Your MyStory Life Takeaways

Allow me to introduce a journaling prompt I have been working with lately for reflecting on My Story tales:  those events or experiences which have become meaningful episodes within a person’s overall Life Story. What if you were either facing your impending death transition or if you had recently ‘crossed over’ and find yourself reflecting on the life you have just completed. Then what if some spiritual Being or your own higher consciousness Self were to ask about the life you have just completed:

“What Life Lessons did you learn well, and how?”

I am playing with ideas for this prompt based on the book The Journey of Souls, by Dr. Michael Newton, and the also afterlife-based comedic film, “Defending Your Life.”

In The Journey of Souls, the psychiatrist Dr. Newton reports on tape recorded interviews he conducted with over one hundred clients under hypnosis, responding to his questions about what has happened between lives for these individuals. While these clients did not know each other and had no knowledge of the questions they would be asked under hypnosis, the degree of intersubjective agreement or similar sorts of afterlife accounts was nothing short of amazing.  Most described meeting with a relative or spiritual agency and later meeting with a “soul group” of Souls who checked in with one another between lives to talk about the lives they had completed, the lessons they had learned, and where they might have fallen short of their goals or ideals from that time around. A spiritual guide would then also help the soul to reflect on these factors, often in order to prepare for the next incarnation. 

In the lighthearted film “Defending Your Life” (with Mel Brooks, Meryl Streep, and Rip Thorne), the scenario is Judgement City: a first stop in the near afterlife where Souls go to trial—with an assigned defense lawyer—to determine whether they must return for another physical embodiment or whether, instead, they have demonstrated the spiritual capacity or readiness to “move on” to higher spiritual dimensions. The Mel Brooks character, Daniel, meets and falls in love there with a woman, Julia, played by Meryl Streep, who herself has recently completed a very heroic lifetime; she is a no brainer for moving on.  Not so much for Daniel, though; his lawyer (Thorne) has a hard time trying to convince a judge and jury of his readiness to move on because he had shown fear and avoided risk too often in his recent life.  The ‘better ending’ story twist in this film is well worth watching; I will not spoil the ending for you here.  But the point here, as in The Journey of Souls, is that reflecting on our Life Story–and I would say especially BEFORE passing on–can help reveal the lessons of a lifetime that we may have come to Earth to learn.

images are from pixabay.com

So then, imagine one of these fantastical scenarios: meeting with a spiritual guide or your soul group between lives (after this one), or ‘defending your life’ in Judgement City.

“What Life Lessons did you learn well, and how?”

I am doing my own private journaling in my own MyStory Journal for this one, and I encourage you to do the same.  One suggestion is using a dialogue format with your spiritual guide, members of your soul group, or with your own Higher Self. Just let the dialogue flow until you feel you have identified some meaningful life lessons relating to some of your most meaningful MyStory events. These might be episodes worth also expanding upon in your journal.

Have at!

Story Seeds

I use the expression Homo Narrativus (coined by others, as I have recently learned) to frame the primary human cognitive orientation to conceive of our life experiences as either linear-serial, cyclic, or random episodic narrative events (see Your Life Path, 2020; Better Endings, 2022).   For as far back as we can trace language, every human or hominid society has had a storytelling culture. We reflect upon and relate to others about our life experiences—even our dreams—in narrative form. We construct our life history in terms of narrative episodes. We each possess, and develop over our lifetimes, a Life Story that in large part defines as well as expresses our individual identity as embedded within our collective cultural Whole.

We are Storytellers.  And the stories we tell, both to ourselves and others, are time capsules: seeds that inform and influence the further unfolding of events that either complete or transform our Life Story narrative and hence that affect the development of our own—and significant others’—character arcs over time.

This is why telling and reflecting on our own and others’ stories matters so much: they are the stuff of myth and legend as well as the foundations of our own Life Path.

Any story conveys a message linking past, present, and future as a meaningful whole; a narrative moment that encapsulates lessons either learned or not, repeated or abandoned.

Your story…what I call in this blog your MyStory…is a gold mine to explore and to reveal.  Your story feeds not only your own unfoldment but is a seed that can nourish others.

Why do we read and tell bedtime stories to our children or watch television serials or watch some films over and over again? This is how we understand the dramatic and mythic contours of life itself and one another. 

So I encourage you to journal about your MyStory, to reflect upon the meaning of your own uniquely informative story seeds!

images are from pixabay.com

As a lighter way of thinking about all this, I am reminded of one of my favorite movies: Stranger than Fiction.  The plot itself works precisely because it acknowledges the universal human experience of living our lives as Story. The main character Harold (played brilliantly by Will Ferrell), an IRS auditor somewhat bored with his lackluster life, comes to realize he is actually a rather lackluster fictional character in a novel being written by an author other than himself (played also brilliantly by Emma Thompson).  Harold consults an English Literature professor (Dustin Hoffman) to better understand his predicament, and the professor asks him to take notes on his life experiences to determine whether indeed the story he is a character within is a tragedy or a comedy. I will not spoil the rather satisfying ‘better ending’ in this tale, but I highly recommend the film.  Suffice to say in the end Harold’s character in the author’s story takes a transformational turn once Harold becomes actively engaged in figuring out who he is in this story, hence making it his own story after all.

Happy Tales!