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A story is a narrative we tell or are told that acts as a representation or account of events. We live our lives through the stories we tell about who we are, our place in the world, our relationships with others, our circumstances and potential. Until we bring awareness to them, these stories are often based on perceptions and perspectives, conditioning and programming, filters, biases and identifications we are invested in and aligned with from the limited mind, some of which we have been familiar with from an early age.

We are powerful creators yet until we are conscious of this, we unquestioningly believe in the narrative that we tell ourselves and that is told to us that we feel to be true, we practise repeating it and knowing it and we forget that we can change the story in any moment that we decide to.

When we wake up to the power we have over our lives and the potential we have to change the beliefs and ideas we invest in and build our stories upon, we find that we are able to change our narrative or even to stop telling one. No matter who we are, what we have been through or what we have done, we all have the ability to change our minds about the stories we tell and believe in and discover who we really are and what we might experience and enjoy in life beyond the personal judgements and opinions of the limited mind that steer us away from an expression of our truest selves.

This is not to dismiss any suffering we have been through that we feel has influenced us or led to our current circumstances but rather to let us know that we have resilience, that we can open our hearts and experience wisdom, that we can recover and be restored to wholeness, consciously creative and able in every moment we to choose to free ourselves from living in the feeling of suffering by investigating the validity of our stories about it and choosing a new expansive, healing narrative or viewpoint.

We have a choice about who we think we are and we do not have to continue seeing ourselves as damaged, affected or conditioned by the past, regardless of the stories about it that we have told or been told until now.

When we reflect on moments of peace and stillness and quiet happiness that we have experienced in our lives that have felt hope filled, faith filled, calm, when we have felt at one with the world, secure, enough, we discover that in these moments our stories have fallen away, our narratives paused. In these moments, we are connected with who we really are, experiencing pure consciousness as our minds still and we feel clear, healthy, whole, able to let our thoughts flow and tune into the frequency of our innate health.

We all have an idea of how powerful our minds are, they are so incredible that our thinking literally creates our physical reality. In any moment we can reflect on what we are creating and inviting into our lives via the stories we tell ourselves about the world and who we are in it and become curious about the lives we might enjoy if we change the narrative or even drop it entirely.

When we let all stories drop away and investigate what we truly know to be real, we find that very little of the narrative is left. Almost everything we believe in is fiction, based on illusions we been taught to accept or have invested in until they felt real. Once we let go of them all, we are able to choose which thoughts we follow and which ideas we build our lives upon.

We are so much more than the stories we have told ourselves and been told about us. We are the infinite potential of the Universe expressing itself in human form.

For most of every day, we are narrating what is occurring, judging, reflecting, considering, reacting but what perhaps we are forgetting is that we can choose how we do it by replacing the default voice in our minds with a more conscious understanding and awareness of life in order to experience it differently. We can change the perspective, viewpoint, frame of reference of our inner voice, replacing unhelpful points of view with an outlook that is more optimistic, enthusiastic and appreciative of life, that feels more aligned with our truest beliefs and core values or one that is simply more neutral.

When we become aware of the voice we hear all day every day, we start to understand that we are actually detached from it and able to discern whether to pay attention to it, believe in everything it says and follow its direction or not. We also come to notice by considering the voice how often it parrots the opinions, attitudes and ideas of others that we don’t actually feel are true or real for us and repeats past tone, energy and beliefs we decided to give up long ago.

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This awareness allows us the distance to consider the constant narration that occurs in our minds without getting involved with it and we find that we have the power to direct it as we choose. In this sense, we are creating our inner narrators so that they are more resonant with the experience we want from life and know is possible. We are choosing our perspective, reprogramming our belief systems and establishing conscious creative power over the way we explore life and how we receive and perceive what is occurring. If we don’t like the way we experience things, we can change the way we view and interpret them, we can change our narration to be more beneficial for us.

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There are some that claim that we are not being realistic when we begin to explore a new way of living, that we are not acting as serious people but we are all living in realities of our own creating so what is right and true for one will never be right and true for another. Living from an awareness of our ability to experience life from a happier, healthier, clear, lighter perspective and understanding can only improve the way we take part in the world, benefitting us all.

Making the choice to take responsibility for the way we experience life and control of the way we explore it can only continue to improve the way we think and feel and act. We all slip into unconscious modes of being throughout the day; if we notice the stories we are telling ourselves in these moments, we can pause them and change the narrative so that in the moments we default to unconscious programming it is beneficial for us, changed to a more neutral and healthy way of operating.

