Pick up the pieces of your life who put them back together with the words you write, all the beauty and piece and the magic that you'll start too fun when you write your story. You got the words and said, don't you think it's down to let them out and write them down on Colord. It's all about and write your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm your host, and on today's episode, I want to talk about this idea of the story you need to stop telling. And I have to give a lot of credit to the unmatched, the amazing, the immortal David White, who is an Irish poet, a philosopher, an author, an amazing thinker that I've been following for a long time now. I think I originally learned about David White via John o'donahue, who also similar description. Also Irish poets famously wrote books of blessings that are just the most incredible, amazing pieces of writing. A lot of the blessings are written for certain occasions, so you could read the blessing at like a graduation, but they're blessings for thresholds, they're blessings for death, or blessing for someone who's in a funk, or blessing for a depression someone who's experiencing depression. So they're kind of themed blessings, but they are really these little miniature poems that are so profound and so beautiful and just like speak exactly to the circumstance that you're in. They're really really incredible. I found John o'donahue first through his book that I think is just called Book of Blessings, and then learned about David White and David White's poetry through John o'donahue. And by the way, if you want to do yourself a favor, like a three hour favor, go find Rick Rubin's podcast and listen to the two back to back episodes that are conversations with David White. This man will just enrapture you with his wisdom, with his just his tone a voice, the approach he takes, the way he reads his poetry. It's almost like having a prayer spoken over you or a blessing read over you, like your your whole body. Your vibration will change instantly when you hear this man begin reading his own poetry, or not even reading he's reciting his own poetry. He says in that interview that he has thousands of poems memorized, many of which are his own, and then many of which are written by other poets. And hearing him recite the poetry, hearing him talk about his love for poetry, it's like it takes you into a different dimension and whatever felt like it was weighing on you just feels like it lifts right off of you. I don't know if you've had that experience before in like a spiritual environment or just even in nature, where you feel like your whole vibration shifts because of something that's going on in your environment, like you're really stressed. But then you're sitting by the ocean and something about the sound of the waves and sitting there in the sand just feels like it changes the entire nature of of how you're relating to the world. And suddenly your heart rate slows and you aren't feeling that same heaviness, and your whole body relaxes and you feel like you can take a deep breath. That's the feeling of listening to David White read his poetry, and something I've been trying to do recently, and this is a challenge I'll extend to you as well, because I think it's really beneficial. Is I've been trying to memorize a poem a week, or you could even do a poem a month. You don't have to do a poem a week. There are a couple of reasons why I think this is really beneficial and helpful. One is that with the introduction of technology into our lives and with smartphones and just the space that technology is taking up, we have to memorize so much less today than we did ten or twenty years ago that our brains don't often get that practice of memorization. So memorizing really anything is such good exercise for your brain. It's like taking your brain to the gym and doing a workout of the gym for your brain. And poetry is an opportunity for your brain to memorize something that you can go back to in times of distress and use as a tool the same way that I was talking about that feeling of sitting next to the ocean when you're feeling like life is really chaotic and there's all this input and you can't find a way to ground yourself Poetry is a really amazing way to ground yourself. And just like people will do with scripture memorization or memorization of like maybe inspirational quotes or quotes from books or whatever, I use poetry the same type of a way, where I go back to the phrases that are in poems, or you know, just a particular word combination. Maybe it's not even an entire sentence, but I'll go back to that particular part of a poem and I'll use it as a way to soothe myself in times of stress. So David White, for example, has a poem called Everything Is Waiting for You, And I won't spoil it by reciting the entire poem because he recites it on that Rick Rubin interview and does it much better than I ever could. But I go back to these lines all the time. Great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone, as if life were a progressive and cunning crime, with no witness to the tiny, hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. I'll go back to that line over and over and over again. Now that I have that poem memorized and say to myself, to feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Or Marry Oliver her poem wild Geese. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk for a thousand miles on your knees through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. I might be getting some of that wording wrong, but that idea of being able to go back to that phrase you do not have to be good. I'll remind myself that in certain moments of perfectionism, or when I find myself being really hard on myself or moving to shame, when I make a mistake or I have a moment of failure, I'll tell myself, you do not have to be good. You only have to let yourself. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. And it's such a comfort in time of great stress or chaos, or when I'm feeling really overwhelmed. These are anchors, there are words that I can come back to. So it's both just really good exercise for the brain, like memorizing times tables or memorizing. You know, I don't know, like facts about animals or something like that like we do in elementary school. It's just good exercise for the brain as we get older since we don't have to do that as often. And it's also this great comfort, this handhold, this grounding mechanism that we can use in times of stress. And so poetry, I think for some people poetry can feel like it's kind of highbrow or elitist, or it's like out of reach kind of And I've heard a lot of people say about poetry, and I used to feel this way too about poetry before I had a major in English in college and really fell in love with poetry. But I used to always say, I don't really get it. You know, you read a poem and you're like, I don't understand what the author was trying to say, because poetry isn't spoken as directly as a book is. It's not, you know, a piece of prose. The