Co-Authoring the Story of Our Life

Living our life, or better yet, creating our life, is like writing a book with two other authors…on a Google Doc…altogether…at the same time. We are the main character in this story, and yet different forces, and authors, drive us. It can feel noisy and competitive as three collaborators vie to move our story forward, but we can learn to work together. We can learn to co-author the beautiful story of our life. 

The three authors are as follows:

There’s our Highest Self, capable of consciously curating a life of meaning, presence and expansion. The Highest Self is infinitely creative and capable.

Secondly, there’s our Brain. Unconscious and in many ways driven by survival, the Brain tends to react to life in a myriad of ways its found helpful up until now. It tends to the negative, protects itself from danger and wants to keep the story small and predictable. It plays its essential part in keeping the main character alive and well, and we can appreciate that, but its limited as an effective story-teller. Thus, it’s not the best author to let drive the train.

— When I speak of “the Brain" here, I’m offering a personification of our primitive, fear-based systems and the autopilot simplification of the world around us, which are mostly unconscious, not necessarily the whole Brain.

The survival Brain is not exactly “the bad guy”, but in this context, if left to its own devices, it can really run us off course. And while there are so many things that we can do to heal and expand our Brain, subconscious and nervous system, so that it affects our story less and less egregiously, these changes do have to be initiated by our Highest Self. 

Finally, if it makes more sense to you, you can equate the Highest Self to the higher level cognitive and creative functioning of the Brain, distinct from the survival Brain spoken of here. —

The third author, and perhaps the most definitive, is Life itself! It’s doing its own thang and ultimately will swoop in to change the story altogether with a single line or paragraph. It be like that sometimes! Benevolent, or perhaps just neutral, Life itself will affect the story in mysterious ways.

As we begin our life, the Brain and Life tend to write the first couple chapters. Life will drop in, write a paragraph about how our parents scream at each other and call each other names. Having not yet well-cultivated our conscious Highest Self, the Brain steps up and writes in our coping mechanisms and protective perceptions of the world around us. Often, the Brain writes parts that are in resistance to what Life has written. It’s afraid of something added to the story and so has to manage it somehow. As the story goes on, any time Life shows us something similar to these early parts of the story, the Brain will react and rehash the same old bits. It gets repetitive. It get stagnant. And it often stalls the story, rather than driving it forward.

As we grow wiser, our Highest Self begins to take shape and play more of the lead. The Highest Self is the ultimate creative, recognizing that the story is just that, a story! One that can be taken an infinite number of ways, in any direction we want.

At the same time, YOU are your Highest Self, the author, AND the main character of your story - Seemingly paradoxically, you are simultaneously The Universe aware of and commanding itself, and yet a very human being rooted in their humanness. You are both directing the story of your life from conscious awareness and, at the same time, experiencing it firsthand in a human body: the character development, the nuances and beauty of each scene, relationships coming and going, crescendos in plot, rock bottom and the full spectrum of feeling we all must embrace as a part of being human.

But with these two other pesky authors chiming in, it can be a challenge to write a good story! So, how do you deal with the other two with wisdom?! How do you keep your cool when the story veers off of what you wanted it to be?! 

“Damn, I had this epic chapter planned and Life came in and dropped a bomb right in the middle of it!! Now the Brain is all over the place trying to bring back this “victimhood" plot!”

**face-palm**

In improv, theres’s a fundamental practice called “Yes, and..”. As a co-creative practice, improvisation requires us to work together, to accept any premises brought to the scene as truth, and to add onto them. Improv does not work if we decline or resist new lines to the story. We have to respond to them, as best we can, and build off of what they’ve offered. This is the same way we must relate to Life. What Life says and does, even in the times when we believe it to be malevolent, is the reality we must accept and face. When it writes in a paragraph, there’s no use denying it. There is no editing or erasing. What’s been written is now a part of the story. The only way we can collaborate effectively is to “Yes, and..” To Life.

Because if you fight Life, you will not win, and your story will stall. Best to accept what’s been written and move forward with it. Better yet, develop the part and give it meaning!

That means that when Life brings challenging circumstances to our story, it’s in our best interest to accept them and get creative with it. The Brain will tend to resist, to interject its own survivalist spin on things. It will rehash old stories from earlier on, our coping mechanisms developed in earlier chapters. This is where the story can get dragged down. This is where the plot can get lost. And unlike Life, what the Brain writes is not always true, or set in stone. While Life will life and there’s no way around it, the Brain will create parts of the story that we have to challenge. Left unattended, if WE, our Highest Selves, don’t show up in these pivotal moments, the Brain may take the story far off course, in its own perverse direction.

And this is an ongoing work of art. Life is life-ing, the Brain will write in its bits about how we are the victim and never going to amount to anything and yadayadayada. The whole story could go on that way, running in circles, going nowhere. We MUST respond. We must rise to the creative challenge of working together with these two other, at times seemingly out of control, authors of our story! If we don’t realize our deep, inherent power within to write the story of our lives, “someone else” will write it for us, and the story does end up quite bland and tragic that way.

The Brain just wants to feel safe. It just wants to have a part in the story! And for the most part, thats okay - give your Brain a spot at the table, but don’t let it plot out the main story arcs. Allow it the freedom to be and to express, and as your Highest Self, respond lovingly “there, there Brain, I know that was a startling bit there that Life threw at us, but here’s how we can move the story forward!” We don’t exactly have to respond “Yes, and…” with the Brain. But we do need to understand the motivations behind its penmanship and compassionately accept it as one of our storytellers. Furthermore, we can write in parts that heal and expand the Brain and nervous system, so that it sticks to doing its most meaningful work keeping the main character alive, healthy and well, leaving the creative freedom to those who can best handle it.

Life, as far as I’m concerned, is actually a benevolent author. Even in times of stress or loss, when the Brain tends to react to Life as if it were stealing something from us, our Highest Self has the capacity to respond to Life’s paragraphs or chapters with perspective, understanding and wisdom. It’s certainly a skill of the author that takes time to develop, and with the Brain chiming in, often in unhelpful ways, it can be a learning curve to get this down. But ultimately, in line with the infinite creativity of the Highest Self, there is nothing Life can write into our story that we can’t riff off of and make into something beautiful. We are fucking resilient.

Of equal importance is to acknowledge the many little literary gifts that Life sprinkles into the story on a daily basis. If we are caught up in the noise of the Brain’s reactive passages, we may miss these, only to acknowledge Life angrily when it drops bigger bombs on the script. Life is constantly and consistently writing in these beautiful little moments to accent the story, setting a beautiful scene from which the story can emerge life-like and awe inspiring. Look for them and appreciate them. 

All in all, we are writing our story together with our Brain and Life. The story will turn out best if we learn to collaborate. As all three of us play an integral role, we cannot do it alone. The writer’s journey is to acknowledge what can and can’t be done, where you have creative power and where you don’t. We cannot change the circumstances of Life but we sure can influence them, and most importantly we can respond them with a “Yes, and..”. And our Brains, well they are a gift of evolution that can be quite mischievous if left unkempt. Learning to work with them lovingly, but not allowing them to drive the story forward (or backward, or straight down, or in a circle) all on their own is essential to writing the wonderful story we all want to tell.

YOU, your Highest Self, are the lead author. Accepting the other two for who they are, reeling them in when necessary, responding accordingly and leading the story through the beautiful chapter’s of your life is your mission. Recognize that you hold the pen.

Write willingly. Write with wisdom. Write wonderfully.