When we make it our habit to do this, we begin to change the way we view ourselves and life, reprogramming our subconscious beliefs so that we default to behaviour that is continually more helpful, healthy and enjoyable for us. We get to choose what we think and what we think influences our entire experience of life. Allowing our inner narrators to be aligned with our wellbeing, empowers us and leads us to look at life from a standpoint of love and joy and appreciation.

We change the way we view ourselves by bringing awareness to the stories we tell in order to evolve and expand them or drop them entirely.

The stories we tell ourselves are so often based on assumptions and personal judgements rather than facts. When we start to become aware of this, we see that the familiar narrator, the voice of the conditioned self sets out to keep us safe, intact, as we are by continuing to reaffirm our sense of self and seeking out opportunities to do so. If we can notice when we are moving away from facts into something that feels more compelling, more urgent, more righteous, we can question the assumptions and personal judgements we are making and where they are stemming from so that we aren’t motivated into action by what the limited mind claims is true because we are more interested in finding out and responding to what really is.

This allows us to be more open, more flexible, more approachable and relatable and better able to enjoy life. Our stories often block us off from experiencing what we have deemed we can’t or won’t or shouldn’t experience in any given moment and this means we miss out on what we might enjoy and benefit from in favour of continuing to live within a familiar reality of our own creating that affirms our limiting beliefs. If we can move beyond these and look at life with new eyes, we will drop our stories in favour of discovering more about ourselves and the world around us and evolve past our need to be right or certain from the limited mind into a truer experience of what is.

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Our personal judgements and assumptions might seem to us to be based on the information available but this information is filtered through our individual biases, our programming, our conditioning and reaction to it and identification with the experience of a limited sense of self. When we stop telling familiar stories, we allow ourselves to question our assumptions and change our minds about our judgements and when further information becomes available or we realise that our ideas might be informed by our own insecurities, misconceptions or lack of awareness or understanding, we are able to consider a new point of view and entertain a new narrative.

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One of the ways we can question our personal judgements and assumptions is to look at why we think what we do. Does what we have decided resonate with a peaceful mind and open heart or with a less clear and more reactive outlook? Have we come to a judgement or assumed something because it in some way affirms our limited thinking or has insight arisen from a deeper knowing that is wise and intuitive?

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A judgement is an opinion or evaluation and an assumption is a truth accepted without certainty or proof. We make assumptions and judgements based on our experiences and when we come to realise that our experiences are a result of our thinking in the moment, unique to us and our perspective, we start to realise that what we assume and conclude via familiar thinking might not be true and accurate and we become more interested in looking at facts rather than the fiction we create about them in order to navigate life.

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One way to ascertain how helpful or accurate our judgements and assumptions are is to consider how they feel to us. Are we neutral about them, calm and clear or clouded and caught up? Are we saying yes to an idea from a conscious awareness of what is likely based on fact or from prejudice towards a fiction that suits or affirms a personal limited world view? If we want to start to live more open, connected, spacious, expanded lives, we need to give up the desire to be right in our limited ideas and opinions and let go of our stories so that we can open up to curiosity, compassion, honesty, love, understanding and a desire to learn and grow.

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Our beliefs inform our actions because they inform our feelings which inspires our thinking if we are not consciously creating it. This means that we can’t feel differently if we don’t think differently and we can’t act differently if we don’t change the way we think about what we feel. To change the way we feel we need to change what we believe so to get new results, to have new experiences, to feel differently about life, we have to reprogramme the subconscious mind so that what informs our thinking and feelings and action is aligned with what we want, who we want to be and who we really are: loving intelligence, innate wellbeing, wisdom, peace, happiness, health.

And so, we must ask ourselves, what are we waiting for? We have to allow ourselves to let go more and more of who we think we are from the limited mind and experience connection with the Divine, with Universal consciousness, with the oneness of all life, with the spiritual wisdom and wholeness within and all around us. Every time we do, we feel as if another part of the story drops away and we are spacious and open to the wonder and beauty and loving energy we are a part of and created and lived by. This leads us to become aware of those areas where we are still closed off at the same time as knowing that we can see through what has felt solid and real in order to let our barriers dissolve, our stories transform and open up to a happier, lighter way of living.

With the awareness that lightness, ease, joy, wonder, health are available to us, when we come up against the limited self and the stories it tells, it is without shame, without guilt, without struggle but in the presence of an infinite love that supports us in moving beyond what does not see us operating in truth so that we can know where we have been operating from stories of lack, fear, needing to control or avoid life in order to feel well, so that we are able to see ourselves as we truly are and not as the identity whose claims and truths and beliefs do not lead us in love or light or wholeness.