author's job is to really directly explain to you what they're trying to say. And if you walk away from a piece of prose without knowing what the author's trying to say, then the author didn't really do their job. But poetry is different. Poetry is about creating images and drawing connections from one thing to another, and so it's a less linear piece of writing, and it can be sometimes more challenging for us to wrap our brains around. But I think this is the invitation that poetry offers to us, is it offers us to move from brain to heart. It offers us to drop from intellectualizing everything and needing to fully understand every single thing that an author says, to just dropping into our heart space and hearing words and asking yourself, how do these words make me feel? And one of the things that my a poetry teacher in college, used to always ask us that was really helpful is what are some of the sounds in this poem that really stick out to you? Because poetry isn't always about, you know, the literal meaning of the words. Sometimes it's just about the way that it sounds rolling off the tongue of the person who reads it. And David White talks about this in the episode with Rick Rubin. He talks about how poetry originally was an oral art form. It was always meant to be spoken out loud. I don't know if you've ever heard a spoken word poet speak their poetry and it sounds like music. But this is really what poetry was meant to be. It was meant to be an art form for the ears, you know, so sort of like tickle your ears like you're hearing senses. And yes, poetry can be read on the page two, of course, but I think there's something really special about hearing it spoken out loud. So I do recommend going to listen to that Rick Rubin episode with David White. Again, like I said, this is a three hour episode. It's two back topack episodes, and each one is an hour and a half. But it's absolutely worth the listen, even if you don't make it all the way through both episodes if it feels too long for you. But I have a feeling that when you get into the episodes, you're going to be enraptured like I was, and really taken with the sound of David White's voice and the beauty of the words that he's written and the way that he speaks them, and just the interchange between Rick and David is so special, and I'm very curious to hear what you think of it after you take a minute to listen. Anyways, all of that was kind of a big detour, but I think it will apply to what I want to talk about today. A detour to introduce you to David White and to the concept and the power of poetry and why that matters so much, because David White is the person who originally turned me on to this idea of the story we need to stop telling. The way he says it is there's a conversation you need to stop having. And he teaches a conversational leadership class that lasts for seven weeks, and my husband took the class, and each the seven weeks has a different theme, but the very first theme in conversational leadership is about the conversations we need to stop having. And this is what made me think of this idea of the story that we need to stop telling, because each of us have a conversation we need to stop having, or a story we need to stop telling. And you could talk about it either way. I think it's the same concept, but with the idea of write your story. All of us find ourselves telling a certain story over and over and over again in our lives, and there comes a point where you realize, I need to stop telling this story. You know, the stories that we write, the stories that we tell, become kind of the architecture of our life. And I talk about this both in the power of writing it down and I talk about it and write your story, and I even unpack the science behind this. This is not like woo woo stuff. There's actual science that shows that the stories that we tell are building the network of the web of neural pathways that are in our brain that help us understand how the world works. So when you tell yourself a story like I'm a loser, I'm a failure, whatever, that neural pathway really becomes the architecture of how you see the world. So in some ways, no matter what happens to you, that's the lens that you're reading your life through, and so you're always going to find a way to make the events that take place in your life fit into that lens. So this is the power of utilizing a tool like write your Story, is that you can take an old story and upgrade the story, rewrite the story into something new, into something more expansive, into something with a little bit more spaciousness to it, so that you can begin to experience your life in a different way. And all of us have these moments of frustration where we feel like we're banging our head against a brick wall, or we're bumping up against a glass ceiling or whatever. And I've had these moments so many times in my life, and I've had them really intensely in the last five years, which I've talked about at length on this show. So that's no secret here. We have these periods of time, these seasons in our life where we feel like I'm stuck, like I can't get out of this environment that I'm in, this small room that I've built myself inside of the architecture that I've created inside my brain. No matter what I do, I can't seem to kind of get myself beyond these four walls. And I think this is the power of asking ourselves the question before we say, how do I want to rewrite my story? Or you know, what story do I want to tell? We almost can't even get there yet, is David White's point. His point that he makes is we can't get to what story do I want to tell? Or what conversation do I want to have? Is how he would say it, until we ask ourselves the question what conversation do I need to stop having? And I love how David White talks about if you don't know what conversation you need to stop having, just ask your spouse, or ask your close friends, or ask a family member, because they will tell you what conversation you need to stop having. It's likely a conversation that's been on repeat for a really long time. And sometimes the people in our life who are closest to us are much better at pinpointing those conversations that are old and tired than we are, because to us, it's just normal life, and to them, they're just able to see it with more objectivity than we are. So if you're not sure what story you need to stop telling, you could ask someone in your life. But before we can think about what story do I want to tell, we have to ask ourselves the question, what story do I need to be done telling? And this really opened up an epiphany for me when I heard him say this on the interview with Rick Rubin, because I started to think, you know, I've done a lot of thinking in the last five years about the conversations I do want to be having the story I do want to be telling what I do want to be taking place in my life. And I think in the world of self help or spirituality or manifestation or whatever you want to call it, we hear a lot of talk about focusing on the positive. And I think