We all tell ourselves stories, stories minds weave for us according to what we remember happened, what we feel we need to tell ourselves.

Each story is recorded and played on repeat and formulates to become our truth.

Our realities become centered around them.

We speak each story to others. We think it therefore it is.

It finds a place in the decisions we make and the way we see ourselves.

This keeps happening, then suddenly we are living a life that is rooted in the very story we once told ourselves, after the break-up, after the disappointment, after that thing happened.

As a true grit romantic, I, like many, have had my heart broken and bruised.

The man I fell in love with didn’t follow me across to the other side of the world as my wander-lusting partner in crime.

I left him to follow my own spirit’s desires.

And so, I needed to tell the tale just right. To fill in the missing pieces myself. To blanket my soul with words of comfort and hope.

Was I not good enough?

No, don’t go there it’s a dark rabbit hole.

Was he not in love with me?

No, that would completely damage the miracle of love I had just experienced.

Was it because he just wasn’t suited to my ever seeking spirit?

No, no, no he was a seeker like me, but in a different way.

So then, what? What’s the story my mind needs to cling onto so that I can survive this without too much trauma?

I know! I’ll dive into the most romantic situation with a hopeful outlook that leaves me able to hold onto something so I don’t have to completely let go.

The story:

He wasn’t ready to wander with me just yet. He needed to go on his own journey first. But, he’ll come find me. He loves me, so he’ll search for me and choose me. If it’s meant to be (which I know it is) then he’ll come back to me. He’ll come for me. I just need to wait.

That was the story. That is what I told myself every day. It was a story I would gladly tell others, since the power of word was my manifesting vibration.

My spirit held onto this man. It held onto the truth that my mind had built up for me.

It was the staff I clasped both hands around and plunged into the earth to strengthen my ability to climb alone.

Until it became my burden.

After the initial tremor of the storm, the staff held me up. But after some time the staff began to rot. It decayed in it’s own dampened age. It lost it’s ability to hold me upright and began to shift my attention from the road I was walking on to the staff’s spoiled condition.

Suddenly, my staff (story) was guiding my direction. It was deciding which routes were better to take and which paths I was completely disinterested in. It blasted my attention from the present journey back into the past and played the story again on repeat, over and over again.

I was in a whirlwind.

I was starving myself from my own reality.

I was captivated by my own romance novel and had become a living, breathing character in it.

And while all that might be rather ethereal and magical, my Self became a ghost to it. I had detached myself from the journey I was on and became incapable of being fully invested in it.

My own story held me back from being the very Self I went out into the world to conquer.

I was exhausted by my own mental deception. A beastly shadow of a life.

One night, immersed in a women’s circle, it finally found me. The truth. My spirit screamed it out.

Free me!

I listened. I took her in. I acknowledged the story and wrote it down. I then crossed it out in ink. I shook my head from one side to the other and shook out the stories right out of my head.

I meditated, went into my mind and told her that it was finished now. That story would no longer be told.

No longer to be repeated. It no longer served me.

Stillness. Like cool water, it cleansed me of the dusty webbed notions and tales.

Letting go of the story that had beautifully bruised me, gave me lightness.

Unattachment.

Freedom to continue my journey with honesty.

I deleted the story.

I took back my reality.

I stood firmly planted in my present without staff.

I made way for the now, for the self, for freedom.

Relephant: 

She Let Go.

Author: Tara Minshull 

Editor: Renée Picard

Photo: author’s own