I’ve always thought that the point of story was to create meaning and an understanding of the events and experiences of our lives. However, upon further reflection, I’m realizing that story helps us enter into relationship with what happened. Once in relationship, we have a very different vantage point from which to view and understand our experience than if our narrator merely details what happened. 

Relationship to our experience is a holistic endeavor. It invites inclusion. Not only do I get to pay attention to one single voice in myself, but I can also entertain many voices. This allows for diversity which also calls forth creativity and even brilliance, if I am lucky. As I think about being in relationship with my experience, I feel a connection to myself that can easily feel lacking when I’m only thinking about making meaning. 

My visceral experience writing these two paragraphs illustrates for me the difference between merely creating meaning and being in relationship with my experience. When I’m in relationship with my experience, my body is included. Interestingly, I didn’t consciously invite my body into the experience. Yet it feels like the ground that supports my relationship to my experience. From this place, my mind is freed to explore and not have to constantly worry about situating myself or wondering where I am. This inclusion invites presence and thus brings aliveness. 

When my body contributes to making meaning, I feel a depth of reality to my experience. It’s palpable rather than either fleeting or repetitive as thoughts can often be. I feel whole. I’m simultaneously aware of my thoughts and realizations, and I feel my energy coursing through me. There is a heat and a sense of groundedness. My body is not merely another voice in my internal system. It is catalytic and changes my relationships when I include it. 

Stories can either remain connected to lived experience or become increasingly abstracted from it. When we lose contact with lived experience, our stories can become disconnected from us. Our stories give not only meaning to our experiences, but they also give shape and geography to them. Stories that are closely grounded in our experience not only give meaning but can offer encouragement, support, and healing as well. Stories that are not grounded in our lived experience or lack empathy for another’s lived experience can easily wound ourselves and others. 

Being in relationship with experience changes how meaning gets made. I think when I started this piece, I had an unquestioned belief that meaning creates relationship. Now I wonder whether relationship to self, to other, and to experience offers us a deeper experience of meaning and that the meaning generated from this relationship actually deepens our experience of relationship. The term “ubuntu” just popped into my mind. I am because we are. What if everything IS interconnected?

What happens when we stop treating story merely as an account of what happened and begin to experience it as a way of relating to what happened?