I've been trying to do that, really focusing on like what do I want instead of what don't I want? And I think David White brings up a really amazing point that we can't really create something new until we take a good look at what we have created, what we have already created, where it came from. And even he he doesn't use this language, but I would use this language. Even can we find a way to bring some love to the story that we created that needs to be done, It needs to be gone, it needs to be you know, buried. Can we find a way to bring some love to that story? Because maybe you have a story that you always fail at what you try, or maybe you have a story that you don't deserve love, or maybe you have a story that you know don't have what it takes to be in a long term committed relationship, or maybe you have a story that you know you can't take up too much space in the world, or that you're irresponsible or whatever. It is these stories that we carry around in our bodies, and until we're willing to really sit with that story and take a look at it and ask ourselves, are we ready to be done with this? You know, where did this story come from? Until we take some time to do that, we're not really ready to build something new. And so I think I've gotten caught in this trap a few times in the last handful of years as we've been navigating some challenges and difficulties in our life, particularly with my career or my husband's career. I guess I should say we took a big risk on a business venture. We felt like it was a strong calling in our lives, like we were invited into this thing that felt much bigger than us. We knew that, we knew that, we knew we were supposed to do it. We invested tons of time and energy and all of our savings into this venture and ended up losing everything. And I had so many questions after it all fell apart, about why would we be taken on this journey if it was just going to all fall apart at the end. You know, at first, it was just like, well, this whole thing feels really unfair. Then it felt like maybe I misunderstood. Maybe it was never a calling, Maybe it was just we were out there on our own, just kind of deciding that we were going to do these things, and it's just kind of a coin toss, like maybe you succeed, maybe you fail. And so I spent a long time trying to figure out which was which. And here's the point that I'm trying to make. I think there comes a point where you have to look at the way you're telling the story to yourself and ask yourself, am I ready to be done with this story? Am I ready to be done telling the story of Pinewood Surf Club? And I want to just share with you if you're a longtime listener, especially if you listened all the way through the last season, for example, if you've been with me for a while and you've heard me tell the whole story start to finish, you're probably one of those people in my life who could say, Okay, we're maybe ready to be done telling this story. And I do feel like I'm coming to the end of the usefulness of the story. There's a period of time where a story telling a story over and over feels pretty useful because you're still trying to understand it. In fact, I read this amazing statistic, or not even really as statistic, I don't know what you would call it. I read this amazing article about kids and why kids like to read the same books and watch the same shows over and over again, and since I have a three and four year old, this was so poignant to me. I'm like, why will they watch the same episode of the same show over and over again. There's this episode of a show that my daughter likes to watch. She's four and a half, and it's an episode where in the episode, the little girl learns how to swim, and I swear to you she's watched this episode probably fifty times, and she still asks for it when we sit down to watch TV. She wants to watch the same episode of the same show again. And this article was essentially saying that kids watch the same show or read the same books over and over and over again until they understand them and then they're ready to move on. And it made me wonder if maybe we do the same thing with our stories. Maybe we tell our stories over and over and over and over again until we fully understand them, and then when we fully understand them, we're ready to move on. And I do feel like this story that I've been telling about this risk that we took and the way things turned out and it not going the way that I hoped it did, is a story that I've been trying to understand. And I've been really telling myself the story, telling you, the story, telling anybody who will listen to the story hundreds of times until I can understand it. And only recently have I felt like, oh, I think I'm really starting to get it. Like I talked about on last week's episode, I'm starting to be able to receive the gifts that this difficulty wanted to show me. And when I first started telling the story, I wasn't in that place. I wasn't ready to receive what the story was trying to offer me. But now I'm really beginning to see it from that perspective. And one of the things I'll tell, just this quick example, just as a way to put some meat on the bones, my daughter recently came home from the little day camp that she goes to, and one of her friends at camp had told her this scary story about a were wolf that I think the little girl's older brother had told to her. And when this friend told Nella about the werewolf, this like set off a chain reaction of just absolute fear and terror. At bedtime, Nella couldn't, you know, whereas normally bedtime as no drama, no fuss. She would go down very easily, and now all of a sudden, she didn't want to be left in her room. She didn't want to be in the dark by herself. You know, her bedroom's upstairs and our main family room is downstairs, so she didn't want to go upstairs and put her clothes on by herself. She didn't want to be even in the other room from mom or dad. You know. Sometimes I would load the kids into the car and then like run back inside and get something else that we needed before we leave. And it's not like I'm leaving the kids for thirty minutes. I'm just you know, for thirty seconds while I run in the house and get a water bottle or something. The kids would sit in the car and Nella has started asking me when I walk out to the car, Mom, do you have everything that we need? Well, this fear has just taken over her life. It's just taken over her body. It's so much fear. And I've been in these long conversations with her recently about how important it is to face our fears, because until we face our fears, we are overcome by them. They rule our lives. I said to her, do you want to spend the rest of your life being afraid that a werewolf is going to jump out of your closet in your room? Or do you want to come with mom? And I'll hold your hand and we can go up to your room together and look in the closet and you'll see there's nothing there, and I'll be with you the whole time, and we're going to look your fear right in the face, and we're going to see that