It's time to re-write the story of you

“I hate swimming”, I heard myself saying as I was up to my neck in the cold water of the loch near where I live, on a morning swim surrounded by nature and with a new group of friends.

“Well, that’s clearly not true”, I heard someone say back to me. And, of course, they were quite right. How could I say I hate swimming when there I was, having (voluntarily!) got into my swimming costume, into the water and was doing a good job of keeping afloat? I was swimming……..and I was loving it.

In that moment, I re-wrote the story of who I am.

(in relation to swimming at least!)

I saw something clearly in that moment, you could say I had an insight, which went far deeper and wider than swimming and it is something that I know has the potential to crack open other untruths I’ve been telling myself for years.

For years, I have said I hate swimming;   “It’s boring, I am not very good at it, I don't like getting out of my depth, it’s such a faff to get dressed again when your skin is damp and has that sticky feeling about it.......”. As a result of these thoughts and beliefs, I have found many other ways to get and stay fit, to be in nature and to hang out with friends, so swimming has not featured as part of my life and that seemed just fine to me.

However, in that moment last week, I suddenly realised I was doing the very thing that I believed I hated and, in an instant, the storyline I had had running in my mind for as long as I could remember was scrapped. It just disappeared. I was no longer someone who hated swimming.

And it left me wondering what other stories might disappear just as quickly?

And this isn’t really about swimming! It may appear like that but in fact you could substitute "swimming" for anything. Anything that you have told yourself about yourself and have believed to be true and which has influenced your behaviour and your choices. You see, we are incredibly talented at creating fictitious stories about ourselves and going through life without editing them, updating them or realising we can actually re-write them. It’s usually not until we find ourselves in a situation where we are faced with our story that we are even aware that it’s running in the background.

What I got to see was that it isn’t swimming that I hate, it is what I have been saying to myself about swimming that has caused the feeling of hate and resulted in my avoidance of it. But, being immersed in nature, feeling the rush of wellbeing from the cold water and being in a wide open space resulted in an entirely different storyline being written – I LOVE SWIMMING! 

The thing that changed was my thinking.

In that moment, I re-wrote the story about me and swimming. And that wasn’t all.

In that moment I received a very clear reminder from the universe of how our thinking creates our reality and that we can have a very different experience of reality when we become more conscious of it. When we become aware of the stories that are running in in our mind, some of them for decades or an entire lifetime, we open ourselves up to the possibility of editing and re-writing them which, in turn, opens up a whole new way to experience life.

This moment of awareness or insight, is what happens when we turn our attention inward and start to understand the nature of the mind and how it influences everything we do, how we show up in the world and how the world responds back to us. It is an integral part of the inner work, the journey of discovery, which leads us back to ourselves and invites us to connect with who we are beyond the stories.

So,

• What stories have you been believing to be true? 
• Where have you limited your experience of life by being convinced you do or don’t like something, can or can’t do something? Or by believing yourself to be this kind of person or that kind of person?
• What could change in your life if you were willing to edit or re-write that story?

Join me and a small group of intrepid inner work explorers on our first ever   Inner Work Summer School   and be guided along a pathway to help you answer these and the many other questions that come up when you start looking inwards. With the support and guidance from someone who has walked (and continues to walk) the path you will reveal to yourself how you can radically transform your life and experience it with more enjoyment, ease and freedom.

If you’re interested in finding out more, visit the   dedicated page   on my website or   get in touch   and we can have a chat to see if now is the right time and if the Summer School is the right pathway for you.