#164 "Tell Me A Story" -> "Release the Story"
From Attachment to Awareness: How Yoga, Recovery, and Buddhism Teach Us to Let Go
More than five years ago (wow—time flies!) I was in love with a man who traveled across the world to present a workshop called “Tell Me a Story.”
We both worked in the wellness industry, and the premise of his talk was simple: that good fitness instructors tell good stories. Stories move people. They inspire. They create meaning.
This guy was an excellent person to deliver this workshop. Because, he told excellent stories.
I remember one class he themed around Time - how quickly time passes, and how when we blink, it’s gone. He told a very memorable personal story from his life to bring home this topic. People cried. It was raw, relatable, human.
I never saw the actual “Tell Me a Story” workshop, but I heard a lot about it as his girlfriend at the time, he talked me through the workshop - in it’s planning stages, and also afterwards, in reflection. It was a perfect topic for him, because the man could make any moment into a powerful story. And that’s how I fell in love. I fell in love with his stories.
I was twenty-seven, he was forty-eight. And at the time, I didn’t see that I was also living inside a story - a story about what love should look like, what my life could become, about who both of us really were to each other.
The Stories We Live In
This week, at a Satsang, a teacher invited us to think about stories. This became the theme of my week.
“What are the stories I assume about myself and the world that keep me anchored - in ways that might be helpful, or unhelpful?”
In 12 Step Circles, we call these “our old ideas.” In Step Four, we inventory them. In Step Six, we become ready to have them removed. In Step Ten, we continue to watch for their return.
The Buddha called them Sankharas. In Buddhism, they are mental formations that shape perception and keep us cycling through craving and aversion.
Patanjali called them Vrittis - my favourite topic this year. Fluctuations of the mind that obscure our true nature.
They are, in essence, our stories.
The Teacher Who Doesn’t Ask My Story
I have a teacher who I have noticed rarely asks me about my life when we meet. I don’t think it’s because he doesn’t care, because I know he does care. But I think he just doesn’t think that I am my stories.
Through his Buddhist lens, I think he sees everyone around him as a soul far beyond this lifetime, far beyond the stories they hold. It took me a long time to realize this.
In Yoga, this is called Purusha - the unchanging Self. The stories of Alexandra belong to Prakriti, the ever-shifting material world.
The goal of practice is to remember who we really are: the witnessing consciousness beyond the story. If his goal is to help me remember my true nature, then we won’t spend anytime in my stories. Because my stories lead me to forget.
The Story of Sober Yoga Girl
For years, I was entangled in another story - not the Tell Me A Story man, but the story of the man I married at twenty-five, the heartbreak that followed, and the drinking that followed after that.
That story became Sober Yoga Girl. He wrote a book about it too, from his perspective. Reading your own story as someone else’s narrative is humbling. It was one of the most profound experiences of my life - to read both of our stories and realize that while they were different stories, there was not a single, one truth. There are many sides to every story.
For a long time, I carried shame about my version of this story that I told myself. And then I started to share it publicly. When I told the story, the shame died. But simultaneously, Sober Yoga Girl started to become my story.
When you go to my Instagram, the pinned reel - “My Sober Story” - is the short version of what happened from my point of view. How does one summarize their life into 90 seconds? Watching it recently, I realized how over the years, it’s almost like I had flattened myself into a character.
Stories can be medicine. But if we aren’t careful, we start to play out the character from the story. And we can be stuck playing that character forever.
Losing Interest in My Story
This year I began writing a Substack, The Daily Dharma. I wrote stories daily for almost 100 days in a row starting this January. I wrote stories from my life, teaching, sobriety, travel. But as my life dramatically changed and my meditation practice deepened, over the last few months, something shifted.
Now, ten months later, I find myself less interested in writing stories at all.
It’s not writer’s block.
It feels sometimes like it’s liberation.
The deeper I sit in silence, the less compelling my own stories become.
The less I need to explain, justify, or be understood.
Maybe this is the spiritual evolution of storytelling: from self-expression to self-liberation.
