XII. Contextualization: all of this is your life. There isn’t another life available with this one b

What you believe about yourself and what you make your life mean is contextualized within your own life. There are certain narratives that will help you to heal now by bringing in interpretations - meanings - of your life events that are missing for you. So when you are presented with an alternative narrative to the one you have long held, ask yourself, did it help you get free from belief systems and ways of being that were holding you stuck all while being harmful to no one else? Good then. That’s true enough for me. And now, can you be flexible with these thoughts and not hold onto them too tightly?

The kind of journey I urge people to take, ideally, is a journey into their own lives. As Brené Brown put it, “You either walk inside your story and own it or you stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness.” People need to be deep in their own story.

So I, and other healers, stand there beside them, holding their hand if they need it, and together we look back upon the path that they have walked so far. We see the places in their childhood where they had to walk through a scary place with their eyes closed and we help them open their eyes. We see the places where they believed that they had to walk a certain way because there were “rules,” and we help them let go of these ways of walking that don’t suit them down to their core.

There isn’t really an end goal. Which doesn’t mean that people need to do this kind of work intensely forever. That’s not what I mean. What I mean is that a certain point people become so inside their own story that they don’t need help very often. Maybe they call on someone to help them look at the map of the next rocky and challenging-looking piece of terrain. Maybe they call on someone because they’ve been circling the same huge crevasse for months. But they’ve got a handle on where they’ve come from and they know at least some of the pieces of terrain that are going to be challenging for them.

They’re walking inside their own story.