you're totally safe, and then we can just put this whole thing to bed. And so she's been kind of percolating that and processing it, and as I've been having that conversation with her, I've thought so much about myself and about this time that we've been in and about how this season for me is really about facing my fears. It's about facing my fears of not having enough, facing my fears of running out, facing my fears of bankruptcy, facing my fears of losing our house, facing my fears of failure, facing my fears of the list could go on. So much of this time has been about facing my fears and realizing that the thing that I have let unconsciously control my life, this fear that I'm not going to have enough, that I'm going to run out, that we're going to lose, this that even after everything we've built, it's all going to be taken away from us, that the rug's going to be pulled out. That fear has been unconsciously ruling my life. And it isn't until you face your fear that you're able to conquer it, to overcome, to move on in such a way where, yeah, maybe that happens. Is it the preference? No? Is it the ideal? No? Is it something that I'm pointing myself toward. No. But oddly, this is the weird thing. The more we fear something, the more we point ourselves towards it. And so I've realized this that because I was so afraid of all of these things happening in a weird way, it either needed to happen or I invited it to happen. I'm not sure around the language of this. Yet it needed to happen, or I invited it to happen, or it is a gift that it happened, because then when it happens, you can look it right in the face and go, oh, this thing, this were wolf, that I've been afraid of all this time, is actually pretend it doesn't even exist. It's all in my mind. It's imaginary. And once I realized that, I can put it to bed, and then I don't have to live my life in fear of it anymore. And can it still happen? Sure? Maybe it could. I do think it's sort of a coin toss. It's like you try something risky and it's the toss of a coin. Maybe it's heads, maybe it's tails. Maybe when maybe you lose. That's true with anything that we try, and the more risk that you put into something, this is the whole point of risk, right, It's the whole definition of risk that the risky or something is, the more you have to lose if it falls through. And so we took a risk. It didn't work out the way that we thought it would, and that's just the end of the story, and we can be done telling that story. Now, I really do feel like I'm coming to the place in my life where I'm ready to be done telling that story, because I've already extracted all of the goodness, Like I've pulled out all the gifts that this hardship wanted to offer me, and I'm ready to move on to the next story in my life. So I don't know what that story is for you, or, as David White would say, what's the conversation you need to stop having. What's the story you need to stop telling. What's the conversation you need to stop having? And I want to really make sure that I say, I'm not asking this question from a place of shame, So let me just parse out the difference for you. I'm not asking this question to say, like, if you were really strong, you know, if you were really evolved, if you were really wise, you'd stop telling this story. You know, get over it already. That's a very different energy than the energy I'm bringing to this question, Because the story in your life that's ready to be put to bed will feel ready to be put to bed. If you would have asked me two years ago if I was ready to be done telling the story about this thing we were trying to build, and how it might not work out. I wouldn't have been ready to be done because it wasn't time for it to be done. But like everything, stories run their course, and there comes a point where you are ready to be done telling the story. You've already extracted all the goodness that the story had to offer you. You've already learned all the lessons that the story had to teach you. You've already fully understood everything that took place in the story. And if you haven't gotten there yet, there's no shame. It doesn't mean that you're not as evolved, it doesn't mean that you're not as wise. It doesn't mean anything about you, except just that the story is still working in your life. And if there's a story that's ready to be done, it will feel really ready to be done. It's going to feel like what a relief. I can set this aside. I have just exhausted this story for all that it's worth. I've told it a thousand times. It is ready to be put to bed. One other quick example I'll give, because it's slightly different, is a client I worked with a long time ago. I actually wrote about her and write your story. Her name is Mary, and she told me that she had a story from her childhood that was really fascinating and very dramatic and had lots of human interest in it, and people loved to hear her story, and so she would be asked in church groups or in school groups, or in front of, you know, large crowds of people to come and tell this story to folks. And she did that for a long time, and people would always say, it's so inspiring, I can't believe that you've overcome what you've overcome. Amazing how you've become the person who you are inspite of everything you faced. And for a while that worked really well for her, and at one point she realized, I'm very ready to be done telling this story. It's not that it's stopped being inspiring for others, it's that it's stopped being expansive for me. So I want you to take that into consideration too, as you think about the story that you're ready to be done telling. It may not be that the story is no longer inspiring for others. It may be that the story is no longer expansive for you. That telling the story for you in order to tell it. You almost have to put yourself back into a smaller box, and you're ready to move on from that box. You're ready to tell a bigger story. Is there a story in your life that you keep telling repetitively even though you can kind of feel in your system, in your heart, in your gut that you're ready to be done telling this story. That's the story that is ready to be done. That's the story that you're ready to stop telling. So as you consider the story that you're ready to be done telling, also take some time and listen to Rick Rubin and David White and report back. Let me know how it feels for you to listen to David White share his poetry, to share other poetry, to hear the two of them talk. Let me know if you feel what I felt, that feeling of being transported to another world, or like you're sitting next to the roaring sound of the ocean waves, or like in the middle of a forest or something and it just completely changes your vibration. And also let me know if you're going to take on the poetry challenge, what poems are you going to memorize? Are you going to do one a week or one a month. I would love to hear from you. You can find me over on Instagram and Ali Fallon and I will look forward to seeing you next week on The Writer Story podcast

