I was recently having lunch with one of my mentors, who shared that her fight with cancer was teaching her to drop the bullshit more than ever before. She said life is too short, and she was not longer interested in playing prescribed roles.

A few hours later, I was sitting in a meditation hall at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY, listening to Pema Chodron, one of my favorite meditation teachers. The focus of her talk was dropping our stories about ourselves and others.

Both were concepts I had heard before.

But suddenly I “got it” in a different way.

For a split second I had a glimpse of what it would be like to have no stories about myself or other people.

Nothing.

No past mistakes.

It was beautiful.

No past achievements.

It was terrifying.

This ah-ha moment got me to thinking about how often we use our stories as a crutch rather than being fully present in the moment.

We all have so many stories about ourselves. I am mother. I am wife. I am daughter. I love sugar. I need my sleep. I like to write.

We also have stories about other people. She is rich. He is poor. She is a bully. He is a coward. She is corrupt. He is sweet. She is Republican. He is Democrat.

Stories can be so interesting, they can keep us from seeing what is really going on.

What if everything we believe to be true about ourselves and others is nothing more than a piecing together of what we have been told and our own imaginings?

While our stories can be interesting to explore and swap, they can also be a grand distraction.

Our stories about who we want the world to think we are and who we think “they” are can be like a pair of glasses in the wrong prescription. They keep us from seeing what is right before our eyes in the NOW (and give us a headache).

With our stories, we live in a world of drama. There are protagonists and bullies, victims and buried treasure. In Storyland, everything feels very dramatic—dire and desperate.

When our minds are trapped in Storyland, it is easy to see life as a plot about us versus them.

We see the world as polarized (through our blurry “polarizing” lenses).

The biggest cost is that our stories are the foundation for casting others (and ourselves) into empty characters of right and wrong, good and evil, all of which takes us away from fully experiencing who we really are in the present moment.

Realizing Our True Potential

Stepping out of Storyland is like opening a door, and seeing that there is not floor on the other side. It’s just open space.

While being untethered by our stories can be unnerving, it also can be exciting. In that space of nothingness, anything can happen. We might feel sadness, then happiness. We might feel anger and then feel it pass and turn into something else, perhaps indescribable. We never know what we will experience.

When we totally let go, even just for a moment, and can be present with our true state of groundlessness, we experience life not as a story but as a fleeting sequence of sensations, emotions and experiences never to happen ever again quite like this.

When we let go of who we thought we were, we open up to an infinite number of possibilities of who we can become.

Yes, this is a new story.

While I have a long road ahead on this crazy journey of letting go, I am pretty certain of one thing—who we think we are and bullshit are one.