Distilled Nugget of Truth

What if you could hand over all the stories you tell yourself to an all-knowing wizard who could look at them with total objectivity and deliver them back to you in a distilled version containing only the truth?

These could be stories about your relationships, your successes, your “failures” and your fears. Most of us tell ourselves elaborate stories about all sorts of things. Why so and so was rude… Why your parents are the way they are and how it affected you… On and on. We do this with just about everything that happens to us in life until our heads are full of tangled webs of story lines that may or may not be true.

Okay, I get that everything is subjective and that our perception is our reality, but frankly I think the stories we tell ourselves can end up to be confining, and possibly even imprisoning.

Last week I experienced a conflict with someone, which put me in a bit of a tailspin… After a couple days of spinning I’d had enough. I was tired of playing the blame game and coming up with a thousand different reasons to justify my position. So I went into prayer and released the whole thing. I asked that it be returned to me in a distilled nugget of truth.

Shortly, within seconds actually, I received the message that I had given too much of myself to this person in the past and that my present and more balanced behavior is now being perceived as selfish.

That’s all… Nothing too profound – just a view of the situation from above. I said to myself, okay I get it, that’s fine, and I still need to do what feels right to me even if it’s being perceived as selfish. A younger, more people pleasing version of myself would never have been okay with being perceived as selfish, but I was strangely fine with it! This nugget, which was fairly small, gave me enough information to move on and stop thinking about the conflict.

Had I not asked for a distilled nugget of truth, I may still be weaving rich tapestries of fiction, which would take up way to much space in my head. I intend to do this with every ongoing story line that I’ve been constructing over the past four and a half decades, and hopefully by the end, my mind will be clear like a bright blue sky ready to receive only the important things in life.