Changing the stories we tell can change us

Or am I living in a bubble?

Thanks to the amazing research discoveries of people like Bruce Lipton, who was the pioneer of epigenetics (I highly recommend his book The Biology of Belief), and to the many revelatory and insightful documentaries I have watched about the way our bodies and minds work, and through what I have witnessed in my own life, I have come to understand that everything in our lives has an impact on our physical and mental health.

Our diet consists of everything we take in, not just what we eat and drink. It’s the air we breathe, the stories we read, the news we allow into our lives, the films and TV programmes we watch, the places we spend our time. It’s the stories we tell ourselves about being human. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are as individuals. The thoughts we think. The memories we choose to let define us.

I stopped watching, reading or listening to the news a long time ago. Many of my friends thought I was stupid to do this, that I was living in an unrealistic bubble, and that I would be ill-informed. But in the intervening years by choosing what I allow into my mind, I believe I have become the most well-informed I have ever been.

I grew up in a house where the TV was on from the moment my parents got up in the morning, until they went to bed. Bad news first thing, at lunchtime, at dinner time, at bed time. Every single day. The news I saw all through the years of living in their house was the same year after year after year. Death, destruction, violence, and division designed to instil fear. Many of the TV programmes they watched dealt in the same subjects and the soap operas my mother was addicted to did not have much love in them at all. The drama that filled these programmes spilled over into our lives too, with my mother often behaving in ways she watched people on these TV soaps do.

Although I didn’t actively watch any of these things with them, they were there every day and they infiltrated my mind. When I left home at eighteen I was troubled, unhappy, physically unhealthy and quite unstable mentally, but I didn’t know that then. Hindsight is a great teacher! I was hedonistic and lived a full-on party lifestyle that lasted for many years. After all, I had to make the most of life, as it was likely to end badly and quite soon if the news was to be believed.

Many years later, I looked around me at the way our society was changing and I knew deep in my heart that most of the discord I was witnessing was connected with the stories that were being told. And what those stories made us believe about ourselves and others. And that’s when I started to change the stories I told myself about who I am. Stories that had been conditioned into me by my family and society since birth.

I started to seek out different narratives about this human experience. I stopped reading and watching any horror, crime and thrillers, and replaced them with quieter, character-driven stories and non-fiction about love, connection and the wonder of this world and universe we find ourselves in.

I started writing differently too. The conflicts at the heart of my stories are no longer so harsh, so harrowing, and the outcome always leads towards love and hope. And in changing the stories I tell and those I allow into my life, I have turned into a happier, healthier, more peaceful and accepting version of me. One that was always there but had become obscured by the narrative of our times, which makes us believe that all is lost, that all is terrible, that everyone is bad and out to get us, or what we have, that getting old definitely means getting sick. I no longer believe that any of that is true.

Yes, we are living in difficult times to navigate as it becomes steadily clearer that the consumerist lifestyle that has come to dominate most of the world is completely unsustainable. That human activity is driving the sixth mass extinction event, which will include our species if we don’t make big changes. But the consumerist way of life coming to an end is not the end of everything as we would be led to believe.

The changes we have made on our planet, through the constant plundering of its resources to make goods to drive economic growth, have no doubt caused irreversible damage to many ecosystems. The extinction of so many wonderful creatures, plants and ancient forests is a tragedy. But ecosystems have died out before and others have come to replace them. The planet will recover from us. And I do believe that we can recover from us too, if enough of us are willing to embrace love, collaboration and compassion over fear, competition and hostility.

If this is me living in an unrealistic bubble, then I am not the only one. The authors and filmmakers I read and watch are spreading a message of love and connection too. There are many of us all over the world that know that changing the stories we tell ourselves can change us all. Come join us in our bubble.

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And if you are a writer who would like to change the stories you tell, then I have a new Mindful Fiction Course launching in April, available via email on a pay what you can afford basis, or there’s a group course running in the Retreat West community where you get to share the stories you create with other writers. Info on both below.

Writing Mindful Fiction