How to Stop Believing the Stories That Hold You Back

(air fizzing) (bright music) Headspace Studios. (gentle music) Hi, it's Dora, and welcome back to Radio Headspace. So I was having coffee with my friend last weekend and she was telling me all about her dating life. But here's the thing, she wasn't really telling me about her dating life, she was telling me the same story she's been telling for the past three years. "I'm just not good at relationships. I always pick the wrong person. I'm too much or not enough. I think I'm destined to be alone." and I'm listening to this beautiful, intelligent, funny woman reduce herself to this tired script. And I had this moment where I wanted to gently shake her and say, "But who are you when you're not telling yourself that story?" It reminded me of something author Iyanla Vanzant once said, you are not the story of your past. You are the story you're telling yourself right now. We're all walking around with these internal narrators, and honestly, some of them need to be fired. We have stories about who we are, why things happen to us, what we're capable of, what we deserve. And here's a sneaky thing about stories. We start to believe that they're facts. I'm not good with money. I'm terrible at confrontation. I always get taken advantage of. Love never works out for me. But what if these aren't truths about who you are? What if they're just stories you've been telling yourself for so long that you forgot that they were stories? In Buddhism, there's this concept that our suffering often comes not from what happened to us, but from the stories we attach to what happens, the narrative we create around the experience. And here's the beautiful, liberating truth. If it's just a story, you can change it or just stop telling it. I used to tell this story about myself, that I was the responsible one, the one who always had it together, who everyone could count on, who never needed help. This story started when I was about eight years old. My mom was going through a rough patch, and somehow I became the little adult in the house. I took care of myself, I made sure everyone was okay. I kept the peace as best as I could, and that story served me for a while. It helped me survive. It gave me an identity, a role, a way to feel valuable. But by the time I was in my late 20s, that story had become a prison. I couldn't ask for help without feeling like a failure. I couldn't show up messy or vulnerable without feeling like I was letting people down. I was exhausted from trying to be this character I had created decades earlier. The breakthrough came during a meditation retreat. The teacher said something that stopped me in my tracks. What if you could put down the story of who you think you are and just be present...