You Are Not Your Story

What is your story about yourself? Your name, your job, your history, the highs and lows of your life, the roles you play, what you enjoy doing, what kinds of trouble you got into as a little kid…

Go ahead and tell yourself the story about you.

[Pause for storytime.]

Now notice that everything that was said is simply thought arising Now. It’s thought that has been identified with as part of some sort of a “me.” It’s “my” story. Yet the story is not who you are. It’s just a collection of thoughts that exist within awareness.

Why Do We Tell Our Stories?

Our stories are told because we have a yearning that by telling them, we’ll get what we’re looking for.

• We get to feel right and justified.
• We enjoy hearing ourselves speak.
• We enjoy the feeling of existence that, without incessant thought, the mind fears it would cease to exist.
• We have the hope that if we can just fix the story and make the necessary changes, we’ll get what we want.
• We feel safer because although we can’t control reality, we can control our mental version of reality, giving us the apparent feeling of control where we really have none.

It’s a game that can be played for lifetime after lifetime, and indeed it has been.

Stories can certainly be entertaining. They can be full of excitement or full of horror, encompassing the entire emotional spectrum, yet they are not the Truth of who and what we are. They are true in the limited sense that they describe our perception of experiences, but they are not true as the final Truth of our being.

Who we are is everpresent, eternal, and unchanging. We are the space in which the story arises.

The essence of your being can never be contained in thoughts or in words. If you dropped your story altogether, who would you be? What remains without the thoughts about “my story?”

Dropping Your Story

As long as you are telling your story, you can not experience the Truth. When you are experiencing the Truth, you can not continue telling your story.

It’s possible to see that a story is just a story and to stop following it as if it was something real. Our stories, however long we’ve been telling them and however many people have been telling them throughout our cultural history, they’re still just stories.

The key here is to simply stop following the story and stop feeding it with attention. This doesn’t mean to suppress or push against the story, to play the role of a “spiritual seeker” who has gotten rid of the story. Simply stop. Stop trying. Stop pushing. Withdraw awareness from the story naturally and find what’s left. What is here, now?

Can Presence ever be a story? Can Presence ever be a thought?