Your life story: life or death?
What character do you play in the story you tell yourself about life?
Last night I spent two and a half hours teaching my daughter how to parallel park.
She’s getting ready to take her driver’s license test and she wanted to be confident in her ability to parallel park.
The first few runs through the cones went pretty well.
The next few runs weren’t so good.
Then she got the hang of it again and made a dozen clean passes.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a cone jumped out at her and she ran over it.
Test failed, she thought.
I saw her body language change.
Confidence gave way to tentative fear.
She set her jaw.
Her lips pursed.
And she started messing up every pass.
No matter what she did, the car would end up crossways in the box, and she couldn’t figure out how to navigate backwards through the cones.
I told her to put the car in Park and we had a little chat.
“What are you feeling right now?”
Tears welled up in her eyes.
“I’m afraid” she confessed.
“What are you afraid of?” I probed.
Thinking for a bit, she replied “I’m afraid you’ll think I can’t do this.”
Thinking a bit more, she said “I’m afraid I won’t be ready for the test.”
“Then what?” I asked gently. “What would happen if you fail the test?”
“Then I’d have to take it again” she replied.
“Ok, you’d have to wait another week to get your drivers license. You’ve waited 16 years. Do you think you’d survive?”.
“Yes” she said softly.
“Take a few deep breaths. Bring yourself out of your head and into this moment right now.”
“Ok - now that you’re here, let’s just notice what’s happening in your body and your mind." I instructed her.
“You’re learning a new skill right now. If we were learning piano instead of learning parallel parking, and you hit a wrong note… how upset would you be?”
“Not very upset” she replied.
“Right, because you’re learning a new skill. You’re not an expert at it it. You can keep practicing. Everything is ok.”
“Do you want to know why you suddenly lost your ability to practice this new skill well?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you remember when you hit that cone a while back?”
“Yeah.”
“I saw your body language change when that happened. You started telling yourself a story about failure and about what I’m going to think about you. That story placed you into fear, didn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
More tears.
“When you started living in fear, it took you out of the present moment and you started living in your head, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“When you started telling yourself a fear story, your body responded to that fear story. Your body can’t tell the difference between being chased by a lion or the fear of failing your driving test. When you started giving energy to those thoughts, it activated your sympathetic nervous system. You went into ‘fight-or-flight’ mode. Your body started dumping cortisol and adrenaline into your bloodstream.”
“Guess what cortisol and adrenaline are good for.”
“Running away from lions?” she ventured.
“Correct.”
“Guess what they’re really bad for.”
“Practicing parallel parking?”
“Correct!”
I went on “cortisol and adrenaline are great for putting you into motion with your large muscle groups, but at the expense of fine motor control. Your body prioritizes blood flow to the large muscle groups of your legs and your trunk, and shuts down the finer, more precise muscle movements. The analytical and logical parts of your brain shut down. All that matters is dealing with this threat right now. Fight, or flee!”
“I saw that happen in your body. You literally lost the ability to make the car go where you want it to go.”
She nodded, knowingly.
“Let’s reframe the story” I gently coached her.
“Everything is as it should be. You and I are both doing exactly what we want to be doing right now. You’re learning a new skill. Neither one of us have anywhere else we need to be. We can take as long as we need to to practice this new skill. There is no stress about anything. Nothing is wrong.”
“Is there anything, right now in this moment, just you and I sitting in this car, that is not as it should be?”
“No” she replied.
“We both have everything we need, right now. Everything is ok. Yes?”
“Yes” she nodded.
“Ok. Now I want you to down regulate your nervous system with your breath. Deep, slow, mindful breathing activates your parasympathetic nervous system and helps your body metabolize the stress hormones so you can regain your presence and your fine motor skills.”
She breathed deeply and I saw her body settle down.
“Now we’re going to do some visualization exercises.”
With the car in park, with her eyes closed, I coached her to mentally move through the course, moving her hands on the steering wheel, moving her head to “look” at the cones in the mirror. Picture what she sees at each stage of the journey.
The strangeness and newness of the mental rehearsal combined with her deep breathing to take her mind off of the fear story, and bring her back.
She proceeded to drive through and made clean pass after clean pass.
She’s absolutely relentless in her drive and determination, so she kept practicing for a good hour after I thought she was good to go, and she made at least 100 clean passes through the cones.
Finally, at 9:30 PM, I called it a night and suggested we go get ice cream.
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Pause and take a snapshot of your life in your mind’s eye - right now.
SNAP.
Frame the entirety of your life - everything you have experienced in the past that has led you to this point and the totality of your life today: snap that picture in your mind and hold it for a second.
What’s the story you’re living in?
What is your character?
The hero?
The villain?
The guide?
The joker?
The king?
What’s the emotion you feel when you look at that picture?
Are you happy with your life?
Sad?
Disappointed?
Do you judge it good or bad?
The meaning we make of our life comes from the story that we tell ourselves about it.
The animating stories of your life are what give meaning to the facts of your life.
