Tell Me That Story a Different Way

Reflections~I saw it this way. by Janice Brown

Prior to today, I didn’t know that I could rewrite my past by being who I am. I am a person who has struggled with worth in my past, and the clarity of all these understandings has come through more fully as I have understood myself in purpose. 

For simplicity's sake, my purpose, if I were to say I had one, is problem solver, a natural dilemma resolver. And this is what I do when I look at a problem from many solutions; I realize a potential that has not yet been held and cast a new light on an old story. And old stories are your prison guard. 

This will be the first thing you notice about yourself when you start working with me. I’ll be the one who picks up and says, ‘Why don’t you tell me that story a different way? Help me to see it from another perspective.’ 

And once you start doing that, you’ll find there are certain aspects of your story that don’t hold much water anymore. And when you see that, you’ll find there’s an opportunity for a new lease on life. It’s why we hurt so badly—simply because we haven’t learned to turn it around. It’s always going to be there—the opportunity to pick it up and hold it in the same old pattern—but what if, just for today, you didn’t tell the story in the same old way?

What if, just for today, you said, ‘I’m going to lay that one down and try on a new version.’ And it’s not that the new version is necessarily accurate to the details of your own perception, but it might be that the wiring of your mind has held you in such a framework for so long that all you could see was red when there were some lovely shades of pink. 

Maybe you could see that that wasn’t a scowl on that face but a look of concern. Or perhaps that child didn’t deserve what happened; he simply didn’t understand what was happening. Oh, and here’s a tough one: what if the thing I was thinking at that time was actually irrelevant to the whole situation? Like, did I really know what was going on in someone else’s mind or only think I did? 

That’s how we are wired to believe in a certain direction, and I can tell you I’ve seen this for myself in some exquisitely painful ways. I’ve toppled giant buildings of my own worth in believing what I was seeing in other people’s minds before I was able to claw my way out of the rubble with a new and singular thought; maybe it wasn’t quite what it seemed. 

Maybe I simply told myself a story in a certain direction because it made me feel better about my own position. Maybe I chose those specific words because it was the only thing that could make a hard situation bearable at the time. And maybe, just for a moment, if I could soften my direct view, then maybe I could see something more come in through my peripheral view. 

And I’ll tell you, this seems like shits and giggles to some, but the true meaning of who you are will rewrite every misperception you’ve ever had about yourself and every other person. 

I can tell you I’ve lifted people off the pike that I have put there my very self. And that was some hard reckoning to do in my own mind. But my heart could just not bear it to see the thing I had done to another in the way I had positioned them in my mind any longer. It’s not just letting them off the hook. It’s dissolving the reason you think they had to be there in the first place. 

The reason holds water only because you look at it in a certain direction. You’ve done this to yourself. Anchored yourself into a reality and perspective that has not allowed you to move forward in any real capacity. And I don’t just mean going to the grocery store. I mean going out into the world because you are no longer afraid of what might be waiting for you around the corner. 

This is the ultimate boo-geyman story. 

If I do this, he’ll do that. If I do this, she’ll say that. If I do anything you want to put into this blank void of space, it exists in potential, but it only seems the way you think it is because you haven’t given the landscape the potential to evolve into something more. Something more powerful. Something more meaningful. Something more sacred. 

I’m sorry to say that this is casting the first stone. It’s you when you wake up in the morning and don’t give yourself a chance to have another experience because you get up and put on the same old body of armour suit. What if you put on a flexible catsuit for a day or two? How many more vistas would you venture through if you had a little flexibility in perspective? I’m willing to bet, and this is a little risqué and irrelevant some would say, that if you were willing to just say 'may be’ instead of maybe, that the story could change an awful lot more in your own favour. 

It’s a fool's game to cast a life in stone; it’s only you that gets to live that way, not anybody else. And so once in a while, give yourself a break and hear what you’re actually saying when you say it. 

Is that true, or have I just framed it into a position of certainty? It can be another way; you just need to give it some time and some space to lighten its load. It’s almost as if it didn’t really happen this way at all. I’m willing to say that there’s a lot more innocence in your life than you’ve been allowing yourself or anyone else to experience. 

