Discovering the Inner Voice

Writing the story within you

We all have something to say. Everyone has a story. Often it’s rooted deep down. In the place where the enemy lies deepest. The place we don’t really want to go, where we haven’t the heart to go, where we even fear the story we’ll find.

Yet we are often aware of an inner voice from this ‘lost place’. The root point perhaps where the story of our lives first changed. The living memory of who we once were. And we know we are who we are, and behave as we do today, because of the story the inner voice wants to tell from this place.

The story waits to emerge. Within this story are truths and patterns revealing our core beliefs; beliefs stemming from our experiences of past events, which are based on the interpretations we assigned to those events; beliefs which may not serve us today.

Years later, we’re aware we have the ability to see past events differently: we’re aware perhaps now it’s possible to choose a different interpretation of those events. Our living experience of the original events then becomes different, perceptions and our beliefs about the world change, and it becomes possible to leave behind confusions and pain.

For these old interpretations frequently form our perceptions - and our perceptions do determine our experiences today.

We do not see things as they are – we see them as we are.

This is who we are today. Do we like it very much?

If we could allow our story to emerge effortlessly – if within the story we could then identify those powerful patterns developed from old interpretations of past events.

If we could map the landmarks of our hidden beliefs about the world – those beliefs which still so determine our present experience of the world. Think! Our behaviour today – our complaints!- may be only misinterpretations of past experiences. But if we could identify how that operates now . . .

Yet how do you reveal these deep hidden beliefs? How do you unpick the tangle of misperceptions, feelings, thoughts, images, scraps of dialogues and distant screams – how do you heal scars so deep?

Surely if we really knew what we were doing, and knew it didn’t serve us, we’d identify the relevant patterns and beliefs, and we’d change them? Yet a common characteristic of certain types of disease is that they seem to carry an inbuilt, additional virus, which tells the sufferer, they don’t have the disease. This is especially true of disease associated with addictive behaviours. The disease can deliberately blinker the suffer to its existence as disease. Why should a perceptual dis-ease be any different?

Our perceptions about the world of course are often constructed to be self propagating: if we believe the world is against us – it will be.

Thus at the gates of our perceptions are those watchers forbidding entry to possible changes in perception. The story told by your inner voice may well be denied entry. Seeing the governing pattern of your core beliefs, and perhaps the redundancy of them, may threaten the existence of current perceptions. The watchers will close the gates.

Yet the story, your inner voice, still seeks to slip through.

This work book offers a way through – offers a process which facilitates the story within you and does this encouraging emergence free of conscious criteria. Along with this it offers you a fun and easy method to come up with a story – a literary accomplishment of which you will be proud.

To some extent the ego becomes redundant in the process. You give yourself up to the unfettered creativity of your inner voice. If your own ego protests at this – remember, the perceptions your inner voice seeks to change, maybe already at work pre-empting any change. How the ego insists it must know what’s going to happen – how it alone must remain in control – and there of course it steers you clear of going to the place you know you really need to go.

Ask yourself, how many times already has the ego scuppered your attempts to set down your story. The voice of the ego which says – finally – forget it!

But the inner voice remains – and the work book here offers that voice an intuitive route for the generation of story elements, which find their own shape and meaning for you.

You identify a theme. You follow through the set steps. Whatever you unearth, however unwittingly, will reflect your deep beliefs about life, will allow you to thread back through experiences to the root point of your story. How could it be otherwise without the voice of the ego telling you what to do?

The finished work is a composite of your concerns, and experiences, centred around a selected theme. These are explored through the chronicling of aspects of the lives of people which emerge organically through written images, dialogues, monologues, prose reflections and scenes.

The inherent pattern within the work offers a map of your beliefs, enabling new understanding and thus the possibility of changes of perception. The patterns reveals truths of how you think and feel which you were previously perhaps not fully aware, allow you to assess whether how you think, and feel, is based on an interpretation of past events which no longer serves you, an interpretation you will now choose to change - or one with which you choose to continue to live. There’s a choice. You are challenged to choose how you want to live. Something has been said. The story which lay deepest, longest, is out. Freedom is possible.

And you didn’t have to do anything – save the difficult task of not doing anything: of not judging – of not censoring – of not worrying if the work’s good enough – if you’re good enough.

All you have to do is follow through the steps – commit to the 12 steps and emerge free of something you’ve been holding for too long.

Your finished story maybe a text of anything between 5000 and 20,000 words. It will stand on its own – your story. A validation of who you are. It’s tone, it’s colour will be unique – a collage, a written mural, of your feelings, experiences and your inner life.

You may wish later to develop your work in a different direction, and there are alternative routes outlined. You may see within your story particular strands, you want to follow into another form – a short story for publication, a script, or even a novel. But that’s in the future. The first step is to set aside all such calculations - and to begin to allow your voice to emerge.