Pick up the pieces of your life who put them back together with the words you write, all the beauty and piece and the magic that you'll start too fun when you write your story. You got the words and said, don't you think it's down to let them out and write them down on Colord. It's all about and write your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm your host, and on today's episode, I want to talk about this idea of the story you need to stop telling. And I have to give a lot of credit to the unmatched, the amazing, the immortal David White, who is an Irish poet, a philosopher, an author, an amazing thinker that I've been following for a long time now. I think I originally learned about David White via John o'donahue, who also similar description. Also Irish poets famously wrote books of blessings that are just the most incredible, amazing pieces of writing. A lot of the blessings are written for certain occasions, so you could read the blessing at like a graduation, but they're blessings for thresholds, they're blessings for death, or blessing for someone who's in a funk, or blessing for a depression someone who's experiencing depression. So they're kind of themed blessings, but they are really these little miniature poems that are so profound and so beautiful and just like speak exactly to the circumstance that you're in. They're really really incredible. I found John o'donahue first through his book that I think is just called Book of Blessings, and then learned about David White and David White's poetry through John o'donahue. And by the way, if you want to do yourself a favor, like a three hour favor, go find Rick Rubin's podcast and listen to the two back to back episodes that are conversations with David White. This man will just enrapture you with his wisdom, with his just his tone a voice, the approach he takes, the way he reads his poetry. It's almost like having a prayer spoken over you or a blessing read over you, like your your whole body. Your vibration will change instantly when you hear this man begin reading his own poetry, or not even reading he's reciting his own poetry. He says in that interview that he has thousands of poems memorized, many of which are his own, and then many of which are written by other poets. And hearing him recite the poetry, hearing him talk about his love for poetry, it's like it takes you into a different dimension and whatever felt like it was weighing on you just feels like it lifts right off of you. I don't know if you've had that experience before in like a spiritual environment or just even in nature, where you feel like your whole vibration shifts because of something that's going on in your environment, like you're really stressed. But then you're sitting by the ocean and something about the sound of the waves and sitting there in the sand just feels like it changes the entire nature of of how you're relating to the world. And suddenly your heart rate slows and you aren't feeling that same heaviness, and your whole body relaxes and you feel like you can take a deep breath. That's the feeling of listening to David White read his poetry, and something I've been trying to do recently, and this is a challenge I'll extend to you as well, because I think it's really beneficial. Is I've been trying to memorize a poem a week, or you could even do a poem a month. You don't have to do a poem a week. There are a couple of reasons why I think this is really beneficial and helpful. One is that with the introduction of technology into our lives and with smartphones and just the space that technology is taking up, we have to memorize so much less today than we did ten or twenty years ago that our brains don't often get that practice of memorization. So memorizing really anything is such good exercise for your brain. It's like taking your brain to the gym and doing a workout of the gym for your brain. And poetry is an opportunity for your brain to memorize something that you can go back to in times of distress and use as a tool the same way that I was talking about that feeling of sitting next to the ocean when you're feeling like life is really chaotic and there's all this input and you can't find a way to ground yourself Poetry is a really amazing way to ground yourself. And just like people will do with scripture memorization or memorization of like maybe inspirational quotes or quotes from books or whatever, I use poetry the same type of a way, where I go back to the phrases that are in poems, or you know, just a particular word combination. Maybe it's not even an entire sentence, but I'll go back to that particular part of a poem and I'll use it as a way to soothe myself in times of stress. So David White, for example, has a poem called Everything Is Waiting for You, And I won't spoil it by reciting the entire poem because he recites it on that Rick Rubin interview and does it much better than I ever could. But I go back to these lines all the time. Great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone, as if life were a progressive and cunning crime, with no witness to the tiny, hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. I'll go back to that line over and over and over again. Now that I have that poem memorized and say to myself, to feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Or Marry Oliver her poem wild Geese. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk for a thousand miles on your knees through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. I might be getting some of that wording wrong, but that idea of being able to go back to that phrase you do not have to be good. I'll remind myself that in certain moments of perfectionism, or when I find myself being really hard on myself or moving to shame, when I make a mistake or I have a moment of failure, I'll tell myself, you do not have to be good. You only have to let yourself. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. And it's such a comfort in time of great stress or chaos, or when I'm feeling really overwhelmed. These are anchors, there are words that I can come back to. So it's both just really good exercise for the brain, like memorizing times tables or memorizing. You know, I don't know, like facts about animals or something like that like we do in elementary school. It's just good exercise for the brain as we get older since we don't have to do that as often. And it's also this great comfort, this handhold, this grounding mechanism that we can use in times of stress. And so poetry, I think for some people poetry can feel like it's kind of highbrow or elitist, or it's like out of reach kind of And I've heard a lot of people say about poetry, and I used to feel this way too about poetry before I had a major in English in college and really fell in love with poetry. But I used to always say, I don't really get it. You know, you read a poem and you're like, I don't understand what the author was trying to say, because poetry isn't spoken as directly as a book is. It's not, you know, a piece of prose. The