The Secret of the Shadow (19 page)

Outside the confines of our personal dramas, our internal dialogue reflects the unlimited possibilities that are available to us at every moment. Outside our stories we are filled with feelings that 179

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w reflect our highest selves rather than those that echo our lowest thoughts. We are filled with an inner knowing that says, “I trust that the Universe will take me where I’m supposed to go. I love life. Everything is unfolding in Divine order. I have enough. I am enough. I am blessed. I can do it. I believe in myself. Good for me!

How can I serve you?” Outside our stories we bask in excitement, joy, abundance, openness, enthusiasm, exhilaration, trust, gratitude, awe, inner knowing, self-confidence, appreciation, respect, unconditional love, and boundless energy.

S t e p p i n g O u t

All of us have days when our internal dialogues are more consistent with our personal dramas than with our greatness. In order to step out of our stories, we first need to be able to recognize that we are in them. We need to be able to say, “This is my story. These are my shadow beliefs. This is my Shadow Box that screams at me all day long.” If when we get up in the morning the first thing we hear from our Shadow Box is “You’re worthless. You’re never going to get what you want” or “You look terrible, why don’t you eat better?” most of us, instead of saying, “Oh, I’m in my story. . . ,” just step right into it. We go for it. We bite the hook. We get enrolled.

Not only do we listen to that voice, we
become
that voice; and instead of watching the movie we become the star of the show.

Recently I spent time with Ethan, a thirty-nine-year-old holistic healer, who shared with me how completely different he feels when he is in his story compared with when he is free from its lim-180

l i v i n g o u t s i d e y o u r s t o r y itations. “I’m not safe in the world” is the theme of Ethan’s story.

Intrigued, I wanted to hear more.

Like a lot of people, Ethan has been traveling the path to self-improvement for many years. Committed to transforming himself, he searched high and low, learning technique after technique, trying to feel some inner safety and become more than he’d been.

Ethan knew there was more inside of him than he’d been able to tap into. Frustrated by his inability to succeed in his career and in his desperate need to feel safe, Ethan numbed himself with marijuana, hoping to find there the peace and contentment he desired.

Committed to breaking down the barriers that stood between the self he knew and the self he dreamed of, Ethan enrolled in my coaching program. One of the first exercises he was assigned was to identify the stories around each aspect of his life. Ethan began by examining his story around why he smokes pot. His story told him that smoking pot enhanced his creativity and increased his self-confidence, but the truth was that pot distanced him from the life he desired. His addiction separated him from both his pain and his passion. I asked Ethan to identify the feelings as well as the other behaviors that live inside this story.

Living inside the confines of his story, Ethan would spend hours each day getting stoned and fantasizing about what his life could be like. He would daydream about different projects and pretend that his endless planning was actually getting him somewhere. Ethan was always “getting ready” to take action, but he never stepped into the arena of making it happen because he was too afraid. Inside his story Ethan was afraid to share his dreams with people, feeling that doing so would take away his momentum 181

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w and his ability to manifest them. Concerned with being accepted, Ethan feared the disapproval of others, who he felt might not support him in his goals.

Inside his story Ethan felt like he was small and the world was huge. On any given day he would feel fearful, anxious, numb, angry, resigned, hopeless, and victimized. Inside his story Ethan constantly felt unsafe, so he’d hide and try to remain unnoticed.

One morning after another night of fantasy and delusion, Ethan looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and saw a man getting old without having lived his dreams. He saw the face of a great impos-tor, someone who was still pretending he was on his way to success when in fact his story was going nowhere. After years of working on himself, Ethan made the decision to give up marijuana and to live outside his story.

Now, standing outside his story, Ethan has been able to open his heart and feel safe exposing his feelings to those around him.

Today he shares his plans for the future with people before he even knows how to make them happen, confident that he will be guided to the right action. Outside his story, Ethan spends much less time planning and more time taking action. He is less concerned with being accepted and allows himself to try new things whether he knows how to do them or not. Outside his story, Ethan takes care of his health, honors his body, and does not smoke pot.

