Learning to Recognize and Understand Your Life Story and Identity

 We’re always the ones Creating ourselves and our Life Experience by the Story we begin telling about things

Our mind exists as a paradigm that forms a unified expression as a personal reality through a natural form of storytelling. As humans, we’re always in the process of telling a life story by how we talk about our past, impacting events of our life, our perceptions of other people, how we reflect on things, our reactions, and various underlying motives and personal agendas as behavioral dynamics that we’re naturally prone to and readily engage in. We’re always revealing our character by how we talk about things. The voice(s) in our head as our thoughts, are always talking to us about things. They’re explaining, describing, judging, making fun of, ridiculing, criticizing, complaining, correcting, or just rambling on about nothing in particular. We have the same type of thoughts over and over throughout our lifetime, and while the context of our thoughts may change as our outer circumstances change, the attitude, perspective, and theme of our thoughts remain consistent and cohesive. We may use different outer elements to tell the story, but it’s the same type of story. No matter what our outer circumstances or situation, we form our perception and interpretation of it as the means for experiencing it through the role we play and our own story about it.

As we go through life, we develop a certain personality and character that forms the basis of our experiences, out of which we develop our identity. Who we are in any relationship or situation, determines the role we play and how we interact to reshape everything in order to continue telling our story about things. Our story, as a cohesive outer reality is based on, or comes as the expression of our mental paradigm. Our model of the world (minds structure) has a self-organizing formative mechanism inherent in it that transforms the outer reality to match the inner reality. Our minds energetic structure is the culmination and integration of all our experiences, what we’ve been taught, beliefs, values, morals, preferences, disposition, temperament, emotional states, attitude, and so on. All of these combine to form a singular reality that expresses all of them in a congruent and harmonious fashion. Our paradigm, as a dynamic living pattern forms into a kind of genre and theme, which demonstrates our vibratory frequency or energetic essence.

The best way to recognize your own story, is to learn how to move out of the experience of your story as being fully associated with it, or in it, and step into an objective perspective that’s dissociated, and simply observe it, while relinquishing all need to judge it or justify it, and instead simply witness it as if watching it play out on a movie screen in your mind. Move out of the position of being in the story as the main star or character, and see yourself as playing a role in a greater story in which you’re simply one of the characters. Always resist the tendency to explain why you feel the way you do or justify your right to be that way, and simply watch it from an unbiased perspective and a neutral attitude. As you talk and are telling someone about you (your past, or something someone did to you, what you’ve been through, etc.), after you tell them, simply stop and reflect for a moment and listen to what you said as if you were the other person. Then ask yourself, what does this mean about me? Who do I become because of this story?

This practice will give you insight into parts of your nature that you’re normally not fully aware of. It’ll help you to begin gaining realization around your own issues and tendencies. It’ll help you recognize how you were conditioned by your upbringing, whether you adopted the same patterns being acted out in your family dynamic, or formed patterns that came from rebelling against them and trying to be the opposite of them. In order to work consciously and intentionally with anything, we have to become aware of what’s really happening, and how we are always the ones creating our self and our life experiences by what we tell ourselves about it that gives it meaning, and we have to be willing to give up our story in order to train ourselves to begin telling a new one. By telling a new story we’ll systematically transform our character and identity. By changing our story, we take creative control of our self and our life, and use our will to reshape our mind and form a new pattern (change our vibration), and learn to express in creative new ways.

 Dr. Linda Gadbois

Transpersonal Psychologist, Mind-Body Medicine Consultant, and Spiritual Teacher