author's job is to really directly explain to you what they're trying to say. And if you walk away from a piece of prose without knowing what the author's trying to say, then the author didn't really do their job. But poetry is different. Poetry is about creating images and drawing connections from one thing to another, and so it's a less linear piece of writing, and it can be sometimes more challenging for us to wrap our brains around. But I think this is the invitation that poetry offers to us, is it offers us to move from brain to heart. It offers us to drop from intellectualizing everything and needing to fully understand every single thing that an author says, to just dropping into our heart space and hearing words and asking yourself, how do these words make me feel? And one of the things that my a poetry teacher in college, used to always ask us that was really helpful is what are some of the sounds in this poem that really stick out to you? Because poetry isn't always about, you know, the literal meaning of the words. Sometimes it's just about the way that it sounds rolling off the tongue of the person who reads it. And David White talks about this in the episode with Rick Rubin. He talks about how poetry originally was an oral art form. It was always meant to be spoken out loud. I don't know if you've ever heard a spoken word poet speak their poetry and it sounds like music. But this is really what poetry was meant to be. It was meant to be an art form for the ears, you know, so sort of like tickle your ears like you're hearing senses. And yes, poetry can be read on the page two, of course, but I think there's something really special about hearing it spoken out loud. So I do recommend going to listen to that Rick Rubin episode with David White. Again, like I said, this is a three hour episode. It's two back topack episodes, and each one is an hour and a half. But it's absolutely worth the listen, even if you don't make it all the way through both episodes if it feels too long for you. But I have a feeling that when you get into the episodes, you're going to be enraptured like I was, and really taken with the sound of David White's voice and the beauty of the words that he's written and the way that he speaks them, and just the interchange between Rick and David is so special, and I'm very curious to hear what you think of it after you take a minute to listen. Anyways, all of that was kind of a big detour, but I think it will apply to what I want to talk about today. A detour to introduce you to David White and to the concept and the power of poetry and why that matters so much, because David White is the person who originally turned me on to this idea of the story we need to stop telling. The way he says it is there's a conversation you need to stop having. And he teaches a conversational leadership class that lasts for seven weeks, and my husband took the class, and each the seven weeks has a different theme, but the very first theme in conversational leadership is about the conversations we need to stop having. And this is what made me think of this idea of the story that we need to stop telling, because each of us have a conversation we need to stop having, or a story we need to stop telling. And you could talk about it either way. I think it's the same concept, but with the idea of write your story. All of us find ourselves telling a certain story over and over and over again in our lives, and there comes a point where you realize, I need to stop telling this story. You know, the stories that we write, the stories that we tell, become kind of the architecture of our life. And I talk about this both in the power of writing it down and I talk about it and write your story, and I even unpack the science behind this. This is not like woo woo stuff. There's actual science that shows that the stories that we tell are building the network of the web of neural pathways that are in our brain that help us understand how the world works. So when you tell yourself a story like I'm a loser, I'm a failure, whatever, that neural pathway really becomes the architecture of how you see the world. So in some ways, no matter what happens to you, that's the lens that you're reading your life through, and so you're always going to find a way to make the events that take place in your life fit into that lens. So this is the power of utilizing a tool like write your Story, is that you can take an old story and upgrade the story, rewrite the story into something new, into something more expansive, into something with a little bit more spaciousness to it, so that you can begin to experience your life in a different way. And all of us have these moments of frustration where we feel like we're banging our head against a brick wall, or we're bumping up against a glass ceiling or whatever. And I've had these moments so many times in my life, and I've had them really intensely in the last five years, which I've talked about at length on this show. So that's no secret here. We have these periods of time, these seasons in our life where we feel like I'm stuck, like I can't get out of this environment that I'm in, this small room that I've built myself inside of the architecture that I've created inside my brain. No matter what I do, I can't seem to kind of get myself beyond these four walls. And I think this is the power of asking ourselves the question before we say, how do I want to rewrite my story? Or you know, what story do I want to tell? We almost can't even get there yet, is David White's point. His point that he makes is we can't get to what story do I want to tell? Or what conversation do I want to have? Is how he would say it, until we ask ourselves the question what conversation do I need to stop having? And I love how David White talks about if you don't know what conversation you need to stop having, just ask your spouse, or ask your close friends, or ask a family member, because they will tell you what conversation you need to stop having. It's likely a conversation that's been on repeat for a really long time. And sometimes the people in our life who are closest to us are much better at pinpointing those conversations that are old and tired than we are, because to us, it's just normal life, and to them, they're just able to see it with more objectivity than we are. So if you're not sure what story you need to stop telling, you could ask someone in your life. But before we can think about what story do I want to tell, we have to ask ourselves the question, what story do I need to be done telling? And this really opened up an epiphany for me when I heard him say this on the interview with Rick Rubin, because I started to think, you know, I've done a lot of thinking in the last five years about the conversations I do want to be having the story I do want to be telling what I do want to be taking place in my life. And I think in the world of self help or spirituality or manifestation or whatever you want to call it, we hear a lot of talk about focusing on the positive. And I think