It can feel like a daunting adventure to return to those painful memories. After I’d experienced heartbreaks in my relationships with men, I sensed that this pattern might be connected to my experience of my parents’ divorce. I decided to write about my recollection of this time. But I felt ambivalent about bringing up the past and the painful feelings of how I felt my needs were invisible to my father. I decided that I needed to find a way of rewriting the stories of my past, in a safer, more approachable way. When my parents were going through their bitter divorce, I remembered thinking it would be great to have an invisible animal friend on my side that I could tell all my feelings to. I decided to re-story a particular incident during that time by using storybook characters to guide me through the experience. And so Jasper the Joybird and Zephyr the Wind were cast.
With Jasper the Joybird coaxing me to express what I was really feeling in the moment and take positive action, I felt an inner strength to face my feelings and speak my needs to my father in my rewritten story. With Zephyr the Wind providing a balanced and wise perspective, I could see a larger picture of what happened then and could choose how to feel about the experience. This “Power Posse” was giving voice to my wise, loving self and replacing my overdeveloped inner critic! With the help of these guides, I could see my father as the imperfect yet loving man that he was. And I could see myself as the courageous heroine of my own story who created a different and triumphant outcome by expressing her needs and realizing that she was valued and loved.
Seeing myself in that way had a magnificent impact on my selfesteem and the way I related to friends and loved ones. I felt a different vibration and as a Spiritual Counselor, I knew that it was from this point that I would attract new conditions into my life. I realized that I had stumbled on to what the ancients had been practicing for centuries: the power of storytelling to heal and bring meaning to our lives. Without going back, replacing the old feeling with a new one, we cannot go as far forward.
Without remembering our past and self-reflecting, we cannot fully see ourselves and live from our larger truth in the present. As a child we thought our perceptions were absolutely the truth about ourselves. However when we become adults, if we don’t go back and explore those situations with our adult consciousness and discover a more positive belief, we keep attracting from the old, limiting belief.
It is in recounting our pasts that we have a chance to review how we arrived at our beliefs. I discovered through restorying my life that besides the healing power of remembering, it is in having an active role in creating new beliefs about ourselves that propels our self-healing to a higher level. I saw the connection of rewriting my story with the principles I’d been studying as a Practitioner in the Church of Religious Science.
The Church of Religious Science, or Science of Mind, was founded circa 1927 by Dr. Ernest Holmes, a self-taught philosopher who studied all the spiritual paths and discovered a powerful synthesis of the working principles in all religions. Science of Mind is based on the theory that there is One Infinite Mind which includes all that there is. It teaches how to use the Mind Principle for helping ourselves and others to overcome problems such as despair, poverty and sickness.
The Science of Mind defines the highest potential of each human being by stating that everyone has inherent God-like qualities within. Each of us is a co-creator with the Divine. It is this divinely creative capacity of our true nature that enables us to create a life for ourselves that is completely fulfilling in its every aspect. But it starts with identifying our objective circumstances as originally stemming from the quality of our thoughts.
The Science of Mind describes negative consequences as stemming from wrong thought which leads to wrong belief. We believe that in order to have positive changes in our life, we need to change our thoughts about how much good we can experience. We believe that in changing our thought’s stream of consciousness, we can produce a corresponding change in our environments. The Science of Mind technique for change is based on thinking right thoughts, which leads to right beliefs and behaviors which then produce the right conditions in our life. This is also known as the Law of Attraction.
By re-storying our lives, we are going back into our pasts and feeling how we experienced a traumatic incident; we can often find the root of a belief that has grown into a tree in our adult lives, whether for good or bad effect. Part of the task of discovery is to ask ourselves specific questions about the incident, so that we can find the thoughts and beliefs behind the actions and feelings. These questions have been included in the workbook section at the end of this book. Since each of us experiences our lives through the filter of these long-held beliefs, we can see how our stories have influenced our self-esteem, ethics, work life, relationships, values and spiritual life. By having swallowed these childhood beliefs whole, they have become a part of our cells. We think this is the reality of life, when in fact we have just created a story about reality of which we are living proof. Through rewriting our stories, we can now choose new choices to counter our negative beliefs and replace them with the positive thoughts and actions of the heroes and heroines of our story: ourselves.
We can also go a step further and observe the thoughts, feelings and beliefs we hold of our friends and loved ones. How much has our belief about the “bad guy or girl” in our stories continued to limit our perception of this person and keep us stuck in an estranged relationship? Or how much of our negative belief have we passed on to our own children? The “sins of the father” syndrome can be played out subconsciously. This is a big motivator to get straight with ourselves, isn’t it? As we are restored to the truth of ourselves and learn to love ourselves unconditionally, we can then bring that generosity to our relationships with others. I found that through rewriting my own story, I was able to move beyond blame and powerlessness to forgiving my parents and embracing them, as whole and complete, despite their weaknesses. I was able to pass that type of positive thinking on to my son. He could see that his Mom and Dad weren’t perfect either, but really only human, doing the best we could with what we had at the time. He was able to arrive at this conclusion after reading my story. This is another real gift of rewriting your story and sharing it with your kids, they can discover your pearls of wisdom themselves.
In the workbook section you will be asked questions that prompt memories of your past. As we return to those early experiences and rewrite them, we can often see the connection of the past filtered experience and how we continue to use the same filters in similar circumstances in the present. With this new perspective of our past, we can then choose to process information in the present in a healthier, more informed way.
Our values help us decide what is good or bad, right or wrong. We make judgments about ourselves based on these values, so it’s important to identify what our values are, and their hierarchy of priorities. Our values are the result of our internal model of the world. If our model of the world differs from our values or someone else’s, there’s conflict.
Beliefs are what we have presupposed about the world. They can either empower us or destroy us. The important task in re-storying our past, is to find out the disabling beliefs that get in the way of the magnificence of who we really are and attaining true and lasting happiness and success. Our memories are responsible for coloring our present and our presence.
By rewriting our stories, we have a chance to explore the language, images and feelings that encompass our experience. We can then choose to open our perception beyond our filters to see a larger and more empowering story.
By modeling a successful person, we can apply this element of modeling in rewriting our stories with ourselves as the heroic character. If we have been teased by other children because we are dyslexic, we can go back and choose a different way to respond to the teasing. We can even take our actions a step further and make friends of our tormentors by educating them about dyslexia.
Another way to rewrite your story is to embody positive traits in other characters that represent different empowering parts of the self, as has been done with the characters Jasper the Joybird and Zephyr the Wind. For instance, in the childhood incident I rewrote as Bea Wished, which I present in chapter three, I couldn’t ask for the understanding and reassurance I needed from my father, who was consumed by his