What Story Do YOU Tell?

25th October 2014

Your ancestral hunter-gatherer is a natural storyteller!

As hunter-gatherer, your physical senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch and perhaps even your sixth sense would have been highly attuned to stimuli and changes in your external environment because your very survival depended on it.

For example, if a noticeable hush overcame the jungle it would send up a red flag and your senses would be on high alert for the signs and sounds of a predator close by. Your mind would have gone to work surmising whether that predator was a lion or some equally threatening wilder beast, its whereabouts in relation to you, your fellow tribesmen and the vulnerable ones back at camp. You would have simultaneously begun thinking of how to safeguard yourself and your loved ones, and whether scaring the predator away or taking him down would be best approach.

In other words, the audible hush in the jungle would have triggered several story-lines to start running through your instinctive mind, all of which were intimately wired into your being to keep you and your tribe safe.

Your instinctive nature as a storyteller and interpreter is still with you – the only difference now is that our civilisation has evolved such that, for the most part, the hunter-gatherer archetype is one that has lost its relevance to our modern society.

Our Primal Instincts, Today

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It is really interesting to notice precisely how this fundamental ‘storytelling’ aspect that originally enabled us to survive as a species still get triggered in response to everyday situations today. The flight-or-fight response of the amygdala is still a part of our internal wiring, and is activated in situations we perceive at a primal level to be a ‘threat’ to our sense of security.

A critical point that often gets overlooked however, is that our understanding and awareness of ourselves has evolved exponentially since those hunter-gatherer times, and with them, the factors that we base our sense of ‘security’ and safety on have also evolved. Our collective attention has naturally and significantly shifted away from physical survival to a comparatively more sophisticated need for spiritual self-affinity, self-actualisation and self-love.

Despite our evolution, the primal hunter-gatherer instinct to instantaneously piece a story together based on external cues does not and cannot help us meet our higher emotional and spiritual needs.

So that brings us to the question…

What Story Do YOU Tell?

What story do you tell yourself when someone doesn’t respond to your offer of love or friendship, a precious piece of your heart and soul?

Do you grieve the loss and move on? Or does it cause you to feel dejected, rejected, invalidated and unseen and to make up – and believe – a story about all the reasons why you aren’t loveable or deserving of being acknowledged, appreciated and seen?

What story do you tell yourself when you stand in your brilliance, sacredness and truth and those around you perceive you (and react) from a place of their own spiritual ‘stuckness’ or pain?

Do you stand strong in your convictions? Or do you make up – and believe – stories about not being good enough or not having anything worthwhile to share with the world?

What story do you tell yourself when you’ve invested in your education, career and self-care but have been unable create a life that is happy, fulfilling and honours your natural rhythm, inner knowing and pace?

Do you focus on the journey? Do you make up – and believe – a story about unhappiness, suffering and lack being your unfortunate, unshakeable lot?

Dissolving the Energetic Story

You can see from these examples that our natural storytelling abilities are very much at work, not only helping us shape our day-to-day experiences but flavouring the experiences we can expect in the future as well.

And, if you go just a bit deeper with this understanding, you will notice that the underlying messages in the stories you tell are often variations of spiritual themes that have been working their way into your life for some time – the ones that keep us out of alignment with our real self and stuck in a place of perceived limitation.

To liberate ourselves from that particularly limiting story we tell ourselves, we must understand that the relationships and experiences that ‘define’ you right now (for want of a better word) are all a reflection of our own recurring spiritual themes. For example, if you are unconsciously dealing with feelings of self validation, your outer relationships and experiences are likely peppering you with varying degrees of invalidation. This is simply a reflection of the universal intelligence that supports your fundamental human nature to flourish, grow and heal.

The point at which you start making up and believing stories about why you do not deserve to be validated however, is the point at which the metaphoric fog lowers onto your consciousness causing a spiritual blindness to your real self – a painful disconnection from the truth about who you really are as a magnificent, capable, intuitive Spirit, in the flow.

Now what if, in each moment, your experiences are being cleverly engineered by your higher consciousness so you can heal and learn from the spiritual information that becomes accessible once you’ve ‘mastered’ your current lesson, so to speak? There is immense value in considering this, as a possible reason particular experiences and situations make their way into your consciousness and life. Not only is there a degree of objectivity, reprieve and neutrality to be had, to truly see and grasp this dynamic at work enables you to keep your innate storyteller and its vivid imagination in check.

To take this notion one step further, the less than ideal experiences you have often arise and speak to a mutable, transient version of you that is ungrounded for the very reason that you are mid-way through the process of trying to integrate your spiritual information and self-understanding around a particular life theme. By consciously selecting and agreeing to engage only the experiences and opportunities that speak to your soul each day ie. by harnessing your intuition, you begin to fall out of vibrational affinity with a whole spectrum of these that do not honour who you are, your truth.

Once you integrate this into your perspective on life, you can begin to identify and dissolve the energetic stories that keep you defined, and which stand between you and true spiritual, physical, emotional and energetic freedom. You begin a natural process of refining and up-levelling the quality of your day to day experience of life. Your intuition is the ‘key’.

It is important to notice that self-awareness and intuition are two sides of the same coin. Your self-awareness/intuition is your gauge of the relationships and kinds of experiences that consistently honour, validate and support the person you really want to become.

It will not lead you astray.

Your intuition – not your storyteller – is your internal compass whose only purpose is to get you to a place where you are surrounded by precisely the people, encounters and events that want and need to access your magic by speaking directly to your soul.

Previous articles by Caroline:

About the author:

Caroline wants to live in a world where it’s easy for others to connect with their innermost desires and experience the exhilaration that comes when they find their groove. An Intuitive Life Coach, Caroline is the creator and facilitator of Everyday Alchemy: Intuition at Work and Play, a system of intuitive self-healing programs, thoughtfully designed to help you reveal your own essential energetic, intuitive and creative nature, and effect positive, meaningful life change.

You can experience Caroline’s work by joining the Everyday Alchemy community, a platform designed to give you greater self-understanding and alignment with your inner knowing, spiritual purpose and needs. In this confidential and sacred space you are invited via online teleconference each month not only to show up as your most authentic self but to participate in various combinations of group discussion, journaling exercises, guided meditations, intuitive coaching and energy-based self-healing techniques.

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