I've been trying to do that, really focusing on like what do I want instead of what don't I want? And I think David White brings up a really amazing point that we can't really create something new until we take a good look at what we have created, what we have already created, where it came from. And even he he doesn't use this language, but I would use this language. Even can we find a way to bring some love to the story that we created that needs to be done, It needs to be gone, it needs to be you know, buried. Can we find a way to bring some love to that story? Because maybe you have a story that you always fail at what you try, or maybe you have a story that you don't deserve love, or maybe you have a story that you know don't have what it takes to be in a long term committed relationship, or maybe you have a story that you know you can't take up too much space in the world, or that you're irresponsible or whatever. It is these stories that we carry around in our bodies, and until we're willing to really sit with that story and take a look at it and ask ourselves, are we ready to be done with this? You know, where did this story come from? Until we take some time to do that, we're not really ready to build something new. And so I think I've gotten caught in this trap a few times in the last handful of years as we've been navigating some challenges and difficulties in our life, particularly with my career or my husband's career. I guess I should say we took a big risk on a business venture. We felt like it was a strong calling in our lives, like we were invited into this thing that felt much bigger than us. We knew that, we knew that, we knew we were supposed to do it. We invested tons of time and energy and all of our savings into this venture and ended up losing everything. And I had so many questions after it all fell apart, about why would we be taken on this journey if it was just going to all fall apart at the end. You know, at first, it was just like, well, this whole thing feels really unfair. Then it felt like maybe I misunderstood. Maybe it was never a calling, Maybe it was just we were out there on our own, just kind of deciding that we were going to do these things, and it's just kind of a coin toss, like maybe you succeed, maybe you fail. And so I spent a long time trying to figure out which was which. And here's the point that I'm trying to make. I think there comes a point where you have to look at the way you're telling the story to yourself and ask yourself, am I ready to be done with this story? Am I ready to be done telling the story of Pinewood Surf Club? And I want to just share with you if you're a longtime listener, especially if you listened all the way through the last season, for example, if you've been with me for a while and you've heard me tell the whole story start to finish, you're probably one of those people in my life who could say, Okay, we're maybe ready to be done telling this story. And I do feel like I'm coming to the end of the usefulness of the story. There's a period of time where a story telling a story over and over feels pretty useful because you're still trying to understand it. In fact, I read this amazing statistic, or not even really as statistic, I don't know what you would call it. I read this amazing article about kids and why kids like to read the same books and watch the same shows over and over again, and since I have a three and four year old, this was so poignant to me. I'm like, why will they watch the same episode of the same show over and over again. There's this episode of a show that my daughter likes to watch. She's four and a half, and it's an episode where in the episode, the little girl learns how to swim, and I swear to you she's watched this episode probably fifty times, and she still asks for it when we sit down to watch TV. She wants to watch the same episode of the same show again. And this article was essentially saying that kids watch the same show or read the same books over and over and over again until they understand them and then they're ready to move on. And it made me wonder if maybe we do the same thing with our stories. Maybe we tell our stories over and over and over and over again until we fully understand them, and then when we fully understand them, we're ready to move on. And I do feel like this story that I've been telling about this risk that we took and the way things turned out and it not going the way that I hoped it did, is a story that I've been trying to understand. And I've been really telling myself the story, telling you, the story, telling anybody who will listen to the story hundreds of times until I can understand it. And only recently have I felt like, oh, I think I'm really starting to get it. Like I talked about on last week's episode, I'm starting to be able to receive the gifts that this difficulty wanted to show me. And when I first started telling the story, I wasn't in that place. I wasn't ready to receive what the story was trying to offer me. But now I'm really beginning to see it from that perspective. And one of the things I'll tell, just this quick example, just as a way to put some meat on the bones, my daughter recently came home from the little day camp that she goes to, and one of her friends at camp had told her this scary story about a were wolf that I think the little girl's older brother had told to her. And when this friend told Nella about the werewolf, this like set off a chain reaction of just absolute fear and terror. At bedtime, Nella couldn't, you know, whereas normally bedtime as no drama, no fuss. She would go down very easily, and now all of a sudden, she didn't want to be left in her room. She didn't want to be in the dark by herself. You know, her bedroom's upstairs and our main family room is downstairs, so she didn't want to go upstairs and put her clothes on by herself. She didn't want to be even in the other room from mom or dad. You know. Sometimes I would load the kids into the car and then like run back inside and get something else that we needed before we leave. And it's not like I'm leaving the kids for thirty minutes. I'm just you know, for thirty seconds while I run in the house and get a water bottle or something. The kids would sit in the car and Nella has started asking me when I walk out to the car, Mom, do you have everything that we need? Well, this fear has just taken over her life. It's just taken over her body. It's so much fear. And I've been in these long conversations with her recently about how important it is to face our fears, because until we face our fears, we are overcome by them. They rule our lives. I said to her, do you want to spend the rest of your life being afraid that a werewolf is going to jump out of your closet in your room? Or do you want to come with mom? And I'll hold your hand and we can go up to your room together and look in the closet and you'll see there's nothing there, and I'll be with you the whole time, and we're going to look your fear right in the face, and we're going to see that