Just for today, try to soften a syllable in each sentence and see what happens to the tone of your experience. We can all do this. There is someone we are holding in uncertainty or disregard that never even knew they tripped over the carpet in the furrows of your mind before. They are living a happy, free life while you are boiling them in oil in the background. And do you know who that is hurting? You. 

You, in the way you don’t allow someone in that could be a friend. You, in the way you are isolating yourself from experience in keeping an isolated viewpoint. 

I’ll give you a simple story that’s kind of an old-timer perspective that a lot of people hold when change is happening in an established town or community. New neighborhoods get built, and in a way it ruffles all the feathers in the hen house. It’s not like it was; it certainly isn’t the way I’d prefer to live; it’s a lack of good planning; it’s meeting the needs of a few over the needs of the whole; it’s ass-backward thinking. It’s struggling to see that it’s a new opportunity or that it’s an evolution or growth. 

A seed is a pretty bland thing compared to a flower, but if you don’t plant the seed, how will the flower arrive? Maybe someone is seeing that raw plot of land as the very hope they never dreamed they could have, and you’ve shattered it on the shoreline before they could even get a purchase on the view of their very heart’s desire. 

What a shambles of distortion to think that the only thing you see is the only thing that could be. What about where the wild things grow? They don’t need taming. They need courage and charisma to bust out of their very own field and make a new way forward. Or where the simplest thought becomes a gentle perch for a new rendition of an old love song. It’s not that it wasn’t a wonderful song the way it was sung before; it’s that a new instrument, a new thought, makes the song bend in a new way with a slightly different flavour. 

And oh, could you imagine if we could just set a new perspective in a society’s eye? Or a government’s? These are things that happen over time with the awareness of a collective coming into a softer viewpoint. And the viewpoint doesn’t have to be pitted together against wrong. It just has to be open to a new and slightly less conformed viewpoint. Because that’s what you have done: conformed a viewpoint into a frame of mind that only holds water where all the same rules of observation apply. 

When you change the viewpoint even one iota, you have to redefine the rule book because all of a sudden that little fusspot of a kid becomes the light of your life. And do you know why that is? Because you gave it a chance to see through their eyes that something in their world was unbearably uncomfortable for them. 

We have to be just a little less rigid, not because we need the world to go all willy-nilly but because we need the world to take a breath of fresh air. To get the cobwebs out of the corners. And that’s going to make things different. Make things lighter and easier—much easier than I could imagine it could ever be. 

Can you imagine that? I don’t think so. Because it’s what I imagine that made the difference in my life. And it’s what you imagine that made the difference in yours. But here’s the thing... it IS what you imagined and then solidified and then tended to all these years with a single frame of reference in your very own mind. 

We all deserve a chance to just set the mindset down once in a while and pull in some new bearings, and when you do, you just might find that light on the horizon is a beautiful sunrise instead of the world burning down. 

And I’ll tell you the very tiniest of hints that has the mightiest of powers; even if you can’t quite get yourself to see the story quite differently, if you could just lighten the emotion that you are applying to it today, it just might be a lighter load to carry. 

Things like taking offence, or indignation, or being appalled, or overwhelmed with the stupidity, or breaking apart inside from the magnitude of the hurt, can all keep a bygone moment alive and unwell in our Hearts and Minds. 

Give the thought a little liberty and allow it to be an altercation instead of a battlefield, a bad moment instead of a bad person, a shared moment of annihilation won’t get you anywhere; it will keep you locked inside your own mind forever trying to decide if the next thing out there is coming at you from the same direction. 

Well, let me tell you that if you are only ever looking from one direction, the only thing you will ever see, can ever see is the thing that moves the same way. 

Make sense? 

Breathe, soften, relax, and release. 

I saw it this way.

~ A Girl

I’ve been working with the Tao as long as I’ve lived; and so have you. Here’s what that means to me, I’m a problem solver and I use the Tao as a framework for my discussion. In my writing and my work, I share with you how I use it, and you can decide if that’s helpful for you or not.

Janice writes from the Heart in the moment. She writes specifically from her point of view. You may not have seen it this way before, but that's the whole point—to turn it around and look at it another way.