Unsticking the Narrative

It has been a long time since I last wrote and much has gone on. One key reason for my silence was that I needed to disengage myself from the thought process I had grown accustomed to. I began to realise how attached I was to my thoughts. They were directing my experience of living. Instead of just experiencing things, the instant I began experiencing, I realised that I began narrating.

I was tuning in more and more to the voice that was explaining what I was living and I was enjoying it. It was as though I had to sculpt everything into words in order to comprehend it and behind that there was a desire to put it out. There was much ego in it too, for in truth, I liked what I was preparing to impart. I was rehearsing through my life, but it was becoming performance.

I could sense myself growing frustrated and I knew that I was being nudged more and more to let go: to let go of the thinking. That was hard. “I think therefore I am,” it is a habitual relationship to self.

I believe we have a tendency to narrate, to create stories around our lives. Events unfold and we do not live them in fragments, as a moment-by-moment experience. We do not often allow each moment to unfurl and expand. We have an experience and we tend to rope it together with other experiences we believe we have lived, using as a gel the narrative we have created about our lives.

But this can be stifling, because our narratives are linked to our beliefs, they speak more to our perspective than to a stand apart truth. By fitting each moment into the narrative, we close the possibilities it could offer, if we were only able to keep the space open. The minute we fit it in, we have defined it and shut down alternate options.

It is really a shift in perspective. Instead of living and putting an established frame upon what is being lived, it is to try to wait in the space of the experience. Allow for the moment to naturally expand, to see what it draws to you rather than what you stamp on it.

It is like the dreamer who on waking tries to draw all recollected dream images into one storyline. It has happened to me often, when on writing my dreams, I notice a tendency to pull a fragment scene into another dream to have it make sense. But in letting it stand alone, as a moment in itself with all its infinite richness, can open up a greater potential for self realization. For the story, though it may delight, is likely to be something that I have already heard and spoken before.