Frequently, when asked “What’s your story?”, a distancing occurs between the inquiring subject (listener) and the speaker (storyteller). In actuality, the unintentional, non-chalant question often lands somewhere outside the interiority of our physical, emotional, and spiritual centers. Meanwhile, the ‘subconscious’ might hear the question as rather: “What do you have to say for your life?”.

For many of us, we seldom experience a sacred container for hearing one anothers ‘story’ (life experiences) with human dignity. Additionally, in today’s culture of commodified and digitally curated identities, the ‘pitch perfect’ representation of ‘self’ as ‘story’ is prevelant. A facimilie or copy of ‘identity’, if you will! It is, however, the context, edges, and seams of our complex lives that authentic ‘story’ becomes a gift to one another.

When faced with difficult life experience and when standing at the cross-roads, ‘story’ can also become partially displaced and frayed within the psyche (emotional bodymind) and particularly when not met in psychological safety. To our surprise, the pressing question (“What’s your Story?”) can appear as a glaring flashlight in the sacred solitude of our darkness. Instead, we might approach the question of ‘story’ with the understanding that the path/s ‘less travelled by’ are essential for self-transformation and in finding ourselves anew.

Although, in ‘normative’ social fashion, we might answer the question with explanations of roles, credentials, accomplishments etc.. These measurements of ‘performance’, ‘identity’, and ‘success’ only address one layer of our storied lives. Beyond these traditional milestones, a deeper symbolic, metaphorical current (invisible thread) exists beneath, through, and across our triumphs and tribulations. From a ancestral and mythological perspective, this golden tread speaks to the inter-relationship (being) of destiny, fate, self-actualization, and healing. These dreams, images, and secret callings live adjacent to ‘material’ manifestations.

During significant life transitions, mid-life crisis, and periods of loss (grieving), the ‘known’ shells that one has carried crack and crumble. It can leave one searching for new direction, clarity, meaning, and coherency. In moving through thresholds and with unraveling, we explore underlying beliefs, assumptions, and blind spots that block our creative expression. This journey of discovery invites new insights and reveals habitual, sequential patterns. Addditionally, in a process of slowing down and with a deeper, inner ear, we honor the emerging vision and inner wisdom that awakens new possibilities

As with my own personal journey of descent and acsent, the return ‘home’ was a long and arduous one. Only in re-discovering my voice and with careful mending did the question, “What’s your story?, find my heart. In the traces of our living memories and the ‘breathing’ mytho-poetic, the wild terrain returns us to a robust vulnerability and invitational curiosity. As asked by the mythologist Michael Meade,“Did we follow the inner thread of our being?’. In ‘eternal return’, as with the snake eating its own tail (ouroborus), the vow we make (to ourselves) determines how we graciously live in the unfolding ‘now’.