Stepping out of Stories.
We’re constantly being told stories about ourselves, and the way things are.
Our very selves have been told to us in stories. We may then try to recover our own stories. So many people have been abused or left out by the dominant stories, there’s certainly a need to tell the untold ones.
Narratives serve a human need for things to make sense, they consolidate, they help us understand, they can be points of connection, bond us together, they are extremely powerful. They can be beautiful. As a therapist, I work with the value of them everyday.
But ultimately, as is obvious as soon as I sit or stand or move to meditate, the idea that my self comes in the form of a story… well, it’s also a story.
At one of these times, when I felt that obviousness, I realized that if there’s a reason at all I’m here, it’s to release the compulsive need to make psychological stories and understand the world primarily in relation to them, and to unleash the energy that’s got twisted up there.
Even narratives of liberation twist me up.
Hero’s journeys, heroine’s journeys, journeys of awakening, they’re valuable in a relative sense, and of course we live in a relative world. But there’s also the absolute, and that’s what calls to me, what makes a discomfort I feel physically, like an itch, like an urge to move, whenever I feel interpreted in terms of a story.
Because when you are relating to a story, however empowering it might be, no matter how true it is…
… you’re still not relating to the stuff itself, you’re not going direct.
I’ve gone from resisting the stories to finding ruptures in them, then creating alternatives that always fell back into the same trap. Now I’m aiming always at the actual stuff, the juice, the energy — the fuel, if you like — for action, even for future stories if they come naturally.
One day I noticed that some of my favorite things, meditation, focusing, writing and painting, were all serving me in this way, to jolt me out of the stories, jump-start me, plug me into a raw state of joy and power, from which I could, if necessary to get along in the world and help others, make some new narratives.
Without plugging into the power source, which is in itself entirely without stories, the stories don’t work.
Being in the power source, I also discovered, I’m not sure why, but I get told what to do. I get just the next step.
Sometimes these are quite dramatic. For example, I had been living in Poland for 20 years when I was told to go and live in Scotland, in a town I had never even visited. I turned my life upside down completely. There were lots of story-reasons for this, if you choose to read it that way. I also know that I just, in some internal sense, was told to do exactly that.
It seems to me to be of the utmost importance that as many people as possible right now can access this power source directly. Not only to feel good — although this is our birthright — but in order to know clearly what they’re doing, and to do it without impediment, to listen to their own innate wisdom and not trip themselves up or get in their own way.
This isn’t a luxury but a necessity. The world is in so much danger it’s sounding like a cliché to say so. The ecosystem is being irreversibly ruined by human greed, and human beings appear to be willingly giving away their minds through technological progress which far outstrips awareness and ethics.
These of course are stories. Because truth is nothing if not paradoxical. We are story and not story.
My mission is to step past the compulsion to make and relate to stories which takes up so much human energy, and obscures what is actually going on before our very eyes. And to use that spare upsurge of energy to change things, directly, just as much as I can
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Sarah Luczaj (PhD) is a counselor/therapist, Reiki master, writer, poet, originator of the Creative Regeneration process (which brings together meditation, focusing, free-writing and intuitive painting) and co-founder of the terrealuma healing refuge, on a wild and secluded permaculture farm. She facilitates Creative Regeneration in various ways, from live group sessions, through month-long online courses, to 6-month intensive one-to-one activations, to get people plugged back into their natural state of bliss and power. Sarah is mainly based in Glasgow, and has two daughters.
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