you're totally safe, and then we can just put this whole thing to bed. And so she's been kind of percolating that and processing it, and as I've been having that conversation with her, I've thought so much about myself and about this time that we've been in and about how this season for me is really about facing my fears. It's about facing my fears of not having enough, facing my fears of running out, facing my fears of bankruptcy, facing my fears of losing our house, facing my fears of failure, facing my fears of the list could go on. So much of this time has been about facing my fears and realizing that the thing that I have let unconsciously control my life, this fear that I'm not going to have enough, that I'm going to run out, that we're going to lose, this that even after everything we've built, it's all going to be taken away from us, that the rug's going to be pulled out. That fear has been unconsciously ruling my life. And it isn't until you face your fear that you're able to conquer it, to overcome, to move on in such a way where, yeah, maybe that happens. Is it the preference? No? Is it the ideal? No? Is it something that I'm pointing myself toward. No. But oddly, this is the weird thing. The more we fear something, the more we point ourselves towards it. And so I've realized this that because I was so afraid of all of these things happening in a weird way, it either needed to happen or I invited it to happen. I'm not sure around the language of this. Yet it needed to happen, or I invited it to happen, or it is a gift that it happened, because then when it happens, you can look it right in the face and go, oh, this thing, this were wolf, that I've been afraid of all this time, is actually pretend it doesn't even exist. It's all in my mind. It's imaginary. And once I realized that, I can put it to bed, and then I don't have to live my life in fear of it anymore. And can it still happen? Sure? Maybe it could. I do think it's sort of a coin toss. It's like you try something risky and it's the toss of a coin. Maybe it's heads, maybe it's tails. Maybe when maybe you lose. That's true with anything that we try, and the more risk that you put into something, this is the whole point of risk, right, It's the whole definition of risk that the risky or something is, the more you have to lose if it falls through. And so we took a risk. It didn't work out the way that we thought it would, and that's just the end of the story, and we can be done telling that story. Now, I really do feel like I'm coming to the place in my life where I'm ready to be done telling that story, because I've already extracted all of the goodness, Like I've pulled out all the gifts that this hardship wanted to offer me, and I'm ready to move on to the next story in my life. So I don't know what that story is for you, or, as David White would say, what's the conversation you need to stop having. What's the story you need to stop telling. What's the conversation you need to stop having? And I want to really make sure that I say, I'm not asking this question from a place of shame, So let me just parse out the difference for you. I'm not asking this question to say, like, if you were really strong, you know, if you were really evolved, if you were really wise, you'd stop telling this story. You know, get over it already. That's a very different energy than the energy I'm bringing to this question, Because the story in your life that's ready to be put to bed will feel ready to be put to bed. If you would have asked me two years ago if I was ready to be done telling the story about this thing we were trying to build, and how it might not work out. I wouldn't have been ready to be done because it wasn't time for it to be done. But like everything, stories run their course, and there comes a point where you are ready to be done telling the story. You've already extracted all the goodness that the story had to offer you. You've already learned all the lessons that the story had to teach you. You've already fully understood everything that took place in the story. And if you haven't gotten there yet, there's no shame. It doesn't mean that you're not as evolved, it doesn't mean that you're not as wise. It doesn't mean anything about you, except just that the story is still working in your life. And if there's a story that's ready to be done, it will feel really ready to be done. It's going to feel like what a relief. I can set this aside. I have just exhausted this story for all that it's worth. I've told it a thousand times. It is ready to be put to bed. One other quick example I'll give, because it's slightly different, is a client I worked with a long time ago. I actually wrote about her and write your story. Her name is Mary, and she told me that she had a story from her childhood that was really fascinating and very dramatic and had lots of human interest in it, and people loved to hear her story, and so she would be asked in church groups or in school groups, or in front of, you know, large crowds of people to come and tell this story to folks. And she did that for a long time, and people would always say, it's so inspiring, I can't believe that you've overcome what you've overcome. Amazing how you've become the person who you are inspite of everything you faced. And for a while that worked really well for her, and at one point she realized, I'm very ready to be done telling this story. It's not that it's stopped being inspiring for others, it's that it's stopped being expansive for me. So I want you to take that into consideration too, as you think about the story that you're ready to be done telling. It may not be that the story is no longer inspiring for others. It may be that the story is no longer expansive for you. That telling the story for you in order to tell it. You almost have to put yourself back into a smaller box, and you're ready to move on from that box. You're ready to tell a bigger story. Is there a story in your life that you keep telling repetitively even though you can kind of feel in your system, in your heart, in your gut that you're ready to be done telling this story. That's the story that is ready to be done. That's the story that you're ready to stop telling. So as you consider the story that you're ready to be done telling, also take some time and listen to Rick Rubin and David White and report back. Let me know how it feels for you to listen to David White share his poetry, to share other poetry, to hear the two of them talk. Let me know if you feel what I felt, that feeling of being transported to another world, or like you're sitting next to the roaring sound of the ocean waves, or like in the middle of a forest or something and it just completely changes your vibration. And also let me know if you're going to take on the poetry challenge, what poems are you going to memorize? Are you going to do one a week or one a month. I would love to hear from you. You can find me over on Instagram and Ali Fallon and I will look forward to seeing you next week on The Writer Story podcast