One of the four questions that Native Americans ask when somebody is sick is, “When last did you tell your story?” There’s this recognition that somehow when we don’t tell our story, when we suppress who we are, that something goes wrong inside of us. It’s almost like the story that we tell about ourself is aligned with the energetics of who we are in this world. We actually cannot live into our true vitality and our true power when we are suppressing the truth of who we are.
What happens when we tell our story is that we are forced to look at our lives with compassion. We cannot write about ourselves unless we come to that with self-compassion. If we write about ourselves with judgment and self-criticism, what happens is that we become what I call an unreliable narrator. Nobody is interested in reading about our self-contempt and our vitriol, and how much we despise ourselves. That is not a story that is in service to other people.
When we write from I, “I saw this. I experienced that,” and we look back on what other people did to us, we become the agents of that story. We are no longer victims of that story. We become the author of that story. The minute we author our own stories, we break free of those shackles, of being a victim, and we step into our true power and we say, “This is my story and here I am to tell it.”
When we tell our story, it’s always a story of survival, and there is nothing more inspiring and healing than saying, “I went through some shit, but look, I survived.”
In writing our story, we truly get to become owners of our story. We stop being victims of our lives, because when you write your own story, you are saying, “I saw, I experienced, I suffered,” and when we do that, we take ownership, we become agents in our own story, even if other people did things to us, we become the authors of that story, and we tell the story from our point of view.
My new book, ‘Your Story: How to write it so that others will want to read it, teaches you how to write your story so that you can share the insights from your life with others.Get more inspiration and enjoy other teaching videos on my site: http://joannefedler.com/your-story/