The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Have you ever bought a present for someone that you just couldn’t stop playing with? That’s what happened to me when I bought the Mirage, an instant 3-D hologram maker. You put this little plastic pig in the bowl, put the top on, and the pig appears to be sitting on the top of the bowl — but it’s not, it is only a hologram.

I now have this Mirage maker sitting on my desk, and every so often I reach over and try to pick up the pig, and every time I am re-astonished at how real the pig seems until I touch it.

The same thing is true of our “stories” isn’t it? They seem so real, we just know they are real, this is what really happened to me, we scream silently. But if we tell our story, or better yet, write our story, and ask someone who is not involved to listen to it or read it, and ask them to give us their view of it, or ask us questions about it, what do we find? It is just a story. We have personally arranged all the mirrors, just like this they did with the Mirage maker.

This is how the Mirage makes the pig appear real. The mirrors have to be arranged just a certain way, and they have to be polished for it to work. Hmmm, sound familiar? We have been arranging and polishing those mirrors for years. And then, if we are very lucky, someone moves one of the mirrors just a bit, and the pig disappears. Wow! Been carrying that pig around all my life, and now it’s just gone. What a miracle!

I actually arrived at this idea about the mirrors before the Mirage came into my life, when I was writing the chapter on Anger in Choosing to Be. I was having trouble explaining how meditation eventually helps us get out of our Ordinary Mind (the Mirage) and into Buddha Mind.

I was writing the dialogue between me and Poohbear Degoonacoon, the Feline Zen Master, in which he was trying to help me break free of my story, the one that was coming up repeatedly like a bad movie in my meditation. Pooh said that I was caught in the Wheel of Samsara (suffering), reliving the same events over and over again. He told me that the way to get of the wheel was to “become curious about this anger and this hurt and this humiliation. Do not participate in the scene. These feelings you are having are not you. Do not be overcome by what is happening in it. Step back and look at it from a distance.”

Several days later, the same scene came up again in my meditation. This time I did what Pooh suggested. I became curious, asking myself about the texture and tone of the feelings, and how my body was responding to them. I saw that my stomach would tighten, and I wasn’t breathing. I took a deep breath, and then another.

The story was still present, but the scene had shifted, as though I was looking at it from another angle. It was just a story about a woman who as a young girl made a decision that it was not acceptable to speak her truth. I saw how my story could morph and change in an instant, as if I was in a hall of mirrors and I just moved a few inches to the right — and got a completely different picture.

Of course, there are lots of books and techniques we can use to help us get out of our stories, but I find myself getting pretty attached to the pink pig that is not sitting on top of the bowl on my desk. Guess I’ll have to go back to the store to get another Mirage for that present I still owe my friend.

Tagged as: Being a Life Change Artist, Choosing to Be, Meditation, stories