On Valentine’s Day 2013, at a small community center in New Hampshire, I attended a workshop with Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona, Lakota-Cherokee shaman and narrative psychiatrist. The workshop began with a talking circle in which each of the forty or so participants shared a personal story about love.

At the beginning of the day, I was excited. I’d read all of Dr. Mehl-Madrona’s books, and I was eager to learn everything I could. But as the time passed, I got bored. There were no limits to how long people could talk, and by lunchtime, we were only part way through.

At lunch, I vented my frustrations to my journal. I imagine I wrote something like, Why is everyone taking so long? People should have time limits! We’re supposed to be learning something here!

I returned to the second half of the circle, which meandered along like the first.

Then, after the circle completed, Dr. Mehl-Madrona invited a participant to work with him one-on-one, with everyone else witnessing.

He instructed her to tell him about a break-up that still felt emotionally raw but to only share the bare bones—the observable data, the facts that she was aware had actually happened.

Dr. Mehl-Madrona told us that our stories are like meat that covers the bare bones of what’s happening, that can make the facts harder to see and generate confusion, distress, and disconnection.

Each time the participant started telling a story—judging something that she or her ex had done—Dr. Mehl-Madrona paused her and invited her to label it story.

As I listened to Dr. Mehl-Madrona guide my fellow participant to distinguish her stories from the bare bones, I realized that I’d been telling myself a story—steeped in white supremacy cultural narratives about how teaching should happen—that judged Dr. Mehl-Madrona’s circle-centered approach and held me back from perceiving the hidden lessons the other circle participants shared.

We are the stories we tell ourselves.

In his book, Remapping Your Mind, Dr. Mehl-Madrona writes that the closest equivalent to the English word self in the Lakota language is the word nagi, meaning the swarm of all the stories that make us who we are.[1]

Each of us is viewing ourselves, the people we interact with, our circumstances, and the world around us through channels of perception that contain all the stories we’ve gathered about who we are, what is possible, and how the world works.

Faced with infinitely complex challenges, frustratingly incomplete information, and a universe that is far too vast to perceive it in its entirety, we humans rely on stories—theories, opinions, interpretations, assumptions, beliefs, and so forth—to fill in the gaps and make sense of it all.

We tell stories to connect, learn, grow, heal, and answer the question why. We humans need stories like we need food.

But not all stories serve us well.

Like debris on a car windshield that accumulates over decades, many of our stories make it difficult to see ourselves, our people, our situations, and our paths forward clearly. We mistake our filtered views for reality itself and don’t realize that we’re looking through a lens in the first place.

Our stories can either support us to honor our needs or hold us back. For example, if we think there’s something wrong with me for taking so much time to reach my vision, we’re less likely to keep going; if we believe crossing the gap between where I am and where I long to be requires time, patience, and support, the journey can become easier.

We get to choose the stories we tell ourselves.

At that New Hampshire workshop, Dr. Mehl-Madrona taught us that, although many people believe that we have to get rid of our stories to liberate ourselves from them, the truth is that we don’t have to convince any part of ourselves to change its mind. If we try to convince the storytelling part of ourselves that it’s wrong, it may cling even tighter to its beliefs.

In A Liberated Mind, Dr. Steven C.