It’s amazing how attached we can become to our story. What’s also astonishing is how identified we can become with someone else’s story. Because sleeping people are so suggestible this can be tragic. We start to make someone else’s story our story. Some years ago I watched a training video on personal relationships. One of the participants in the seminar had a story about his childhood that I remembered this morning, again. It was one of those stories with which it was easy for me to identify because it was an abused child story and I had one of my own. His story was better than mine. When he did something that displeased his father he was held down and then had jalapeño pepper juice poured into his eyes. That’s high drama! As an adult he was a very soft and sensitive man with huge brown eyes. As an adult he was still telling the story of the young boy who was so horribly abused by his father. He was his story and had no identity apart from it. He was stuck like an old phonograph record with a gouge in it that keeps the needle jumping back to the same spot repeatedly to replay the same section.

Probably the purpose of him telling his story again was to help him to get free from it, to overcome it and get on with his life. It probably didn’t work. After forty years of going to seminars and workshops, reading books and talking to counselors I’ve found the only way to get past your story is to get on with your life. As I sat thinking about the man with the jalapeño pepper juice story it reminded me of my story. Bits and pieces of it started to come up and I reminded myself, It’s just a story. It stopped because I stopped it. I withdrew my energy and attention from the worn phonograph record with the gouge in it. Given the condition of our memory a prudent person will ask himself if our memories ever happened. Did the boy have jalapeño pepper juice poured into his eyes? I’m sixty-two years old and I’ve seen many horrible things that sleeping machines do to other sleeping machines. I don’t doubt it happened. I don’t doubt his story. We’re not talking about if the story is true or not. This is about getting free from the story not verifying its veracity.

Our memories are questionable because we’re not awake enough to perceive the truth accurately. We were subjective then and we’re subjective now. That makes our memories flawed at best. Some of us have observed that many of our stories have been told so many times the story just tells itself without us. Not as fantastic as it may sound given that our lives as man-machines run by themselves, are made active by the events in life while we imagine we’re in control of what’s happening, what’s going to happen. We don’t have to let our stories run us for the rest of our lives. I know this because I am abandoning my story. It’s no longer my story. It’s just another story, like a television drama. The more often I stop it when it comes up the weaker it gets. What used to be the cornerstone of my life is now a pebble on the beach, just like all the other pebbles. It’s quite freeing. Try it.