Throw me the life raft, boys, because it’s sink or swim time.”

Despite the embracing of courage now, the simple truth is that in my life’s trajectory I have had more experience with running Stories and staying stuck, or spending long periods of time in the ick feelings, because I was more invested in a Story that “This all sucks” than I was with Stories that serve me (“I choose if this sucks” or “I bet there’s something about this that doesn’t suck.”) It has only been in the past few years that I’ve pulled all of my mental inventory from the Doldrums Bank and started investing in Possibility IPO.

I realized that I have far more “bad” Stories about leaping, taking risks, than I do “good” ones (with “bad” being the ones that don’t serve me and the “good” ones being the Stories that lift me up, support my life vision, etc.) We live in a world where I think it tends to be kinda easy to get risk-averse!

Earlier this week, I made a decision to let go of something that had been been bothering me for awhile. I’d run about a million and one Stories about why it was not working, and it was exhausting to do. I’d had a great session with my Coach in which I realized that I’d been carrying a lot of Stories about how I had messed it up, had make-up work to do, needed to try harder, etc. And then I realized that I was also carrying a Story that one was not ever supposed to “give up” on other people or difficult situations or anything that caused conflict. Where did I get that idea? Sometimes it’s time to let things go (another Story, but one that serves me better and leaves out that whopping helping of guilt).

I was reminded that we work with what we have in this moment–anything else is judging what happened in the past or going into the future, which I don’t know anything about and can start to catastrophize if I’m in a fear-based place. I’d exercised a lot of options around this decision, including the all-important, “Don’t bother with it for awhile, think about something else, allow some space,” and none of them really seemed to shift things.

The funny thing is that I thought that letting go was going to be hard–this was my Story–and I assumed that I would feel grief, fear, loneliness, scarcity. Instead, what I noticed was an immediate sense of relief. And any time I didn’t go into any Stories, and just stuck with the moment and what I knew to be true on a purely objective level, I was able to stand behind my choice. Things felt expansive, like opening up. Whenever I moved away from that and into some Story about lack or fear I was back in an icky space, and whenever I stepped away from that, I was completely in support of myself as a fumbling, stumbling, mistake-making and all around fantastic, vibrant, courageous human being.

And in a series of moments, something opened up until I could feel myself having embraced fully some new Story around leaping: letting go and leaping opens up new space for something that is more of a match to come in.

What kind of Stories have you noticed yourself running about money, time, friendships, jobs, the economy, your parents, your relationships, your kids, people who eat X kind of food, people who wear X kinds of clothes? And, as Byron Katie says, “Who would you be without your Story?” Now that’s a powerful question!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 12:22 pm |