Are Your “Stories” True?

How many stories are you telling yourself that feel yucky? The Angels and I are inviting you to play with this today, because many of those bad-feeling stories are not true!

What Do We Mean By “Story”?

When we use the word story in this context, the Angels and I are talking about the meaning you’ve attached to a particular event … or perhaps to a person, a group of people or a thing.

Creating a story isn’t wrong or bad. In fact, humans are story-making machines. And it turns out there’s a very good reason for that: Humans are built for self-preservation.

For example, let’s say you touched a particular plant like poison ivy, and you got a terrible, itchy rash. Well, clearly it’s valuable to attach meaning to that event. The meaning might be: That plant hurt me, so I don’t want to ever touch it again.

Likewise, if you ate a particular kind of berry and got sick from it, it would be valuable to attach meaning to that event, so you’d remember not to eat that berry in the future.

Are All Stories Helpful?

The stories above serve an obvious purpose. They’re helpful in navigating the world around us.

However, most of the stories we tell ourselves are not so helpful.

Maybe somebody said a mean thing to you when you were a child — like “your nose is too big” or “you’re dumb.”

It’s quite likely that you were able to brush off a lot of those comments when you were a kid. But … there might be one experience that sticks out in your memory because you attached meaning and significance to that event, and you created a story around it.

As a personal example, the Angels are nudging me to share a story I still have about a high school yearbook picture. I was a senior in high school before the days of digital cameras and personal computers. All of the seniors had to go to a photographer’s studio and pose for yearbook pictures. Then we each received a package of proofs, and we went back to the studio to tell them which images we wanted to get prints of and which image we wanted to appear in the yearbook.

Months later, when we all got our yearbooks, I was shocked to see that the absolute worst photo of me appeared in the yearbook. Clearly, that was not the photo I had selected.

And that photo didn’t just appear in the yearbook. At every high school reunion, that awful picture of me appeared on my name badge.

For all these years, I have been telling myself the story that the girl who worked at the photography studio didn’t like me, and she purposely chose the worst photo to spite me. Even now, I can feel that story creating turbulence in my system.

Is It True?

The Angels are asking me to gently wonder if that story is true.

And … I have to admit: I have no idea if the girl at the photography studio did it intentionally.

What I do know, for sure, is that telling myself this story feels yucky. 

So, the Angels are encouraging me to consider other possibilities. For instance: What if she just wrote down the wrong number for the yearbook image? What if she was mildly dyslexic? What if this was nothing more than an accident?

Just entertaining these other possibilities feels so … much … lighter!

Letting Go of Stories

The Angels want you to know: You can do this, too. You have the power to release all of your yucky-feeling stories … in this very easy way.

And … you don’t even have to actively do the process. You can simply ask the Angels to dissolve not-helpful stories for you.

Letting go of these stories is SO beneficial. It removes a lot of turbulence from our systems, because some of these stories have been actively running in the background. They’ve been running below the level of conscious awareness, creating a sort of white-noise hum of discomfort, or disappointment, or shame, or not-good-enough.

Releasing these stories dissolves that background noise.

Plus, those old stories act as “triggers” from the past, which can get pinged and reactivated when something with a similar flavor happens in the present moment.

So, with your permission, the Angels and I will begin dissolving not-helpful stories from your system.

And, if it would be helpful for you to recognize and actively play with a story as part of the journey, the Angels will gently bring it to your attention, so you can use this easy process to change, and thereby release, that old story.

I am finding that releasing old stories frees up quite a bit of energy … energy that we can use for the things that really matter to us.

(with appreciation for the magical book photo by Theo Crazzolara on Unsplash)