Why should we write our stories? Because in the words of Baba Ram Dass  

“Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story instead of the actor in it.”

For now we are watching the action from above, or from the side, or from the wings. We have some distance. We are an observer. Everyone in the story, including ourselves, is now a character. This is taking our lives to another level.

Story-Me means “make-it-into-a-story.” It means taking an episode from your life, something memorable because of the emotions attached to it, and creating a story around it, a narrative that doesn’t part with the facts of the situation, but one in which you are the observer, the witness to  what is happening. This retelling is like being “in it but not of it.” Not this time around. This time around you can see it all playing out in hindsight. This time you are wiser. You know the outcome already, but you are re-creating it for us, your listeners.

When you Story-Me*, you are taking your experience to a different level. If the experience was a painful one, there can be healing through writing it down. Through bringing the events up again we can hold them in the light. We can step back, change the view in the viewfinder. Re-evaluate. Perhaps change our perception.

And then there is the sharing part. Reading a story aloud opens up the throat chakra.

In the process of creating story, we are outside, looking in. We begin to see ourselves as a “character” in our own lives. Why is this good? Because when we are able to observe ourselves, we are no longer at the mercy of our thoughts and feelings. We still have thoughts and we still have feelings, but now we are observing ourselves as we have them. Journaling does this for us as well, albeit in a private way. Journaling doesn’t necessarily open up the throat chakra or take us to another place. But it does make us more self-aware.

When you are able to re-create your life or part of your life as a story, your life starts to turn into an art-form. Maybe you start to see the plot, or the theme. Or what it has been so far.

As we move into the accelerated evolutionary pathway, the telling of our stories has never been more popular. “This flowering of story-telling is certainly no accident,” says Daniel Pink.

My own understanding has grown immeasurably since I began seeing myself in different stages of development. I’ve had to practice self-forgiveness when I realized how I was denigrating my younger self for not being more aware. There were so many hidden messages I had been giving myself that didn’t even come out until I began putting them on paper.

The more we can story our past experiences, the more we will be able to create the story of our future. Perhaps it will then be a story of the soul. Perhaps we will become more conscious of our soul lessons. If nothing else, writing out our stories brings us to a new level of awareness and understanding.

The whole point is to go deeper into our experience, remembering who we were in order to know who we are.

*Story-Me is an expression I came up with when I was fantasizing how wonderful it would be if I could listen to a person’s story, (meaning a sad, bitter or tragic one) and then reinterpret it for them – much the same way as I reinterpreted my own for myself in The Nancy Who Drew. Which is to say I took the experience of betrayal and punched so many holes in it – until the Light of the Soul came pouring through – and lit up my life!