Every time we allow ourselves to become comfortable with the discomfort of the change we are led to embrace by our intuition, we break open further, hold back less and become more present, more fulfilled, more engaged with the goodness of life.

This allows us to question the stories we develop and follow and energise, those we repeat that keep us identified with and solidifying a sense of self that is not reflective of who we truly are,our capacity for conscious creation and ability to change so that we are always evolving, always expanding and doing so more often with a sense of ease and trust, comfort and freedom, pleasure and joy, so that we keep ascending, transcending more of what causes suffering and and embracing what allows us to enjoy happiness and peace.

Once we come to a deeper awareness of how we experience life, it might seem as if we should discount or discredit certain feelings and reactions and dismiss our insecurities and triggers but this approach doesn’t resonate with who we really are which is a loving and intelligent energy and actually still operates within the belief system of limitation. When we let go of the story that we are wrong or bad or failing or in danger of losing our ability to navigate life well, we can pause, we can practise grounding ourselves in the knowledge that if we approach the thinking we have created that motivates a particular habit or pattern of being that does not align with our deepest values from a space of love, patience, understanding and forgiveness, we remember our truth, we settle into an experience of compassion and we support ourselves in changing our stories about who we are, what we can do and how we can do it.

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What we need from ourselves when we are feeling triggered is self compassion, self patience, self trust and self assurance, not a new story about how we are failing or justifying reactive behaviour. It is not failure to experience reactive feelings and allowing them to rise up and out of us so that we can witness the stories that created them rather than telling a new story about them allows us to recognise that there are areas where we are still sensitive, places within us where we still feel tender, where we are still innocently operating from the illusion that we are not whole or worthy or enough and reflect on why this is without beginning a new narrative about it.

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Noticing our feelings allows us to reflect on what exactly we feel triggered by and when so that we can be aware of our tendencies to react to certain situations and events. We don’t have to do anything with this once we become aware of it, we do not need to tell a new story about it because we have the ability to process and learn and heal from our experiences. When we are committed to living consciously, everything we have been in the dark about is brought into the light so that we can witness the creation of our experiences and consider the reasons for our choices, allowing us to choose differently in future. This does not dismiss any of the challenges we have been through or are experiencing, rather it transforms the way we deal with and recover from them. It empowers us to be clear in our responses so that we love ourselves into health and wholeness without causing ourselves further suffering.

Becoming enlightened about where we are still operating from disempowering beliefs, limiting ideas and false narratives allows us to continually release what does not serve us and choose a new way. We do not need to judge ourselves for those areas where we still feel frightened or alone or unsure. We can know that we are strong and resilient and that we feel our thinking so that when we feel other than clear, calm, neutral in response to repeating or reacting to the recurrence of past states of being, we are in some way clouded by self judgement, telling an unhelpful story that is shaping our reality and experience of life. As soon as we do, we give ourselves the opportunity to change our minds so that we refer again to an understanding that allows us to create an experience that is more beneficial.

We do not have to identify with our feelings, be taken over by them, overwhelmed by them or judge and condemn ourselves for having them. If we wish to, we can allow good feeling to suffuse and guide us. Becoming aware of the stories we create about how we feel allows us to reflect on why we feel what we do when we do, notice when we need extra support, care, patience, love, nurture and let it be okay that in some moments we do not feel in flow, aligned, at ease, in grace because we know the ability to be has not left us, we are simply innocently turned away from it.

When we see that there is another way, a more helpful way to enjoy life, we start to take part in and respond to life better on all levels and retrain ourselves to be guided by an inner voice that knows we are strong, whole, healthy, wise, able, resilient, capable and limitless in our potential.

We are beings of love and health and wisdom. None of these lead to us to treat ourselves with anything other than compassion, patience and kindness. If we think otherwise it is because we are operating from the belief system of the limited mind that tells us we are not good enough, not getting it right, unable or unsafe to try something new. If we can simply witness and bring awareness to this, we will experience the distance we need in the moment to let that thinking pass and remember a healthier experience of self that is rooted in truth and wellbeing and that guides us towards a new way to experience life.

Being the compassionate presence that what is hurt and insecure and unhappy within us requires to heal allows us to process our feelings, past and present and enter a space of peace and clarity that supports us in evolving past fears and suffering and misunderstanding with love and patience. We are all doing our best with our awareness in the moment. What changes things for us is the decision and commitment to cultivate awareness, to allow a greater experience and expression of self, to lift the veil, to lovingly release the limited personality we have created and see ourselves in a way that is ever more resonant with our beauty and potential and power.

