Change Your Story, Change Your Life

Learn how you can change the background stories running through your mind.

Have you ever listened to a friend or family member introducing themselves to someone they’ve just met, and noticed how they often say the same things at each introduction? Such introduction stories are one way we can catch a glimpse of what’s usually happening unobserved inside ourselves. It’s understandable to hear someone describing themselves as a “Hurricane Sandy survivor,” or a “California firestorm survivor,” since this is a quick way to bring people current with a general sense of some of the challenges they’ve recently faced.

Stories become much more than “just stories” when they play a constant and active role in our lives. We tell ourselves and others who we are, what motivates us, how we arrived where we are today, and what kinds of challenges we face in the stories we live by. Author Thomas King points out “There are no truths, only stories.” These stories need not stay stuck in one particular type of archetypal plot type, but can be changed in ways that benefit our emotional, mental, physical and spiritual health.

As it turns out, stories are far from passive, inert influences in our lives; they can be every bit as dangerous as they are healing. Author Lewis Mehl-Madrona and his wife Barbara Mainguy share insights for transforming stories from their professional practices in osteopathic medicine and psychotherapy in Remapping Your Mind, with strong support from recent scientific research to explain how and why story therapy can work. Research explaining how the Default Mode Network (DMN) describes activities in the brain region responsible for running the background activity constantly running in our minds. Scientific studies investigating the remarkable efficacy of the Placebo Effect provide insights as to how the stories people tell influence mind-body-spirit health and wellbeing.

Remapping Your Mind provides us with a road map by which we view the inner landscape of our collective minds as the territory of stories we live by. While the case studies and scientific research are quite convincing, I am already aware that the methods described in Remapping Your Mind are effective–because this method is one I have found to be quite reliable when assisting my life coaching clients over the past sixteen years. I have witnessed the same kind of remarkable transformations in peoples’ lives as described in this book, in which people find profound insights in discovering their story, and as they become facile in changing the landscape of the significance and meaning of events and characters in their lives.

There is a kind of magic that occurs when people move out of feeling victimized into a bigger world of more positive possibility, and Remapping Your Mind provides a trusty guide to start this transformation right away.Whether or not you can wrap your mind around the transformative healing power of stories, and even if you don’t yet know what your stories are, Remapping Your Mind will likely be one of your most treasured reference books.

As Thomas King once pointed out, “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” How wonderful that we have a very big say in how we tell the stories of our lives! I highly recommend Remapping Your Mind for anyone interested in self transformation.

You can watch the video edition of this post on YouTube at: http://youtu.be/kYKsL-7yNH4

___________________________

Cynthia Sue Larson is the best-selling author of six books, including Quantum Jumps. Cynthia has a degree in Physics from UC Berkeley, and discusses consciousness and quantum physics on numerous shows including the History Channel, Coast to Coast AM, the BBC and One World with Deepak Chopra. You can subscribe to Cynthia’s free monthly ezine at: http://www.RealityShifters.com