One of the people with whom I piloted the Life Mapping tools provided in Your Life Path: Life Mapping Tools to Help You Follow Your Heart, and Live Your Dream, Now! (Skyhorse, 2018) was a brilliant young man who gave himself the fictional name Thomas, as he was about to embark on his graduate studies in Philosophy and Anthropology. To begin the life mapping process I ask people to list and describe significant shaping events from their life and then to sort those events into types of situations or events as their Life Themes. Important to the self-discovery goal of this life mapping process is that people are to identify and name these Life Themes themselves.
Thomas named one of his recurring Life Themes as Revealing Myself to Myself. These were critical breakthrough moments of awareness for Thomas when he could finally understand a valuable life lesson. Overall, I have found that the simple process by which “life mappers” are able to identify and recognize the significance of their own recurring Life Themes is always self-revelatory, as it exposes meaningful threads by which a person has woven their own mythic Life Story.
So my next major book project, as a third installment in the self-discovery based Life Paths series (Your Life Path 2018; Better Endings 2022), I am calling Your MyStory; or alternately, YourStory or just MyStory (n.b., blogging confers copyright to the title). After guiding the reader through a few simple steps to identify and name their own Life Themes, I will invite the reader to journal memoirs around these key themes that have punctuated their lives, from past to present to future.
Everyone has certain stories about episodes from their life that they find themselves telling and retelling, over and over again. We embellish these ‘signature’ tales over time, refining their message to impart basic principles we have gleaned from our experience that we may wish to share with others.
As I have presented earlier, I regard the human species as Homo Narrativus. We are, at heart, Storytellers. We live our lives in episodic moments and reflect on our life experiences in mythic terms.
So, these stories that we tell and retell build a narrative corpus of interconnected tales.
For this next year or so I will be introducing and inviting you to journal your own memoirs about a series of common Life Themes. I will also share a process by which you can discover your own versions of these themes and/or discover unique ones. Each, in fact, you will find to be uniquely yours in how YOU have framed the theme and how you assign meaning to your own Life Story episodes.
YourStory reveals your MyStory, see?
Next time then, I will begin with a Theme very near and dear to my heart: Pet Tales. Reflecting on this theme I realize I could (and might just) write an entire book around this one theme. I have been an animal lover and Soul pet companion all this life, and I have learned many life lessons about unconditional love from my other-than-human animal Friends.
Thanks for your patience, and for reading!
Better Endings 