LIVING BEYOND YOUR STORY

The very nature of maturation and why I was drawn to this work is because it focuses on the unconscious and unexamined assumptions about the way the world is and the way we live in the world.

These assumptions we make as humans are the nature of maturation and by learning to penetrate the invisibility of our assumptions, and make them just visible enough, so we’re not driven by them is what opens up our life and gives us so much freedom in how we show up for ourselves. 

In the podcast episode this week with my mentor the amazing Dr David Norris, we discussed what it truly means to live beyond your story.

Those four words, Living, Beyond, Your STORY. 

Most human beings aren’t really living; they are surviving. 

What does it mean to live? 

Living is to be in the presence of your experience with life; surviving is being in the story about living. 

We think we’re living, but most of us are just trying to find ways to fix the experience rather than being with it. 

Being with rather than doing something with. There is a huge difference between doing and being. One is about resistance and the urge to change, the other is welcoming and sitting with an experience, not fighting it. 

We’re trying to do things with our experience so we can have a different experience. That’s not how the work of maturation goes. 

We are striving for a happy ending to our story, and we have this picture in our minds as to how the story is supposed to turn out and we resist what is in the hopes of having that happy ending. 

But we are missing the life that is in between!

Most people try to change the names, the faces in their lives, the country or city where they live, they are fighting so hard against the current to try and get to this happy ending but the basic experience of their life remains the same!.

The more you resist the circumstances of your life, the more they persist in different forms. Have you ever heard a woman say “I feel like I’ve dated the same man the last decade they just have all had different names”, meaning that you can try to change what’s in front of you the person you’re dating, the house you live in, your job but until you be with what you are running from these circumstances will keep popping up in your life no matter how much you fight it. 

Maturation is a shift from the doing and having domain to the being domain. 

Surviving means being trapped in your story. 

You can work tirelessly to change the external circumstances, you can convince yourself that if you just get this or that you can finally feel like you’re enough and worthy.  

No matter how many times you change your outside circumstance, you always bring “me” along. 

The ME inside of you that is stuck in your stormy stuck in survival mode.  

We keep repeating patterns because we can’t imagine an alternative outcome. 

Our ME idea is coloured by our story, and that keeps us on this hamster wheel of surviving, just trying to get by and we are missing the life in between. 

How do you get to what we’re missing? 

To live beyond the story is to recognise the story as a story but at a much deeper level to be in the presence of the story as a story and when you do that something shifts in your relationship to the story. 

Your circumstances remain the same, but it’s not about changing the circumstances, it’s about changing your relationship to them, and it allows you to be with your story. When you can shift away from DOING and HAVING to BEING WITH, suddenly even though you have the very same circumstances, your relationship to them shifts. 

Now it’s suddenly more malleable, more flexible and pathways of actions appear that weren’t there before that allow you to deal with the circumstances differently that lead to new and different outcomes. 

We have to observe the story as an experience and be aware of it, and when we can do that we are no longer completely consumed by it. 

Do you feel like you are trapped in your story unable to escape? Maybe you feel like you aren’t really living, you are just surviving? 

I want you to take inventory of the places in your life where the same patterns seem to keep coming up again? Perhaps it’s the type of people you date, maybe it’s your job, but write it down in your journal. 

Try to identify where you are stuck in the cycle of DOING rather than BEING WITH and how you can start to shift your relationship to these circumstances to allow new paths to reveal themselves to you. 

I love you all, and this work is a lifelong process, so be gentle with yourself as you undertake doing it. We are walking the path of maturation together, and I’m so happy to be your guide. 

Nicky x

Back to articles