Ethan shared with me that he feels good enough about himself to be influential whether he’s liked or not.

When he is unencumbered by the limitations of his personal drama, Ethan feels connected, optimistic, creative, confident, supported, and safe in the world. Outside his story he feels masterful; 182

l i v i n g o u t s i d e y o u r s t o r y life for him is a palette of infinite possibilities to choose from. He feels honest and authentic, powerful and productive. Most of all, he feels like he matters.

A r e Y o u I n o r O u t ?

One of the most important steps in getting outside our stories is being able to recognize when we are living inside them. Suzanne was a participant at a recent workshop where we had been dis-cussing the limitations of our stories. She shared with me that on the last day of the process she had gotten up early and was sitting on the deck of her hotel room, which overlooked a beautiful bay.

She told me the scene could not have been more perfect, and that she felt totally at peace. Sitting on a comfortable couch near the window, she opened the sliding glass door to breathe in the sea air.

Suzanne decided this was the perfect setting to take in a few minutes of quiet meditation. She closed her eyes and began to breathe deeply. But within seconds she recalled a humiliating incident that had occurred with a man some twenty years earlier. Suzanne was horrified. Her moment of peace and quiet was rudely interrupted by this memory, and soon she found herself feeling victimized, humiliated, and powerless as she replayed the incident over and over in her mind. In an instant she was thrown right back into the middle of her story, which told her she wasn’t good enough to be treated with respect. Instead of stepping back and saying to herself, “Oh, look, I’m back inside my story,” she started listening to the same Shadow Box she had listened to thousands of times 183

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w before. It wasn’t long before Suzanne’s mood of peace and tranquillity was replaced by anger, oppression, and self-loathing.

Just then a group of ducks walked by the open sliding glass door, seemed to stop directly in front of her room and say, “Quack, quack, quack.” Suzanne opened her eyes in disbelief. It was like a message from the Universe telling Suzanne that she had dropped back into her story. It was as though the ducks were mirroring her internal dialogue: “Boo-hoo, poor me. Quack, quack, quack.” She couldn’t help but laugh, and decided she would use the phrase

“quack, quack, quack” to catch herself whenever she slipped out of the fullness of her being and back into her story.

B e c o m i n g t h e O b s e r v e r In order to transcend our dramas, we must make the commitment not to use our stories to beat ourselves up anymore. We have to be willing to stop indulging our dramas, to stop empowering them with our attention. If you have ever practiced meditation, you have probably noticed that your mind is a constant stream of thoughts.

But if you are committed to your meditation practice, you make the choice to simply observe your thoughts instead of following them where they are trying to lead you. With practice, what you find is that at some point your mind realizes that you are not going to bite the hook and it gives up. It lets go, and you’re just there witnessing the workings of your mind. The same is true for our stories. If we don’t act out our dramas, we can
choose
to walk away from them. The most important thing we can do to break free 184

l i v i n g o u t s i d e y o u r s t o r y from our dramas is to acknowledge them as stories rather than crawling inside them, believing them to be the truth. Instead of blindly following the instructions of our Shadow Boxes, we can say, “Oh, thanks for that thought. But right now I am choosing a different thought.” Eventually our stories will stop replaying themselves, because they can exist only when we believe we
are
our stories. Our stories feed off the attention we give them.

If there is no dialogue between us and our stories, they will cease to have any control over us. We simply make the choice to dis-identify with them. We do this by declaring out loud, “Oh, here we go again. I’m in my story.” It’s like watching television.

We can choose to walk away, even though the television is still droning on and on. The question we want to ask ourselves is, “Do I want to feed my story and give it my life force? Do I want to empower it with my precious energy?” If our answer is yes, then by all means we should sit down in front of our story and listen to it. But we need to do it consciously. We all have the right to indulge in our story from time to time. We might say to ourselves, “It’s Tuesday afternoon at two and I have nothing better to do. I think I’ll sit down for a while and replay my personal drama.” Then at least we can be responsible for what we are creating.

