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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Carl Greer
Each of us is living a life about which a story can be told. The story has chapters about our body and health; our relationships; our psychology, including our emotions and ways of thinking; our jobs; our relationship to a higher power; and our ways of being of service in the world.
The truth is that none of us is our story, and each of us has the power to be the storyteller. We don’t have to be stuck in a narrative we didn’t actively choose. We don’t have to live with the same themes that have been a part of our story to this point. We can retell the tale of our past and present, and thereby change how the story will unfold in the future.
You can come to see a wider range of possibilities for yourself. First, however, you need to detach from your current story and recognize your power of agency. Then, you can begin to make conscious decisions about how you would like your life to unfold, writing a new story for yourself in the process.
The power of agency (from Wikipedia)
From social science agency is the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices.
One’s agency is one’s independent capability or ability to act on one’s will.
Three elements:
Iterational (past)
Projective (future)
Practical evaluative (present)
You don’t have the power to determine all the details of your story; no one does. Your personal story, like everyone’s, is part of a collective story told by your family, friends, and community. And for all of us, Source serves as a co-storyteller. We are all part of Source, which is the divine, creative, wise force that permeates everything around us and from which all energies derive. Source is also called God, Goddess, the Tao, the Ein Sof, and the Quiet—there are many names for this conscious force.
When we reclaim our power as storytellers, we stop being confused about the events in our lives, and we start to access the wisdom that became lost to us when we disassociated from uncomfortable memories, insights, and feelings.
CHAPTER ONE Transforming Your Life Through the Power of Story
You may have some strong ideas about what you would like to change in your life. However, you may not know how to write a better script for your personal story and live according to this new, preferred narrative. You may feel you are powerless to affect your circumstances. If you do look back in self-reflection, though, you might discover the themes in your life’s story, choose more empowering ones, and end up with a new, more satisfying story. The circumstances you find yourself in, the experiences you have, and the people you meet change when you take responsibility for the authorship of
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Once we claim our role as the storyteller, we need to make sure that our new script replaces the previous one rather than sitting on the shelf, unread and unlived. This is where most of us struggle. We think we know what we want to create, but our ideas don’t translate to changes in our experiences, behaviors, and patterns. What is missing is our understanding of how to work with forces that are aspects of Source as a means of informing our new stories and bringing them to life. That is what this book is all about: reflecting on our lives and accessing information and energy that can help us
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Most of us don’t take enough time to reflect on our stories and consciously create new ones. Instead, we get busy, anesthetize ourselves in a variety of ways, deny reality, or continue suffering. When our lives remain unexamined, we can become rigid and inflexible. When external crises arise, and they always do, we may break or collapse because we simply are not ready for change. We don’t have the inner resiliency to bend with, readjust to, or absorb new situations. We don’t know how to alter our story to accommodate these new circumstances.
https://archetypalspirituality.org/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_archetypes
https://scottjeffrey.com/archetypes-psychology/
This is a book about the importance of taking time to reflect on and discover the story you have been living, with all of its themes, events, metaphors, and subplots.
Powerful Tools for Changing Your Story and Your Life
When you see you are living a story with aspects that mirror the ones your parents and grandparents lived, you start to understand the importance of identifying themes that affect your beliefs and perceptions and, ultimately, your choices.
Changing your behavior includes changing how you spend your time. If, for instance, you want a deeper relationship with a higher power, you need to set aside time to work with that higher power. If you want to spend your time differently, you have to follow through on your intention to do so. Larger goals need to be broken down into smaller ones that you take action toward achieving; otherwise, your goals remain daydreams.
The Value of Experiential Knowledge
One practice that will complement your working with the practices in the book is writing in a journal, or journaling. As you do the exercises, you will be asking yourself a lot of questions. Keep a written record of all of your answers; they can be grist for your mill as you ponder your old story and dream your new one into being. Reviewing and contemplating your answers to the questions will make it easier for you to develop insights that can inform a new and better story.
Our personal unconscious consists mainly of those parts of our stories that we do not want to remember because they are too painful. Our collective unconscious connects us to the realm of the archetypes and their mythic influence. To craft a new story, we need to loosen the grips of these unconscious forces.
By expressing your story through art, movement, poetry, and other nonverbal or metaphorical ways, you engage both the rational (left) and intuitive/nonrational (right) hemispheres of your brain.
