3 Powerful Mantras for Telling Ourselves Better Stories |
Many of my clients ask me for memorable maxims so that they can tell themselves better stories about themselves. It is hard to choose just one, and mine have (thankfully) evolved over the years. When I was young, I wanted to get a ‘reality continues to ruin my life’ tattoo. Then, having become slightly more mature, I thought about an ‘amor fati’ design in my Stoic phase, but I’m now very glad I got neither of these.
For a while, I believed that the most important thing we can do is to learn all the time, especially about ourselves, and I loved this quote, commonly attributed to Einstein: ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.’ The biggest existential crime seemed to me not to learn from experience. We all have some old, irrational patterns that don’t serve us anymore and that we keep repeating, consciously or unconsciously. We may think of it as repetition compulsion, hard-wiring, bad taste in partners, or as trying to undo and change trauma patterns by finally succeeding in mastering them.
I also love Gregory Bateson’s ‘Knowledge that isn’t in the body is just rumour’, because it illustrates so powerfully the difference between knowing something cognitively and allowing it truly to sink in and change the structure of our feelings, in the form of embodied, somatic wisdom. There is a crucial difference between head knowledge and felt, lived, truly integrated knowledge that shapes how we act and feel.
And I love Pema Chödrön’s phrase, ‘Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.’ That is so true for most of our psychological challenges—especially for