Who would you be without your story?

Today I found the response to my last blog post. The Work of Byron Katie was brought to me. I no longer believe that I find anything, things that I need to know are revealed to me.

I have been on a spiritual quest for just over a year now. In this past year I have had a voratious appetite for any and all things spiritual. This path of discovery has been amazing! I have read things like, The Secret, Eat Pray Love, A New Earth, Harmonic Wealth, Thresholds of the Mind, A Course in Miracles, each one more amazing than the next! I am now reading the Sedona Method Workbook. I came across an article about releasing, and so I gobbled it right up. It was in this article that The Work was shown to me.

At the end it noted some other refrences to check out for further reading the first one was The Sedona Method . The next was EFT, I am a major proponent of the Emotional Freedom Technique. And finally, one that I had not yet heard of in all of my travels so far - The Work by Byron Katie.

The Work consists of four main questions and the turn around. What struck me the most is the question: Who would you be without your story? It blew me away!

The questions sort of dive off of the priciple that my mother taught me when I was a child; if you are pointing at someone else that there are three fingers pointing back at you. It was her way of trying to teach me that what's out there in the world really begins with you. I have continued that lesson with works like A New Earth. The teaching of A New Earth is that the mind must always be right. It creates a filter that only picks up on what you are choosing to focus on. The mind is not to be trusted. Then who is? The observer. The witness. Your Higher Conciousness.

You are not your thoughts, you are that which watches your thoughts. That is who you are without your story! That is who you are meant to be on this planet. You are an expression of the divine. Black cannot experience itself without white, bad is only bad in relation to good. It is in this way that God could not experience itself without you!!! You are here to experience the god within you! And you can only do that when you divorce yourself from the story that you have been hiding behind and practicing every day of your life... until today. You can begin to change today because, you are now aware. A bit of consciousness has arisen in you. You are not reading this by accident. You drew this to yourself. So I ask you...

Who are you without your story?

It's called...."So What"

I went off to college with my story. My well rehearsed succinct little story about my life and my history. I had learned to tell it well, always dancing around the truth in such a way that I sounded discreet and stoic. The truth was that I wanted your pity and it was practiced and refined it to illicit just that.

"I came from the poor family with dysfunctional broken mom and abusive dad. They both told me that I would be great and would do great things. But they had absolutely no idea how or what, so nothing was ever specific, they were just saying that to make themselves feel better."

So off I went with my story. When I arrived at college and I started to get to know others, new friends and roommates, I learned that everyone else had a story too. I wasn't special because of my story, I was, as it turned out, more normal because of my story. As I was listening to a good friend of mine one day tell her story I thought to myself "Sounds familiar, I can't wait till she's finished to tell her all about how I understand because I've lived that too." Then the thought came "So what Laura! So what that you have a story too. This is not about one upping each other. Your story should never be used for that. It is not right to invalidate some one else's pain by cutting in with yours."

It was then that I stopped leading with my story. I stopped getting 'high' on the pity of others. It became about what I'd do with my story. The tone of the 'so what' changed. It was no longer a dismissal of my past, but a question of what comes next. It became the validation that my story did not end at unhappy childhood. I could choose the storyline. All I have to do is decide what the next line is.

I just read a blog entry by Kriss Carr about her spiritual journey and her struggles with that and it hit me... that is hat a story is for. It is not meant for pity and to perpetuate a life of suffering by reliving it daily. Your story is real and it continues daily. Your story should never be told as if it were already over. A story should always be true and honest and genuine, and be told for the purpose of uniting all in a common purpose of growth. And because we are all moving onward with our lives a story should always end with ellipses...