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When we see that we can take control of the stories we tell ourselves we cut them off mid flow when they prevent us from living well, when they turn us away from grace and truth and peace. In these moments, we experience relief, we return to our wholeness, we recognise our power, our worth, our ability to grow and transform and be guided by love and we release ourselves from repeating familiar narratives that hold us down and back and realise again that we are not compelled, obligated or required to believe in them simply because they are known to us.

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When we embrace our ability to change, when we set out on the journey back to ourselves, we have to spend time aligning our personalities, our thinking, our approach to life with the knowledge of who we really are and the truth of our being. As we reprogramme our minds and recondition our bodies, we evolve past our familiar unhelpful reactions to life and beyond past stories about who we are that disempower us so that we operate from the understanding that we are wise, whole, healthy, secure within. We begin to recognise our inbuilt abilities, realise our innate potential, align ourselves with our inner wisdom so that we take part in the world in a way that demonstrates a natural self belief and overrides unhelpful habitual patterns of being based on beliefs that we cannot, will not, should not be successful and why.

As we begin to act in alignment with the true self, as we begin to tune out of the stories that tell us we are limited and affected by life in certain ways, we rediscover confidence and trust in our inner resources, we practice faith that we are not the limitations we have come to identify with but imaginative, creative, fluid expressions of the energy of life, able to take a new course of action when we choose to and equipped to do things differently just by making the decision to. As we do, we rewire our neural networks and establish a new relationship with ourselves, so that our inner narrators no longer prevent us from transforming into ever truer versions of ourselves but guide us to override the beliefs that prevent us from knowing or trusting that a new course of action is always available to us.

It takes so much more effort to hide our light than to shine it but we always know on some level that it is there and when we see others shining theirs, not only do we understand it is a possibility for us to shine ours too, it is inevitable that we will seek a way to do so, that we will recognise that we are always being guided to uncover knowledge of our Divine right to shine so that when we start to tell the stories again that dim it, shroud it, cover it up, turn us away from it, we remember that we are repeating ideas and beliefs and behaviour based on misunderstanding of our true worth and potential and power.

You are whole and able and well. You are Divine. Let this guide you. Let go of everything that disputes this, that does not resonate with this truth. Let go of everything that feels urgent and stressful and hard. It is not who you are. Let love support you as you come up against the stories that tell you otherwise and you will find illusion simply falls away.

We are comfortable with the familiar even when it does not serve us because on some level we have confused it with being safe, with being secure so it can be confronting and uncomfortable to move away from what is known by the limited self in favour of what is known by the soul. But when we are really clear on what we want for ourselves as well as what we are truly capable of, we choose something new, something better. If in the moments that past thinking tries to remind us of those stories that we have believed in and told for so long that disempower us and we feel the experience of believing in them in our bodies, we place our trust in a higher self and we stay on the path of self realisation and self love, taking actions aligned with our ability to move beyond the beliefs that prevent or direct us away from doing so and listen to the voice of wisdom, self respect, patience, forgiveness that is always speaking to us, always guiding us to let our minds clear and our feelings settle, we will return home to ourselves, relax, rest in truth, recover clarity, remember peace.

The stories we tell ourselves are powerful. They are the source of all of our experience and until we change them or stop telling them completely, they set the scene for each new chapter of our lives. Every time we feel as if our story is already written, as if there are no fresh pages available to us, we can simply remind ourselves that there is a happier, healthier experience available to us in every moment that we stop narrating from the limited mind and instead fall into a space of peace and stillness and silence that exists before, beneath and beyond it. Allowing our recognition of what we can do to lead us in how we think, what we believe, who we are in the world sees us refusing to continue with those stories born of and aligned with our most familiar limited thinking.

We are the love we seek, we are the wisdom we require, we are the light of consciousness that will shine the way. When we forget this, we feel it. When we turn away from who we really are, we feel it. If we can remember this, affirm this, stand strong in this when we feel otherwise, we will strengthen trust in our resilience, break free from the confines of past narratives, be interested in finding a new way, recondition our minds to a new perspective and begin to operate from a new mode of being that releases us from telling stories that justify investment in and IDENTIFICATION with limiting beliefs.

We will instead be more interested in realising our health, happiness, vibrancy, strength, peace, joy and ability to flow with life so that this impulse becomes our new familiar. When this happens, we understand that we have the choice to tell stories inspired by our innate desire to enjoy wonder and experience more awareness, joy, health and wholeness, founded on the knowledge that we are spiritually wise and well, capable of consciously imagining and interested in exploring in more and more ways our Divinity and ability to experience and express who we really are.