When Was the Last Time You Told Your Story?

Image Credit: Jens Lelie @madebyjens

Dear Friends,

Oh, how I've missed writing… I've missed writing to you.

I let busyness get in the way. Then more busyness. Then a different kind of busyness. Until the other day, when I opened Mark Nepo's The Book of Awakening and read this, from September 15th:

"Questions Put to the Sick - III
When was the last time you told your story? – Questions put to the sick by a Native American Medicine Man

"Stories are like little time capsules. They carry pieces of truth and meaning over time. Whether it is a myth from 4,000 years ago or your own untold story from childhood, the meaning waits like a dry ration; only by the next telling does it enlarge and soften to become edible. It is the sweat and tears of the telling that bring the meaning out of its sleep as if no time has passed. It is the telling that heals.

"Often we repeat stories, not because we are forgetful or indulgent, but because there is too much meaning to digest in one expression. So we keep sharing the story that presses on our heart until we understand it all. … each telling of her sudden eyes and her sudden leaving was a stitch that healed the wound in my heart.

"The truth is that though we think we know what we are about to say, the story tells us and saves us, in the same mysterious way that breathing is always the same but different."

I was reminded how important our stories are, yours and mine. Stories help us find meaning where there once seemed to be none. And they help us heal in the telling, just as Nepo describes it, each retelling a stitch closing the wound.

How we hold our stories, how we tell them, sends our energy in that same direction. Held tightly, a story can keep us small. Told with care, it can set us free.

I think of the stories we repeat most, the ones that "press on our heart," as Nepo says. We don't tell them because we're stuck. We tell them because there's more meaning inside them than one telling can hold. Each version we speak or write pulls a little more truth to the surface, softens something that was once too hard to swallow. It brings us, and our stories, out of the shadows and into the light, where we can hold our experiences with love and compassion. And hold each other's stories that same way.

And maybe that's the invitation in all of this: not to get the story "right" once and be done with it, rather, to return to it gently, when returning feels needed. To let each telling change us a little. The story we carry from childhood, the one about the ending we didn't choose, the one about who we thought we had to be, none of these are fixed. They're alive. They shift shape every time we let them breathe, and something in us shifts with them.

Beneath every story we've told ourselves is the truer, quieter one of who we truly are, the one that was there before the wound, before the conditioning covered it over, before we started feeling like we had to explain or prove ourselves. 

So today, my question to you is Nepo's question: when was the last time you told your story? Not the polished version. The real one. The one still asking to be seen and understood.

With love and care,

Jennifer

What I'm Tuning Into

I Will Always Love You - Dolly Parton and Brandie Carlile - beautiful!

The Divine Matrix by Gregg Braden - thought provoking!

The Power of Real Optimism by Deepika Chopra PsyD - empowering!