I Don't Need To Hear Your Story


I don't need to hear your story. I will listen of course, just to be kind, but I'm pretty sure I've already heard it. Our "personal" myths are not as unique as we think. Most of them are versions of the same old story, the most popular one in the world: My Tale Of Woe.

The universe doesn't need to hear your story either, but the universe will echo it back to you if you insist. Because the universe is an echo-chamber. That's its job. Like an efficient post office, the universe will return to sender, and you will live your story again and again.
But if you're fortunate, you will get tired of your story. You will wake up and realize it never turns out any differently, no matter how often you tell it. And if you're very fortunate, you'll meet someone who will say, "shut up!" They will say it in a gentler way of course, with the mere power of Presence, and you will stop story telling. You will become hopeless.

In true compassion, the Listener will offer you something more profound than any tale of woe: the silence of pure Being. You will let this silence penetrate your body, permeating every nerve, overflowing the nucleus of each cell.

To give up your story is to give up hope. Hopeless surrender will alchemize your ancient pain much better than telling a story about it. Hopeless surrender will dissolve your pain into vibrant available energy, the energy of awareness.

But alchemy requires the dark. Alchemy happens not in the light of wishful thoughts and prayers, not in the repetition of cheery affirmations, but in the abyss. It happens not above but below, not beyond, but deep inside the fibrous warp and woof of your flesh.

Here you transcend, not out there but here in the untamed root, at the subnuclear quantum level of holy matter, in the black hole at the core of every atom. You will touch pure Being, not in the mind but at a cellular level.

Darkness is not the opposite of light, but the womb of light. The light of joy is born not as a story, not as a memory or an image in the mind, but as an electrical power in your bones, in your marrow, when awareness burns through trauma, and transmutes it.

Now you are alive without a story. The whole cosmos rushes in to fill the vacuum where hope used to be, where time used to be, where your tale of woe used to be. You can't explain anything anymore, thank God. There is nothing to complain about. Each instant is an inundation of wonder, a feral explosion of softness, a catastrophic dissolution where nothing remains but love.

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