Seeing, Not Judging
When we talk about ‘seeing our stories’, it really means ‘see’ – not judge, resist, remove, delete, or criticize.
The human mind is a story-telling entity. Narratives will continue to arise. That’s not a problem – not something we need to change or fix – not something we can change or fix. But if we are able to make the shift to perceiving the stories as stories, instead of ‘reality’, something changes. Even if we just consciously allow for the possibility that our picture is incomplete or incorrect, we experience life differently and more openly.
Think of a magic trick – once you know how it’s done, you don’t experience it the same way again. It loses some kind of hypnotic power over you. In a way, these internal sagas are the same; once you see through the illusion that our stories are reality, you don’t put as much faith in them or believe in them as strongly.
So the aspiration here is to witness that we are telling ourselves stories, almost like an anthropological study: “Oh, yes, I see, this is the kind of story that arises when such and such happens.” There is no intention to judge or fix the story in this seeing.
Despite that aspiration, though, it’s most likely that the desire to judge or fix will arise in your mind. What we do then is very simple: we see that story too. “Oh, my story is that I need to be better than I am, and so I need to see through these stories right away, or stop telling them.”
Then we can judge ourselves for judging, and so on. Pretty soon, you can see and feel the humour and heartbreak in being a human being…