Podcasts are, by their essence, containers of stories so these announcements are a fitting share for the theme of my writings this week:

It was a week of deep conversations and connections, sitting down with cups of tea, and listening to wise women. It was an honor to share a table and a microphone with them all. Listen to their words and join the richness. You can also find these episodes on all your favorite podcast platforms:

* The Confident Rider Podcast with Jane Pike: Christmas Conversation with me, Brigid Piccaro, and Terry Kuebler.

* Relatively Stable: I sit down with Tamar Reno and ask all my burning questions (but there’s never enough time with Tamar!)

What’s In a Story?

Don’t slay me for saying this, but I really dislike Charles Dickens (is it doubly bad saying this before Christmas, or would Dickens be like — of all my stories, that one?) But I’m sinking into his unforgettable opening line, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .” because I can’t find a better quote to sum up the last quarter of 2024 for me.

These past months I’ve had a lot of downtime and these hours of being alone with my thoughts have made me hugely aware of my stories — the narratives we humans construct to make sense of the world.

My story this year has been one of great joy and great upheaval.

Story is — everything.-Tamar Reno

Writers have permission to live in alternate realities. It’s not a lie if it’s art — and I’m here today to talk about stories, the timelines we choose to live in. We all do it.

I wrote as a kid because I wanted to escape the reality I lived in. Horses and barns became the same kind of medicine. There’s a mystery in the presence of the herd that invites us to think beyond our limitations — to consider a different way of being.

When I first started taking the stories out of my head and putting them down on paper, someone accused me of having stolen the words or having made it all up. I still smart when I think about it. Having our story questioned is a really big deal.

I can vividly remember the periods of my life that were consumed with stories, characters, landscapes carved from my imagination and as real to me as the light from a sunset. These are liminal spaces, the in-between times of my world. My brain is balanced when I’m drifting in creative space. The whirling cyclones of my logical thoughts, constant, swirling, destructive, meet the sweeping, robed dervishes of my subconscious.

I’ve written before about how I’m an anxious traveler.

Many years ago I was deeply immersed in a story I was writing and my ex-husband planned a sudden trip back home to Istanbul. I was expected to get the farm in order in a matter of days, arrange the trip, get finances in order, hop on a plane, and go.

South Carolina to Turkey isn’t a day trip. Just getting there takes 24 hours of flights. This trip should have hit all my triggers and made me a nervous wreck.

But it didn’t.

I had a story in my head. I was in love with my characters, a criminal collection of international anti-heroes with sordid pasts, burgeoning redemption, and witty one-liners. My imagination was living my daily life through their lens. I might have looked like a farm girl on the outside but my reality was so much more. I was guided by the story building inside my head.

I packed my bags with my best traveling clothes, downloaded an eclectic, baroque soundtrack, and boarded the plane to Turkey like I was the most interesting person in the world. Everyone in the airports became a potential character, every view a potential new scene.

With this storyline in my head, I got out of my usual nest of fears and lived life boldly, like I belonged there.

This way of traveling was so directly opposite to the way I usually did things that I astounded myself. What better way to experience the world — to absorb it and not be trapped in lists, what-ifs, and limiting self-consciousness?

I felt my fingers against the fluted glass of hot tea beside the grey waters of the Bosphorus. I stood still on a street of fabric shops and absorbed the call to prayer like it was a song made of wind. I photographed every sacred street cat I saw. I tried on clothes and danced to The Cure in a dressing room. I engaged in deep, drunken conversations with mystics in old bars. I chased ghosts by the graffitied walls of old Constantinople on Halloween night.

Photos from that trip are so different from the dark-eyed hauntedness on my face in images from other trips to Istanbul. We made many sojourns there. I loved the city and was proud to know it was my second home, but my face on this trip when my head was filled with stories — it’s different. My eyes are mischievous and bright and open — alive and not guarded.

The stories we live in our minds change the shape of our realities.

The world is painfully beautiful, the world is a map. We are travelers, all of us, and our most important narrative is the one of our lives, which includes the learning, the great epiphanies, and the unwinding. The most important voice is our own. — Trackless Wild with Janisse Ray

We Think In Stories

Psychologists know this. It’s why cognitive behavioral therapy has become the mainstay of therapeutic techniques, considered universally beneficial when so many other tools are strongly debated. CBT works by challenging the spontaneous, negatively habitual thoughts we’ve amassed as defensive patterns in response to the world. Narrative therapy is another psychotherapeutic process that is used to transform thinking patterns.

We live and breathe and react through the stories we tell ourselves.

Some are good, some are bad.

But we have a choice, no matter how much it feels in the moment that we do not (I know that feeling of stuck, frozen immobility intimately). We can change, adapt, alter, and transform our stories.

We really are the authors of our own life.

Like defending my first written story when I was little, I will go to war over someone challenging my narrative.

Many years ago, I was honored to share space in a clinic with Jayne Stewart of Journey Horse in New Mexico. It was my first experience with horse people who were more interested in knowing the horse than they were in chasing achievements and accolades. The atmosphere was quiet and natural and vulnerable. We shared stories and we were honest with each other.

At one point Jayne explained that we needed to let go of our stories in order to show up in a better way for the horse.

This idea incensed me. I argued back. I explained that as a writer story was my guiding force. How dare anyone suggest I give up my story? It was like Jayne wanted me to give up my identity, hand over my documents, and begin a new life in witness protection somewhere in the middle of Alaska. I hate the cold.

I thank Jayne to this day for her deep-rooted patience with me. She explained that the stories we tell ourselves don’t need to be static. They can move and change and grow. The point is letting go of our attachment to our story so that we can see what lies beyond the mountains of our perception. We become so used to wearing the same story every single day that we forget that stories are like clothes. We can wash them, dry them, change them, or try on a new outfit altogether. We’re not supposed to be stuck.

In my podcast interview with Tamar Reno, she said, “Story is — everything. It’s how we perceive our relationship to everything. Humans for thousands of years have been programmed to think in stories. It’s how we connect with ourselves, with other people, with the world around us. We think in stories.”

Language is the root of our story.

And the language we naturally think in directs the energy of our stories. Tamar talks about how English is a static language. It’s still and slow-moving. It doesn’t inspire action. English holds our thoughts like a snapshot instead of a movie reel. It’s easy to get stuck there, motionless, in our thoughts.

Curiosity moves us. Inspiration sparks us. Questions encourage us to act.

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Asking the Right Question

It’s Tamar’s gelding, First Horse, who encourages us to keep searching, trying on many questions for size, until we’ve found the right one, until we’ve landed on the right question.

How do we know when we’ve found the right one?

“Because you won’t need to ask a different question.”

I wrote in my love story about challenging myself to see if I could hold an entire conversation in questions (Hint: it worked and Christopher didn’t realize what I was doing — or he hasn’t called me out on it yet).

Learning how to talk in order to listen was my first lesson as I launched my coaching practice the day the world locked down during the pandemic. We were frightened, uncertain of the future, wary of each other, and learning to use our senses in a different way, unable to read expressions beyond our masks.</