For the last 25 years, I’ve been leading a double life.

By day, I’m a mild-mannered personal-growth blogger, Law of Attraction practitioner, and Life-Optimization coach. But I also have an alter-ego as a novelist and screenwriter with a particular fondness for absurd humor.

For years, I never thought that these two sides would meet. They seemed like completely unrelated parts of me, dwelling in unconnected worlds: personal growth in the “real world” and stories in the world of fiction.

Recently, however, I’ve started to realize that  telling stories isn’t just reserved for fiction writers. In fact, we all tell stories — every day of our lives!

Sometimes we tell our stories to others. Sometimes we just tell them to ourselves. Stories like…

• I’m too old for this.
• I always sabotage myself.
• I’m no good with technology.
• I have the worst luck!
• I catch a cold every winter.
• I always put things off until the last minute.

…and dozens of other “truisms” that we just accept as part of our lives.

Most importantly, I’ve realized just how much the stories we tell direct the course of our lives — and how we can change our lives simply by changing our stories!

For instance, for many years I told stories about how badly I procrastinated: term papers, taxes, Christmas shopping,…you name it, I put it off until the last minute!

These stories seemed harmless enough (even comical, in retrospect)…until I noticed that they were seeping into many areas of my life:

• Emotions – Feeling frazzled, nervous, and stressed-out became the norm.
• Health – After years of stressful deadlines, my adrenals were pretty much shot!
• Relationship – How could I spend enough quality time with Jodi when I was always rushing from one deadline to another?
• Self-Esteem – Perhaps most importantly (and disturbingly), I started seeing myself as someone who could just barely get by, but never really get on top of things — not a complete failure, but certainly a far cry from the inspiring figure I was striving to be!

I pondered what would happen if I let this procrastination story continue indefinitely — and was forced to confront the prospect of a lifetime of stress and struggle.

This was NOT the story I wanted to tell…or live!

Fortunately, I realized that I could rewrite this story. (After all, I’d spent years in training as an author — why not apply these skills to my own life?) I could tell a different story — one about how I learned from the past, made a conscious decision to get on top of my life, and started completing my work in a timely, relaxed manner…while feeling great about myself!

This new story-in-the-making may not have any more literary merit than “The Procrastinator” (and I don’t expect to sell the film rights any time soon!), but it sure is a lot more fun (and relaxing) to live! The old story left me feeling stressed, trapped, and disempowered. The new one leaves me feeling lighter, stronger, more confident, and a whole lot happier…which is exactly the kind of life I want — for myself and for you!

If this sounds like the kind of shift you’d like to make in your own life, then there’s good news: YOU CAN REWRITE YOUR STORY!

And you can get started immediately by taking these four steps:

• Identify Your Story – Recognize which stories you keep retelling and reliving — how they’ve shown up in your life, how they’re controlling you, how they’re keeping you stuck, and why you want to break free of them!
• Release Your Story – Let go of old stories, labels, worldviews, and patterns that aren’t serving you — so that you can make room for those that do help you live your best life!
• Rewrite Your Story – Create a story that empowers you and reflects your highest self!
• Live Your Story – Reinforce the new story and make it a living, breathing part of your everyday life.

I hope you’ll join me in going through this process and creating a more empowering story — one that feels great to write and even better to live. One that has the happy ending (and middle and present) that I know you want and deserve!

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What story of yours would you like to rewrite? What would the new, more empowered story look and feel like? How can you start writing and living this story today?

Thank you so much for being here, and I look forward to hearing all about your wonderful, empowering new stories! 🙂

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience;
we are spiritual beings having a human experience.
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

A lot of people see this famous quote as a reminder of our inherent spirituality. And yes, I agree — we are innately spiritual. It’s who we are.

(Or, at least, half of who we are.)

But I also think that the last part of the sentence is just as important (if not more so): we’re having a human experience.

That means that we laugh, we cry, we sing, we dance, we make mistakes, we fall in love, we fall out of love, we eat, we drink, we play games, we make more mistakes, we laugh some more,…in short, we LIVE!

It also means that we FEEL: we feel joy, we feel pain, we feel at peace, we feel worried, we feel bored, we feel excited, we feel nervous, we feel confident, we feel cool, we feel insecure, we feel good, we feel bad, we feel grief, we feel gratitude,…and sometimes we feel a bunch of these at the same time!

Because we’re human. Because we’re having human experiences. Because that’s what we do on Earth.

Imagine for a moment that there’s a purely spiritual plane — a place where our souls originate and to which they return after our time on Earth. And, in this place, imagine that one soul says to another soul:

“I want to go to Earth — to have a human experience. I want to find out what it’s like to feel joy and pain, to fall in love and to have my heart broken, to listen to The Beatles and go to a Shakespeare play and go to The Rocky Horror Picture Show and play badminton and get a speeding ticket. I want to swim in the ocean and climb a mountain and read a book and eat an avocado and make a friend and lose a friend and make another friend. I want to be human.”

And so that soul goes to Earth, lives a long life, and then returns to the purely spiritual realm. And the second soul asks, “So, what did you do on Earth? ” And the first one says, “I spent most of my time trying to achieve a state of pure spirituality.” And the second soul says, “WHY on Earth [pun intended] would you do that?! You have all of eternity to be in a state of pure spirituality, but you had less than a century to be human! Why didn’t you experience being human while you had the chance?! After all, that was the whole point of going to Earth in the first place, right? If you’d only wanted a spiritual experience, you could’ve just stayed here!”

Of course, it’s not either/or. We ARE spiritual, and we’re also human. To forget either half is to deny half of ourselves. To embrace BOTH sides is to become whole.

So if you’re ever feeling particularly human — for instance, worrying, grieving, or feeling any sort of emotional pain or distress, that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. It doesn’t mean that you’re not sufficiently evolved — that if you could only see things from a higher perspective, you would never feel pain or grief. It means that you’re a living, breathing human, having a human experience. And that’s what we humans are here on Earth to experience.

(Or, at least, half of what we’re here to experience.)

Personally, I’m very wary of people who claim to have transcended human experiences such as pain or grief (or desire or confusion or any of the million other things we mortals experience on a daily basis). Yes, maybe they’re highly evolved beings. Or maybe they’re simply denying their humanity. Or maybe they’re not in touch with their true feelings. Or maybe they’re pushing away human experience because, on some level, they think that it’s not spiritual. Or maybe they see a divide (to my mind, a false divide) between human and spiritual experiences.

But if we truly are spiritual beings, then how can anything we experience not be spiritual? And if we truly are human beings, then how can anything we experience not be human?

So, what if we drop the sense of hierarchy — thinking that spiritual experiences are “better” or “more evolved” than human experiences (or maybe even drop the sense that they’re different at all)? What if we fully embrace the spiritual aspects of our lives and also fully embrace the human aspects of our lives?

Let’s be the spiritual beings we truly are, and let’s have the human experience that we’re here to have!

And let’s celebrate it all.

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(Photo by Frugo)