What’s your life about? What is your story? Most people are simply told their story. They haven’t asked what, “what is my story?” Instead they’ve been told by other people, “Here’s the story of your life. Here’s the map you’re supposed to follow.” Most of us try to erase our personal history and we don’t collect own story; we don’t have autobiographies; we don’t cherish all of the details; we don’t learn the drama of own lives or own narratives.
When you ask people about their own story most will have no idea what their story is. To me, what is more important than your own story? I believe that if you really want to find out who you are and what your purpose is it can only come from leading a spirit-driven life. This is where why writing our own autobiographies, the recovery and the telling of our own story is so important.
There are two ways of living. One is the way most people live in their egos which is fear and defensive and the other is in spirit where your life is free, happy and expansive. Most people take the stories that society tells them or their family tells them and live those stories out. They say, “That’s who I am,” but they never really know who they are. If they would begin to explore their own spiritual journey, they would begin to realize that their story is very different and unique.
We must make a transition from living other people’s stories to living our own stories, and creating out of then creating out of those stories. That’s what comes out of living a spirit driven life. When you’re living a spirit-driven life you can say you can without any hesitation or doubt, “This is my life. This is the narrative of my life. This is what I want it to be. This is what it’s all about.”
The reason this is so important is because when you tell your life story, you have to tell the story of many other people. For example, if I was to tell my life story I would tell you the story about other people; the people I have loved; the story about my mentors and teachers. People, in other words who have nurtured me; I’d have the story about sacred places, about land I have loved.
So the story is not as much about me as it is the world that I inhabit and the world that has given my life meaning, and what I have found sacred in that. In that sense, living a spirit driven life is the way we need to be living.
How do you start your spiritual journey? I usually start very small in terms of trying to help people learn about falsehoods that society and the people around them have taught them so far, which do not tell their own story, and certainly not the story they want to live out.
Writing your spiritual autobiography makes you whole and to do this you have to begin to tell the parts you don’t want to tell. What you’re ashamed of? Where do you feel guilty? Where you are sad and grieving? Who do you harbor resentments toward?
To write you spiritual autobiography, you have to recognize your own fears, your own greed and your own negativity, your ego self. You need to recognize the spiritual part of you that is enormously loving and compassionate. To know the depths of ourselves it is necessary to know the height of ourselves.
In any story the most important part is the title. This is what brings your whole autobiography into focus. In order to do this, ask yourself a couple of important questions: What’s the name of my book? How am I going to name the story of my life? That’s what, ultimately, it means to compose your own life story.