S t r at e g i e s f o r G e t t i n g O u t s i d e Y o u r S t o r y

There are infinite choices available to us if we choose to transcend our stories. We could go inside and have a dialogue with our story; 185

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w we could “free-write” and allow that part of us to express itself.

We could say, “Excuse me. I know you want something here, but I have other things to do today.” Or we could choose to talk to God.

There is a saying, “When you’re thinking about God, you’re not thinking about your problems.” The vibration of our story and the vibration of our deepest self are totally opposed to one another. We cannot experience both at the same time.

It’s important that we identify some strategies to get outside our stories when we find that we have slipped back inside them. Here are a few strategies we can use to dismantle our stories and gain access to the life that awaits us outside the limitations of our personal dramas.

Ask the people who were involved in your emotional traumas to give
you their version of the story.
Embracing a new perspective lets us know immediately that what we have identified as our story is only one version of the truth. While I was writing this book I e-mailed the first few chapters to my older brother, Mike, a trial consultant, to get his feedback. In his reply he pointed out what I believe is a very important distinction:

The stories of our lives are 90 percent perception and 10

percent fact. Every person we know will view the same set of facts in a different way. In my job as a jury consultant, I listen to lawyers every day take the same collection of undisputed facts and mold these facts into stories that serve the best interests of their clients. There is little or no search for the truth; there is only a collection of arguments that will be perceived in different ways by different people.

Unfortunately, in our personal lives, many of us choose to 186

l i v i n g o u t s i d e y o u r s t o r y view our lives from the perspective that is least favorable to us. By doing that, we become victims with someone to blame for our misfortune, rather than taking responsibility for the portion of our fate that is a result of our own choices.

Later that night Mike called me again. “By the way, Debbie,”

he said, “I just have to tell you something. That story you wrote about your childhood isn’t true.” “What do you mean it isn’t true?” I asked. “I lived it!” “No, Debbie,” he said. “I wanted you. I always wanted you. I was so happy to have a little sister.” Shocked, I asked Mike to write his version of my childhood, and this is what he wrote.

Here is my version of Debbie’s childhood. Born into a typ-ical nuclear family, Debbie was adored by everyone who knew her from an early age. In every memory I have of Debbie’s childhood she was surrounded by friends who enjoyed her company. Mom filled Debbie’s childhood with love and attention, taking her to dance, baton, swimming, art, and drama classes on an almost daily basis. I admired Debbie’s ability to take on every day with enthusiasm and energy. She was never intimidated by anyone and excelled at everything I can remember. Debbie was mature beyond her years and by age eleven she was modeling and dating older boys. She was a magnet. Everyone wanted to be Debbie’s friend and to be wherever Debbie was. There wasn’t anything beyond Debbie’s reach.

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T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w I sat there flabbergasted. I was hearing a perspective I had never even conceived of. Even though I use and embrace my story, I was floored to hear Mike’s view. As you can see, asking friends and family members to give us their perspective on our lives’ dramas is an effective way to dismantle the limited perspective we believed to be the truth.

Transformation is a shift in perception. It is being able to see something through new eyes. Nothing works quicker to give us a new perspective than seeing the limited view of reality that we thought to be the truth through different sets of eyes. We must understand that our vision—what we can see at any given moment—is limited by our interpretations. The moment we assigned meanings to the events in our lives was the moment we limited our view of reality. Asking other people for their perspectives can reopen the lens through which we view ourselves.

Rewrite your story as though you were an eternal optimist who
could see only the light side of your drama.
Overemphasize the good points of your story as well as the gifts you were given. How would your life look if seen through the eyes of an angel? The bottom line is that we can take our collective life experiences as a bad memory from which we cannot escape, or we can rewrite them so they provide a valuable foundation from which we can build a fulfilling future. We either learn from the lessons of our past and move forward or dwell on them and stay stuck in the same place.