In time, you will become more adept at interacting with energy and symbolic messages through the use of techniques such as journeying and dialoguing. Then, you can discard or replace the metaphors that you have outgrown or that don’t serve you anymore. By changing your metaphors, you usher in forces that can bring to life a new story, perhaps one of an adventurer, a nurturer, or a wise elder. You can stop telling yourself and others that you’re “swimming upstream” and adopt a new metaphor of “surfing the waves of uncertainty” or “going with the flow.”
Finding and Reclaiming the Hidden Pieces of Yourself
Each aspect of your current story has, in one way or another, served a purpose. Even if you want to change or shed part of your current story, it is important to honor it for the role it has played.
In looking at your story, you must free yourself from both sentimentality and cynicism.
A goal of this work is to bring greater integrity, that is, an unbroken condition or wholeness to your life, rather than allowing a disconnection between the actions you take and your conscious beliefs and intentions. Resolving your inner conflicts leads to greater equanimity.
Shamans use specific techniques to alter their consciousness and journey to other energetic realms. There, they gain energy and information they can use to bring about changes in the everyday world. Some say these realms are imaginary; others say they are alternate
According to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, a subatomic particle can exist in any of a number of different locations, or universes, at the same time until its position is determined by an observer. From that moment forward, it only exists in one particular universe. This view, called the many-worlds interpretation, allows for the simultaneous existence of myriad universes, all of which are equally “real.”
Dialoguing is similar to Jungian active imagination—a process in which the ego engages content from the unconscious and then steps back to ponder what has been encountered and find ways to apply newly acquired insights to everyday life.2 Dialoguing, like Jungian active imagination, is a form of engagement with content from the unconscious. Dialoguing specifically involves a back-and-forth conversation with a symbol, inner figure, or emotion, or even an aspect of nature that you came across in a shamanic journey or your work with nature.
Goals of Shamanism
I believe that, at its essence, shamanism incorporates three major tenets or goals: knowing who we truly are; serving others from a place of love, gratitude, and compassion; and having a close connection with the sacred.
Knowing Ourselves
Serving Others
The concept of being of service to others encompasses many things. For example, it can mean being authentic in our relationships, listening well, being kind to others, expressing gratitude, volunteering at a food pantry, or accompanying students on a school field trip. However, balance is required.
Perhaps the most profound gift of service is simply being fully present in the company of others. Giving our full attention and listening intently, without judgment, preconceptions, or expectations, are gifts that can be of tremendous benefit to others as well as to ourselves, regardless of whether external conditions have objectively changed. Being fully present requires being fully open and as accepting as possible.
Having a Close Connection with Source
To achieve the goal of being more present in the moment and open to the voice of Source, we need to recognize those situations where our thoughts, feelings, and roles take over and cause us to act unconsciously from a recurring pattern. We have to free ourselves of our habitual responses, thoughts, feelings, and actions. If we can interject a pause between stimuli that trigger our habitual patterns and our response to such stimuli, we have an opportunity to choose to be more fully present in the moment. We will become better able to broaden our perceptions and have experiences we would not
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Source’s promise is that in each moment, we can begin again and create something new. We might be subject to economic, physical, or other seemingly insurmountable constraints, but if we can change our attitude toward our circumstances and realize that each moment is all that we truly ever have, our beliefs about our lives can improve dramatically.
The choices we make today help determine which of many possible destinies we will experience.
To achieve any of the goals of shamanic work, we must first come into ayni (EYE-nee) a word in the indigenous Quechua language mainly spoken in the Andes. Ayni means reciprocity, right relationship, and harmony with the universe and all aspects of our being. In the process of healing ourselves and changing our stories, we need to bring the many parts of our being into harmonious balance, or ayni. These parts include our body systems, minds, emotions, intents, and spiritual selves. Ayni involves the right thing at the right time in the right amount. The external mirrors the internal, so when we
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On a personal level, we gain harmony by getting rid of habits, situations, and relationships that no longer serve us and replacing them with ones that serve us better, and by experiencing ayni with all aspects of ourselves, even the ones that make us uncomfortable. We nurture ayni by being open to hearing the voice of Source. At the collective level, we move toward ayni when we honor one another and the planet on which we live.
Shamans say that as we change our perceptions, we change our experience of being in the world.
How do our experiences shape and color our perceptions of the world?
“Honoring Source” means acknowledging the sacredness of our interconnection with the Quiet and the matrix and seeing that we are tied to all that exists or that will exist.