The Old Story Fades
At dinner one night during a Yoga Teacher Training this past July, two students asked how I came to Bali. I was shocked they didn’t know this story. For years, it was the first thing I’d tell people:
“I was supposed to come here for my honeymoon. I left my husband the night of our flight. I arrived depressed - and when I landed in Bali, everything turned to color. It’s like when Dorothy, in the Wizard of Oz, stopped seeing in black and white and started seeing in colour. I knew I’d live here one day.”
It was my Bali story.
But when they asked that night, that was when I realized - I think I had finally let go of that story. Because neither of them had heard it before, which means I hadn’t told it to them.
Did that mean I was free from stories?
Or did that mean another story had taken it’s place?
The New Story: Trauma and Awakening (Trigger Warning Sexual Assault)
In February, I was drugged and assaulted. I didn’t know what had happened until days later, during chanting. My subconscious pieced it together.
I describe it to people as my soul left my body for a while. That’s what immediate trauma felt like to me. And afterwards as I slowly returned to awareness, I lived in a fog of stories: How will I ever move past this.
In some senses, I think I let go of the Sober Yoga Girl story because this new story simply replaced it. Two stories was too many to hold. But then at some point, I started to realize that if my story could change so significantly, then what was a story, anyways? Why was I identifying with any story, to begin with?
Lately I’ve found myself moving past the story in ways that sometimes surprises me.
Yoga says when you’re in practice, then you can begin to abide in your true nature. (Yoga Sutra 1.3: Tada Drashtuh Swarūpe Avasthānam.)
Slowly, the story lost its grip.
Being Without the Story
Rolf often invites us into the present moment, “where the war in your mind will begin to cease.”
The Samkhya tradition says our true nature is joy and wholeness, and that the Vrittis - stories, thoughts, mental movements - keep us from remembering it.
I don’t write daily now. Maybe that will change, but right now, the idea of writing stories is something that doesn’t interest me.
It’s not that I am uninterested in life - but right now, I find myself feeling uninterested in narrating life. I just want to be with it.
Yoga teaches that when Asana is practiced with steadiness and ease (2.46), and offered to the Divine (2.47), “then all dualities cease” (2.48).
That’s the point of it all - stilling the dualities, ending the stories.
Taylor Swift said once that she feared that if she ever found happiness, she’d stop being able to write songs, because her sadness was what inspired her creativity. Sometimes, I relate to that. I feel so neutral, so empty, that I don’t have stories to write right now. But maybe that’s the goal: to live so fully in peace that the story becomes unnecessary.
Tell Me a Story → Release the Story
There’s still value in stories. They connect us. They help us see ourselves in one another. I’m about to teach a story. In January, I’ll be teaching a course on the Bhavagad Gita, which is a narrative story on the philosophy of yoga. To prepare, I’m studying the text with two teachers, Anvita and Rolf.
Storytelling works. But now I see storytelling as a spiritual practice of non-attachment - to tell the story, and let it go.
In the Gita, Arjuna’s story begins with a dilemma. He falls to his knees and asks God for help. The Buddha, too, had a similar experience. He sat under the tree of awakening after a life of luxury and despair. In the 12 Steps, we fall to our knees in Step One, too: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanagable.”
Every awakening begins when a story ends.
So maybe my new workshop, if I ever wrote one, would be called:
“Release the Story.”
Because when we finally let go, that’s when we find the most freedom.
So beautiful Alexandra - the true meaning of letting go.
It makes me think of memoirs and how we can make any of our stories, our memories, have the meaning that we want them to have. And this certainly changes over time.
Your email helps me understand the value of storytelling as a way of discovering who I am, however I am not defined by my stories and I can change them - my version of them - any time I want. That is very empowering.
Love Cherie
I am now thinking about this in the context of business and storytelling. The inherent conflict with creating scale to do good while needing to centre it all on ego and stories. I wonder how we balance that. Thank you for sharing this, I’ll be meditating on these questions today.