I’ve been writing a lot about the power of storytelling to change lives for my book. It’s given me the chance to reflect that when I started, I knew little about why I was researching this topic. Now I know there were two main reasons – one was interviewing other people about their very difficult lives helped me get out of a very limited view of my life. It expanded my horizons. The second reason is that I really enjoyed the process of face-to-face exchange with everything it can teach us.
I was telling myself my life story repeatedly in the privacy of my own mind. Due to a traumatic experience, I was like a stuck record, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, returning again and again to the same old same old. I needed to get out of that groove, so I started by being curious about other people’s perspectives. Telling your personal narrative isn’t really about ‘the product’ or the ‘story’ as though it is an object of perfection, something fixed. We all secretly think our lives need to become perfect before we can tell our stories. No, personal narrative is about how we are and where we are right now, with all our imperfections – and we can only find out how it lands with others if we are prepared to share it in a safe supportive environment.
Storytelling is like yoga for the mind. We need to get curious about what’s possible for us. For instance, each time we get ‘onto the mat’ for a yoga session we find out something different within our body – something we were not aware of beforehand. When we change our position in yoga, we change our viewpoint (for instance when doing a headstand we might see that there’s a furry friend hiding under the sofa!). It’s the same when we find the story metaphor that is apt for us at that particular moment in our life. For me, it was discovering that I am happiest when I am a translator – between one language and another as in the Hermes story.
The moment when we discover our unique contribution in life can be transformative. Then things that seemed weighty and repetitious start to get lighter and less overwhelming. As my yoga teacher reminds me, it’s about the journey and finding the time and the space to let the light in. For instance, we could find we are telling someone else’s story to ourselves more than our own. When we start to tell our own story by becoming more visible in our own lives, we don’t need to compare ourselves with others. When I started working with a life coach and told my story, I experienced a complete bodily shift.
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