What’s Your Story

One of the things I appreciate about having a love for reading is that it gives me understanding of life at a much deeper level than if I had not ever learned the joy of reading. And the other joy I have is to be able to present what I read in such a way that you, the reader of my short excerpts, can perhaps gain a bit of insight into your journey and in some way find freedom from your limiting thoughts and beliefs. A beautiful insight I had today was found in a book called “The Mind-Body Code”, which was a gift from a clinical psychologist friend of mine. If you are not familiar with the concept behind my program, “The I AM Project”, it is in short, a method of removing our limiting beliefs rooted in our past (feelings of unworthiness, shame, betrayal, etc) and replacing them with what is called “exalted emotions” such as “love, acceptance, generosity, abundance”. The process starts with acknowledging the evidence of our challenges, often traumatic past, but also takes the time to also acknowledge the acts of kindness, love, acceptance, that are also a part of our history, though often not as easily remembered. Once we have taken the time to reveal the positives of our history (and not surprisingly, we often fight to bring the evidence of these beautiful memories to light), we can start to rebuild our identity on a positive foundation.

The example given in this book was about a woman who was being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, and she could not recall a single incident act of kindness from her past. She was sexually abused by her father since the age of five until she was fifteen where she ran away from home. While other children were coming home from school to a safe environment, she was trying to find ways to avoid her father. After a few weeks, this woman, with the help of her therapist, could remember an act of kindness from an older woman, who lived a few houses down from her, as she offered her fresh baked cookies and hot chocolate on a cold winter day. As the woman recalled the story, after the shedding of many tears, she realized that the act of kindness the woman showed to her occurred just before she had the courage to run away from home! The act of kindness reminded her of her worth!

What the story displays is that for us to “live past our stories” we must first feel “worthy of defying them”, and this requires the taking the time to find the evidence of our worth, of which there is ample proof if we are willing to invest the effort to seek it out. I think of people struggle with their health (unable to lose unhealthy weight for example) and what often holds them back is their lack of “self-worth” in defying their story of why they cannot achieve better health. We can find stories around money, relationships, spirituality, family, just about every part of our life can have a tragic story or a story of redemption, and often they both exist, it only matters on which one we remember and decide to tell day to day.

C. David Gilks Your Fellow Traveler