Some time ago I was in trouble after reading my grandson his favourite book, The Gruffalo, as his bedtime story, Apparently my Gruffalo voice was too convincingly scary, and he had a nightmare. I am quite bland now on how I read bed time stories! (With my own children, we only read Winnie the Pooh, and it is hard to make him scary, even when he falls in the Ephalump trap).
We are story-telling creatures, and in fact the stream of thoughts is really just story-telling to ourselves. Like my grandson, the stories we are told and the stories that we tell ourselves shape our happiness and wellbeing. Our internal lives are a long soap-opera, a series of long and inter-twining stories that continue throughout the day and sometimes when we are asleep.
Mindfulness practices invite us to see our internal dialogue as just that – stories we tell ourselves. Of course, we do get wrapped up in our stories, just as we might if we go to see an engaging play or read a novel or watch a film. By nature we are drawn to some stories more than others – do we like feel good stories, or thrillers, or love stories, or horror stories? We also have a tendency to tell stories to ourselves or others for particular dramatic effect – to cheer, to worry, to entice, to frighten.
A lot of stories are based on the drama triangle. There are victims, persecutors and rescuers in these stories. In a drama triangle, players often switch roles, which make them more exciting. Crime thrillers are the most obvious stories based on the drama triangle, but you can see this pattern in many other stories (even Winnie the Pooh – poor old Eyore is always a victim, Pooh often a rescuer, and Tigger hops around and often is an inadvertent persecutor). A story will have a very different tone when told from the perspective of a persecutor, a rescuer or a victim.
Decentering, where we see our internal dialogue without getting carried away with it, is where much of the value of mindfulness practices arise. The process of meditation invites us to observe our thoughts without reacting to them. With practice, we can begin to see more clearly which thoughts are helpful and which are unhelpful. We start to have more choice on what stories we tell ourselves.
We can change our lives by how we tell the story of our lives to ourselves and to others. Jeanette Winterson, who was adopted by an overbearing mother, fell in love with the books in her local library (unknown to her mother), and began to realise the miserable story of her life could be transformed: her first novel “Oranges are not the only fruit” is the story of how she could retell the story of her childhood, and her latest book “One Aladdin two lamps” elaborates on the theme of how our lives are shaped by the stories we tell.
How do you tell your stories, to yourself and to others? When you settle down to meditate, what stories arise? What are their themes? How do you appear in them – hero, villain, parent, child, teacher, friend, happy or sad? Enjoy them, but try not to be swept away by them. Maybe like Jeanette Winterson, you can retell some of your stories and create some new ones.