The facts of your life are what they are. How you feel about them comes from the story you tell yourself about them.
Do you have a growth mindset? Meaning that you are someone who can learn, grow, adapt to new challenges and move forward in life?
Or do you have a fixed mindset, meaning that the way things are is the way things always will be, and you are the victim of your circumstances.
Like I demonstrated to my daughter, the story we live in affects us all the way down at the level of our nervous system. The primal, subconscious processes of our mind and body that respond to threats, regulate our breathing, and make our heart beat.
Think about that for a moment.
The narrative you live in - the story you tell yourself about the facts of your life - is what dictates what you give attention to, what and how you think (or don’t think), how you respond to triggers, challenges, and new opportunities, and much more.
The story you live in either leads to life or death.
When you get stuck in traffic, or get a flat tire, or get fired, the manner and the degree to which this disrupts you is based entirely on the narrative that you are embedded in.
The core animating stories of your life shape the outcomes of your life in every way imaginable.
They are literally speaking, life or death.
Think back to the snapshot of your life that you took earlier.
When the baby cries while you are busy scrolling on your phone: are you irritated about the interruption or grateful to be able to soothe your child? It depends on the story you tell yourself.
When your car breaks down on the way to work, are you angry about it? Or do you see it as an opportunity to practice managing your emotions and your problem solving skills?
It depends on the story you tell yourself.
Where do these life stories come from?
Some of these stories get handed down to us from our parents.
You pick up some of them from the church you grew up in and others from the church you attend now.
Some stories are drilled into you as you go through the school system.
Some are transmitted through ten generations.
The culture is held together by a shared sense of story, and those stories become a part of your own consciousness, whether or not your are aware of it.
The media that you consume is like a giant forklift - placing pallets full of “stories” into your consciousness that shape how you think and feel about America, immigration, and AI.
The algorithms that dictate the media you consume serve up more and more stories of a certain kind into your mind, driving those stories deeper and deeper into your consciousness.
If you watch Fox News every night, you live out of one story.
If you watch MSNBC, you live out of another story.
If you spend three hours a day scrolling on Tiktok, you’ll import the stories that the algorithm feeds you.
Your parents stories about things like money, sex, and power shape your consciousness in ways that impact your life at every level.
Is it ok to be rich?
Is it ok to be powerful?
Is sex good?
Is it ok to be yourself?
Or do you need to show up in a certain way to make sure the people around you are ok?
What’s your life story?
The life stories you live out shape your values, what you value shapes your attention, what you attend to is what you worship, and what you worship is what shapes your heart.
In order to reshape your life, you have to become aware of the stories that you are living in and orient yourself to THE STORY.
There are stories at every level of our life, then underneath all of that is “THE STORY”.
What is “THE STORY”?
Who is God?
Who am I?
What are the patterns that govern the universe?
What is of ultimate concern in this life?
Jesus came to offer us THE STORY.
He came with Good News, saying “hey… I know you’ve been living out of this old story, but I’m here to tell you… here’s THE STORY.”
THE STORY is the Gospel.
That you were made in the image of God.
Made for union with Him.
That your sins are forgiven.
You can repent (change the stories you believe) and live into a new story.
The old story you are in leads to death, and if you are willing to go all in on THE STORY, you will have life.
Eternal life. Starting now.
Life with God, imbued with peace, meaning and love, that goes on forever.
THE STORY is that Love is the ultimate reality.
You were made by Love.
In Love.
For Love.
Everything that has happened to you, every experience you’ve ever had, whether you think of them as good or bad, has come to you for the purposes of your awakening to THE STORY of Love.
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Jesus came as a perfect embodiment of God (who is Love).
When we are willing to let go of the stories we believe about our shame, lack, fear, and separation from God (REPENT), and start to live as if it were true (FAITH) that Love is the ultimate reality, we step into a life of union with God. Jesus, our older brother who came to show us the way, teaches us one step at a time how to live this reality of love.
Live your life as if Jesus were in your shoes (Because He is).
Like I did for my daughter, let Him teach you to recognize your fears, regulate your nervous system, attune yourself to love, and step into your true power.
You may not see it yet, but God lives in you.
He’s waiting for your to come home to yourself, which is where He meets you.
You are the temple of the living God.
You are the light of the world.
Come home.
Relax. Exhale.
Let go of the old stories.
Turn your heart towards Jesus (who is already with you, right now, in you).
Let Him teach you the good story of Love.
The good news that Love is the only thing that is real.
Everything else is an illusion.
A lie, designed to keep you from the truth of you identity in God.
Surrender to love.
Surrender to Jesus and let him apprentice you into the man you were created to be. Let him map you onto reality and guide you into life.
Powerful and free, in union with God, creating a life of goodness and abundance.
Lose yourself in the work of restoring Eden.
Putting all the broken things in your life back together.
He will fill you with His Spirit to guide your every step.
He is yoked into this adventure with you.
He is not stressed out.
He’s got a gleam in His eye, a smile, a wink and a nod… you got this.
We got this.
Let’s go.
