The Human Story

People tell stories about their lives. It’s human nature. Narrating what’s happening is how the mind tries to make sense of experience. If I told you to stop telling stories altogether, I’d be taking away something essential to being human. The goal isn’t to get rid of the story — it’s to make sure the story isn’t harming you more than the experience itself.

Your story is a mix of emotions, perceptions, beliefs, ideas, morality, religion, and past experience. While it may be based on what happened, it is not the event itself. What happened is a very boring list of observations: “He slammed the door.” “She called him a jerk.” “He walked out.” Without interpretation, that’s all experience is — a chain of observable causes and effects.

The experience is a simple sequence: he said this, so she said that; he did this, so she did that. Each cause generates an effect, and that effect becomes the next cause. It goes back and forth until the interaction ends. Without the overlay of human story, the experience is plain, even dull — which is helpful, because dull things are easier to leave alone.

So what do we do with the story the mind creates?

Use it to find the distortions. Your beliefs, morality, religion, pain, fear, and previous experiences all shape the filter you’re looking through. The story you’re telling is your map to those distortions. When you clear the distortions within yourself, the experience becomes easier to see for what it actually was. And when you see more clearly, you make cleaner choices — and you create fewer distorted cause-and-effect chains moving forward.

The human story is not something you need to get rid of, turn into the villain, or blame for what’s happening. The human story is what makes the unconscious conscious. It’s the mirror reflecting yourself back to you.

In spirituality we often talk about experience as a mirror, but the mirror isn’t the experience — it’s the story you tell about it. That story shows you exactly where you’re still seeing through a distorted lens.

To clarify your perception through the story of experience, you have to focus on yourself, not on what happened. It doesn’t matter why he did what he did. What matters is the story it generated within you. Did it trigger the insecure five-year-old who still feels judged by their parents? Did it awaken a past experience, an old comment, a familiar feeling, a previous relationship, or something else entirely?

The story that rises in the present is the frame built from your past. You’re not reacting to the experience itself — you’re reacting to the unresolved story underneath it. When you see the distortion clearly, you can release the old story. And once you do that, you can reframe the present experience in a way that actually makes sense.

What you’ll notice when you do this consistently is that the present experience loses its punch. It’s no longer entertaining. It’s no longer interesting. The interesting part of your experience was never what was actually happening — it was what it triggered. It’s far more engaging to make up a story about your experience, even if that story creates distortion or pain, than it is to be bored by your own life.

So what do you do if your experience is boring?

Make peace with yourself. Connect to yourself. Understand yourself. Be with yourself. Enjoy yourself.

The common denominator is you. You are the most important thing in your own life. The story only keeps you busy. It doesn’t hold truth, but it does hold a lot of pain. When you hold onto that pain and focus there, you distract yourself from yourself. And for as long as you do that, the distortion continues.

Experience is the entertainment. It’s created by a mix of needing something to do, having eight billion best friends to interact with every day, and having different perspectives, interpretations, and ideas about how things are or how they should be.

The distortion began the moment we tried to explain why things were happening. The human mind wasn’t satisfied with, “This is just a cause and effect chain,” so we invented stories. And once personal preference entered the picture — once we didn’t like what was happening — that story triggered our need for control.

So here we are, living in a world where everyone is trying to gain control over their reality based solely on their personal preferences. And because personal preference doesn’t stay contained, we project it outward onto everyone around us. Politics is just the personal preferences of people in power enforced at scale. Morality is nothing more than exalted personal preference — a belief someone decided should apply universally. It holds no truth except to the person who believes it.

We built an overarching story that says everyone needs to agree with us. Everyone needs to share our beliefs. Everyone needs to see reality the way we do. That need for sameness is a story of control, rooted in nothing more than personal preference dressed up as truth.

The goal is simple: allow the mind to have fun with the human story, but keep it contained. It’s perfectly good entertainment — and it’s also the mirror that shows you what you’re holding onto inside yourself. When used as both entertainment and a mechanism for healing, the human story has purpose beyond creating dysfunction, distortion, and imbalance. The mind calms down when it understands how experience works mechanically, while still getting to enjoy the story it invents.

Use your human story wisely.

Love to all.

Della