Fall Away. . .

A good storyteller knows its audience, knows how to hook the attention of its audience’s imagination, and make the audience believe its story as being true. Hollywood spends millions of dollars trying to achieve this, by use of special effects and cinematography. The stories that are created in our minds, on the other hand, do not require special effects or literary techniques to make them believable and enduring. Yet they can spin us into another dimension of reality, one that’s distorted in our misinterpresentation of what is really happening in front of us. In our story, we may be the victim, the aggressor, the winner or the loser. We may be all of these. If we look carefully into the stories of our minds, we will see that the misinformation and misinterpretation stems from ourselves. If our hearts have seeds of doubt and suspicion, then we view other’s actions with distrust. If our hearts are contaminated with jealousy or anger, then the words we hear are always with thorns (despite what the actual words may be). If our hearts are full of fear, then we focus on the impossibilities and miss seeing the opportunities. So our feelings become drivers in our view of the world. In our ignorance, we live our lives as puppets to our feelings, fed by the stories of our storytelling-mind. These stories in turn feed our feelings, and the whole cycle begins again. So how do we overcome these strong forces that have dictated our lives for so long? With calm awareness and equanimity, we learn to watch the pendulum swing from one to another without adding to it or trying to control it. There is no use grabbing the pendulum to stop it from swinging. The force itself will only make the pendulum swing even more rigorously. The key here is to be gentle and patient. Watch the pendulum, know its rhythms, and allow it to settle in its own time. Trust that the pendulum, and your river of feelings, will subside to a calm stillness. So, watch the stories being created by the mind. Don’t get swept up in them; don’t add to them with your own fantasies of the future and reconstructions of the past. Don’t give them the power to control over you. See the stories for what they are – the fabrications of your mind. Take yourself out of the story, and in time as the stories become irrelevant to you, they will naturally fall away.