"No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life."
- Nietzsche
Stories are magic. They rely on imagination to take observable reality—facts, events, calculations—and weave meaning onto and through them. Following these threads of meaning brings depth and purpose to our lives.
Author, Greg Levoy, recommends pausing, from time to time, to embrace your life as a grand myth because, in his words: “Myths get at the heart of human behavior, at profound truths, universal truths, ageless patterns. They are… stories of transformation.”
Seeing our lives as a mythic journey reminds us that genuine growth and transformation occur only when we dare to step beyond the familiar and approved norms of our culture. In the legends of King Arthur and the search for the Holy Grail, for example, Arthur’s knights each enter the forest in uncharted places where no one has previously dared to go. It is only in these unknown spaces, that the possibility exists to discover their life’s true meaning and purpose by surrendering to life’s deep mysteries. As mythographer Joseph Campbell explained: “You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path... because if you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your potential.”
Where in your life might you be ready to step off the path, as King Arthur’s knights did, and head into the deepest part of the forest to seek your Grail—i.e., your life’s true calling?
Investigating Your Life Script
Author and teacher, Byron Katie, once said, “It’s all story so you may as well make up a good one.” With this in mind consider that a good life story requires that we be willing to question all that we have, heretofore, assumed to be true. Can you do this? Exercise this freedom right now by tackling the following two-part exercise.
Respond to the following True or False statements:
1. Birth should occur in a hospital.
2. Dead people should be put in a coffin and buried.
3. Children should go to school.
4. Adults should get married and have kids.
5. Old people should stop working and retire.
Most of us would probably answer “True” to these five statements because that’s what our cultural has taught us to believe. Yet, these statements are not the only way to conduct one’s life. They may not even be the best way. But we won’t know until we question them!
Part Two:
When you are ready, take the next step and explore how new ways of seeing and thinking might broaden your awareness—leading you to expand your worldview/story. You can do this by choosing any one of the statements from the above list that you are really sure about—i.e., that you take as “True”, beyond the shadow of a doubt. Then, wholeheartedly, explore this statement as if it were False. So, for example, if you responded that birth should occur in a hospital, consider the possibility that birth doesn’t, necessarily, need to occur in a hospital. If you are resistant to this idea, you’re not alone!
I (Melissa) remember an exercise in a Women’s Studies class I took in college, where the professor labeled the four corners of the room with signs reading i-Hospital birth with a doctor, ii-Hospital birth with a midwife, iii-Home birth with a doctor, and iv-Home birth with a midwife. Then, she had us—a room of mostly women with a few men—move to the corner that reflected each of our birthing preferences... Unsurprisingly... most of the students moved to the corner labeled, Hospital birth with a doctor. Where would you have stood?
For myself, like many of the students in that class, I had been exposed to a story about birth that suggested that it was painful, liable to have complications, and possibly deadly, unless all the precautions available in a sterile hospital setting, with trained doctors, were taken. But what if this is only one story about birth?
Believe it or not, there are women who experience the birthing process as, not only not painful, but actually orgasmic. Indeed, in 2013, the journal Sexologies published findings that 0.3% of all women giving birth experience orgasms in the process. Translation: Each year, in the U.S., more than 11,000 women experience orgasms while giving birth. The co-director of the National Midwifery Institute, Elizabeth Davis, explained this phenomenon by positing that during birth, the hormones needed for orgasm to occur—endorphins and oxytocin—are present.
It may simply be that what keeps more women from experiencing an orgasmic birth is fear and anxiety. Most births—nearly 98% of them—take place in hospitals, which, with their beeping monitors, lack of privacy, and bright lights, are not necessarily hubs of relaxation or pleasure. Add to this the fact that most women are preconditioned by everything from TV shows, and movies to religious texts to believe that their birthing experience will be very painful (e.g., the Bible says that pain in childbirth was one of Eve’s punishments for eating the forbidden fruit). Remarkably, in spite of all the fear and negativity, some women still have orgasmic births in hospitals.
Whether or not you are a person who believes that such a thing is possible, the point here—and this is the important part—is to challenge the certainty of your first response (e.g., that birth should occur in a hospital) by exercising your openness, creativity and fecund imagination to arrive at a new possibility with the potential to expand your consciousness.
Maybe now would be a good time to pause to reconsider the pros (benefits) and cons (downsides) of i-hospital birth with a doctor; ii-hospital birth with a midwife; iii-home birth with a doctor; and iv-home birth with a midwife. You may just find yourself changing your position, even if its just shifting from “hospital birth with a doctor” to hospital birth with a midwife”… which is exactly the experience I had. What other possibilities are open to you? How might new or different stories—even ones that perhaps seem a little odd at first—help open you to a fuller, richer, life possibilities.
Just as I had a story for how and where childbirth should occur, the same was true for death. I became aware of my story when, as a college student in Chris’ Awaken 101 course—I was deeply challenged by a lecture he delivered on human burial practices from an ecological perspective. In fact, when I left class that day I was unable to think or talk of anything else, as I fixated on how strange and unsettling—and wrong!—my professor was.
This prompted me to conduct my own investigation of burial practices. In particular, I recall learning about the conventional practice of readying a human body for burial by injecting the cadaver with the toxin, formaldehyde, and then placing it in a metal coffin for a viewing, before lowering the coffin into a concrete vault deep in the ground. This struck me as deeply unnatural, disgusting even. At the same time, through my research, I learned about green burial options where the body of the deceased is carefully wrapped in a shroud and placed in the ground within a tranquil forest setting. Rather than disgust, the possibility of laying the deceased to rest in a natural setting—her bones becoming soil, her flesh becoming trees, and her spirit free to dance, once more, among the swirling mysteries of the universe—filled me with a deep sense of rightness.
Having offered these two examples of how it is possible to flip our stories—i.e., to upend our conditioned ways of seeing the world, we invite you to do the same by flipping Statements 3, 4 and 5 (See Part I, above), using this as an opportunity to explore what it’s like to awaken to new ways of seeing yourself and the world.
"Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless."
- Salman Rushdie
Sources:
Byron Katie, Loving What Is (Three Rivers Press, NY, 2002)