3 Steps to Rewriting Your Narrative For a Happier, More Rewarding Life
As we go through life from experience to experience, our storybook grows larger. Each time we open this book and read a past story, an emotion is re-lived, revived and reactivated within us. We refer to this storybook time and time again. Sometimes looking for clues that our present may be repeating our past. Sometimes dwelling in a past hurt, resenting, and blaming.
What you may or may not realize, is that we tend to carry this storybook with us throughout the entirety of our lives–unless we have an awakening and are able to detach from it completely. Opening this book can either keep you stuck in the past, creating negative emotions, or create feelings of gratitude and growth.
Let’s rewrite your storybook, your narrative, now in order to embrace the growth and gratitude. Stories have the power to move us emotionally and behaviorally. It’s time to move you forward in a move enjoyable and empowered direction.
Step One: Make a Timeline
Grab a piece of paper and a pencil. Draw a timeline across the paper. Imagine you are telling your life story to a stranger from the beginning to the present. List the key points along the timeline. Remember to include topics you feel played a part in shaping or defining who you are today.
Step Two: Identify and Release the Emotions
Out beside each key point of your life story, think about that past experience and notice what feelings or emotions begin to stir. What emotion does that chapter of your life hold onto for you?
Take your time with this process. You may want to spend a week or more on each point of your timeline, journaling and exploring this point in your life and all of the emotions that are weaved through it. It’s now time to release or say goodbye to that emotion. It happened, but it is not happening now unless you chose to relive it. Imagine that you are pulling the threads of that emotion out of the storybook and releasing it into the universe. Spend time saying goodbye to those old feelings.
Step Three: Acknowledge and Embrace the Gifts.
Once you feel you have released and said your final farewells to the old emotions, begin to explore the gifts of that experience. This is the key step in rewriting the narrative. Once you find the gifts, the lessons, in the space the old emotion used to reside in your storybook, weave threads of gratitude. Acknowledge how that experience created growth and change in your life. Realize that the experience was given in order to reshape you into a more empowered version of yourself. Take as much time with this step as you did with removing the old emotion. Journal how this experience changed you for the better. What did it teach you? Did you give you the gift of compassion, patience, understanding, unconditional love, kindness, appreciation? Embrace the gift.
How we tell and remember our past story is the foundation of our future experience. A story woven with the golden threads of gratitude is a story worth telling.
