IF YOU HAVE BEEN following this series on the Shift in Consciousness, you know that humanity is currently faced with the opportunity to change every aspect of its existence, to reconnect with the Source, and to enter high realms of being. On an individual level, the Shift process entails reviewing every aspect of our lives to find any areas of conflict, anything that prevents us from achieving our highest potential. Central to this process is defining who we are, not in terms of what we know to be true about ourselves, but as spiritual beings. To learn who we are we must understand the story of our life, the set of beliefs and perceptions that we use to define, explain and create our reality. Each of us has one that we have developed throughout the course of our life and while it can be unique to us, it also includes themes from our family of origin and past life connections.

We each have a life story, a theme that runs through it and creates a pattern of action and reaction that repeats itself in everything that we do, everyone we meet, every situation that we create. This story is created as a result of our experiences and has several purposes: it guides our behavior, creates the foundation for our reality and it protects us by ensuring that we remember the experiences that cause us pain. We then unconsciously draw events, situations, and people to us that serve to prove that our story is true. Sometimes our stories have a positive theme – ‘I am a wonderful person and everyone loves me.’ Often, though, the stories have a far different theme – ‘I am unlovable, I am unlucky, I am not worthy of success.’ Because we judge life through our emotions, it is the difficult and painful life events that have the greatest impact on us, through which we create the stories that we believe and then work hard to prove them as being true.

But we do not begin life with a ‘fresh page’ on which we can build our own life story. We are born with a story that includes our karmic history and our parents each contribute their own stories to us so that there are three basic stories that we work with–our own karmic history, our mother’s story, and our father’s story. We are also part of a soul group whose stories resemble our own and we also unconsciously draw to us those people whose story reflects ours. Some of these stories are simple, others are much more complicated. Each individual has a story and each story is different. One person’s story would not make sense to anyone else because a story can only be perceived as meaningful and logical through its owner’s eyes.

As we experience the life events that help us build on our story, it begins to take on a life of its own and it can take over our lives until we become the story. The more painful and emotionally significant life events that we experience, the more we build on our story’s theme and believe that it is true. Depending on the emotional impact of the events that we experience, our story has the potential to create a far different outcome for our lives than we may want because making our story true means that we surrender our freedom and our free will to the story.

As we work through the Shift we will be given opportunities to remember, examine, and to change our stories so that we can understand how we have created our life story and what it will take to change it. Before we address how to change a story, though, we must first understand where it began and how it was created.

As an example, let’s start with a simple story. We all know that a kitchen stove (cooktop for my UK, Aussie, and Kiwi readers) can be hot and burn us if we touch it. We know this because at some point in our lives, usually during childhood, we touched a hot stove and burned our fingers. After that point, we knew better than to put our fingers on the stove because we might get burned. Was every stove hot? Probably not, but we weren’t going to take that chance, so we most likely avoided every stove that we saw, just in case.

That’s a simple story but it also has profound implications because it caused us to assume that ‘every stove is hot.’ And it would prevent us from going near stoves because of our fear of getting burned. What else would we avoid because our first experience with it caused us pain? This is an example of a projection that we make based on our story. And this is the key element of understanding our story. It is not the story that has significance, it is the projections and assumptions that we make based on our story. As our story becomes more complicated, the projections that we make based on our experiences also become more complicated. And they begin to have a greater effect on how we live our lives, the choices we make, and the people that we associate with. They can even have an impact on our choice of jobs, where we live, and what we do with our lives, such as how much success and prosperity we will feel ‘safe’ with.

Here’s a more complicated story. We are in love with someone and have agreed to become life partners. As the wedding date approaches, they betray us with someone else. Emotionally devastated, we choose to end the relationship. And we create a story based on this event -we are unlovable, every relationship will end in betrayal, whoever we love will break our heart and we will ‘never’ fall in love again. This becomes our story about relationships and it may manifest in different ways. We may avoid relationships altogether or we may unconsciously draw relationships to us that prove to us that our story is true. Every relationship may indeed end in betrayal, we may be unable to meet someone with whom we can fall in love or we may experience a series of relationships that end with our heart being broken. While these events may further devastate us, they also reinforce our story. And as we continue to repeat those events, each one that works out the way we know it will and that further convinces us of the truth in the story.

And then the story takes on a life of its own. Not only do we see examples of the story in our romantic life, but they also begin to manifest in our career, with our friends, where we live and many of our life choices. People we once knew and trusted may turn against us, a brilliant career may end suddenly, we may choose to move away from a place we once love and our life may be filled with events that cause us to believe that the entire world is against us.

As we continue to work through the Shift we are being provided with opportunities to heal our karma, to change the course of our life from one that repeats karma to one that creates new possibilities to remove it. First, we must realize that the story, especially the one that we are born with, reflects our karma. Each iteration of that story, each event that creates an opportunity for us to make our story true also provides us with the tools to heal it and to create a new story. So each time an event that reinforces our story is presented to us we have several options – we can look at it through the lens of the story and add one more reason to believe that it’s true. Or we can look at the event as an opportunity to understand what we need to heal and to practice forgiveness, which is essential to healing karma, and then move on. Each time we forgive we remove a layer of karma and create a new opportunity to change our story, bringing us closer to our Source and allowing us to embrace the Shift energy.

What does your life story look like? Do you know what its theme is? Can you see the pattern of events that reinforce it? Are you ready to make a change, to create a new story by viewing the situation differently, by applying forgiveness, and allowing yourself to release your belief system? Are you willing to heal your karma and to move your life in a different direction? Are you willing to undertake a Shift in Consciousness knowing that it may open doorways to possibilities that you may never have considered before? All it takes is a willingness to change and the faith to believe that with trust and intention miracles can happen. Take the first step now by releasing your story, forgiving yourself and others, and open the doorways to the abundance in joy, prosperity, and light that the Universe has for you.