Frequently, when asked “What’s your story?”, a distancing occurs between the inquiring subject (listener) and the speaker (storyteller). In actuality, the unintentional, nonchalant question often lands somewhere outside our interior 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 another’s story (life experiences) with human dignity. In today’s culture of digitally curated identities, the ‘pitch perfect’ representation of ‘self’ as ‘story’ is prevalent. A facsimile or copy of identity, if you will! It is, however, in the sharing of the many contexts, edges and seams of our complex lives that authentic ‘story’ becomes a gift.

When faced with difficult life experiences and standing at the cross-roads, story can also become partially displaced and frayed within the psyche (emotional body-mind) 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 traveled by’ are essential for self-transformation and in finding ourselves anew. Trust is at the center of mutual understanding.

In ‘normative’ social fashion, the habitual answer to the question might begin with rapid explanations of roles, credentials, accomplishments etc… These measurements of performance, identity, and success certainly speak to one layer of our storied lives. Beyond these traditional milestones there is a deeper, symbolic, metaphorical current (invisible thread) that exists beneath our triumphs. From a ancestral and mythological perspective, this golden thread reveals the inter-relationship (being) of our destiny and fate. These dreams, images and secret callings live adjacent, if not submerged below, our stories of perfection.

During significant life transitions, such as mid-life crisis and periods of profound 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. We follow the tracks of light as openings to our inner nature. This journey of discovery invites imagination and gentleness around our habitual, sequential patterns. In a process of slowing down and with a deeper inner ear (voice), we honor the emerging vision and inner wisdom that awakens new possibilities. Typically, we meet the places where we have become separated from our own souls and creative potential.

As with my own personal journey of descent, 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 a ‘breathing’ mythopoetic, the wild terrain returns us to a robust vulnerability and poetic inner landscape. From this spaciousness of being, we approach the many paradoxes inherent in life and through the soul’s language of imagery.

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 (ouroboros), the vow we first make (to ourselves) determines how we graciously live in the unfolding ‘now’.