March 18, 2025 • 27 mins
If you ever feel “stuck” or like you’re spinning your wheels, maybe there’s a story you’re telling that no longer serves you. On today’s episode, I talk about how to know which story is ready to be retired, and what happens when we let go of old, tired stories that were dragging us down.
I also introduce you to one of my favorite poets, assuming you don’t know him already.
You can order his book of essential poems by clicking HERE.
You can listen to the podcast I mention HERE!
Host: Ally Fallon // @allyfallon // allisonfallon.com
Follow Ally on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/allyfallon/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pick up the pieces of your life who put them
back together with the words you write, all the beauty
and piece and the magic that you'll start too fun
when you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down on Colord. It's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back
to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm
your host, and on today's episode, I want to talk
about this idea of the story you need to stop telling.
And I have to give a lot of credit to
the unmatched, the amazing, the immortal David White, who is
(00:46):
an Irish poet, a philosopher, an author, an amazing thinker
that I've been following for a long time now. I
think I originally learned about David White via John o'donahue,
who also similar description. Also Irish poets famously wrote books
of blessings that are just the most incredible, amazing pieces
of writing. A lot of the blessings are written for
(01:08):
certain occasions, so you could read the blessing at like
a graduation, but they're blessings for thresholds, they're blessings for death,
or blessing for someone who's in a funk, or blessing
for a depression someone who's experiencing depression. So they're kind
of themed blessings, but they are really these little miniature
poems that are so profound and so beautiful and just
(01:30):
like speak exactly to the circumstance that you're in. They're
really really incredible. I found John o'donahue first through his
book that I think is just called Book of Blessings,
and then learned about David White and David White's poetry
through John o'donahue. And by the way, if you want
to do yourself a favor, like a three hour favor,
go find Rick Rubin's podcast and listen to the two
(01:50):
back to back episodes that are conversations with David White.
This man will just enrapture you with his wisdom, with
his just his tone a voice, the approach he takes,
the way he reads his poetry. It's almost like having
a prayer spoken over you or a blessing read over you,
like your your whole body. Your vibration will change instantly
(02:12):
when you hear this man begin reading his own poetry,
or not even reading he's reciting his own poetry. He
says in that interview that he has thousands of poems memorized,
many of which are his own, and then many of
which are written by other poets. And hearing him recite
the poetry, hearing him talk about his love for poetry,
it's like it takes you into a different dimension and
(02:34):
whatever felt like it was weighing on you just feels
like it lifts right off of you. I don't know
if you've had that experience before in like a spiritual
environment or just even in nature, where you feel like
your whole vibration shifts because of something that's going on
in your environment, like you're really stressed. But then you're
sitting by the ocean and something about the sound of
the waves and sitting there in the sand just feels
(02:56):
like it changes the entire nature of of how you're
relating to the world. And suddenly your heart rate slows
and you aren't feeling that same heaviness, and your whole
body relaxes and you feel like you can take a
deep breath. That's the feeling of listening to David White
read his poetry, and something I've been trying to do recently,
(03:17):
and this is a challenge I'll extend to you as well,
because I think it's really beneficial. Is I've been trying
to memorize a poem a week, or you could even
do a poem a month. You don't have to do
a poem a week. There are a couple of reasons
why I think this is really beneficial and helpful. One
is that with the introduction of technology into our lives
and with smartphones and just the space that technology is
(03:39):
taking up, we have to memorize so much less today
than we did ten or twenty years ago that our
brains don't often get that practice of memorization. So memorizing
really anything is such good exercise for your brain. It's
like taking your brain to the gym and doing a
workout of the gym for your brain. And poetry is
(03:59):
an opportunity for your brain to memorize something that you
can go back to in times of distress and use
as a tool the same way that I was talking
about that feeling of sitting next to the ocean when
you're feeling like life is really chaotic and there's all
this input and you can't find a way to ground
yourself Poetry is a really amazing way to ground yourself.
And just like people will do with scripture memorization or
(04:23):
memorization of like maybe inspirational quotes or quotes from books
or whatever, I use poetry the same type of a way,
where I go back to the phrases that are in poems,
or you know, just a particular word combination. Maybe it's
not even an entire sentence, but I'll go back to
that particular part of a poem and I'll use it
as a way to soothe myself in times of stress.
(04:45):
So David White, for example, has a poem called Everything
Is Waiting for You, And I won't spoil it by
reciting the entire poem because he recites it on that
Rick Rubin interview and does it much better than I
ever could. But I go back to these lines all
the time. Great mistake is to act the drama as
if you were alone, as if life were a progressive
and cunning crime, with no witness to the tiny, hidden transgressions.
(05:08):
To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.
I'll go back to that line over and over and
over again. Now that I have that poem memorized and
say to myself, to feel abandoned is to deny the
intimacy of your surroundings. Or Marry Oliver her poem wild Geese.
You do not have to be good. You do not
have to walk for a thousand miles on your knees
through the desert repenting. You only have to let the
(05:30):
soft animal of your body love what it loves. I
might be getting some of that wording wrong, but that
idea of being able to go back to that phrase
you do not have to be good. I'll remind myself
that in certain moments of perfectionism, or when I find
myself being really hard on myself or moving to shame,
when I make a mistake or I have a moment
of failure, I'll tell myself, you do not have to
(05:51):
be good. You only have to let yourself. You only
have to let the soft animal of your body love
what it loves. And it's such a comfort in time
of great stress or chaos, or when I'm feeling really overwhelmed.
These are anchors, there are words that I can come
back to. So it's both just really good exercise for
the brain, like memorizing times tables or memorizing. You know,
(06:15):
I don't know, like facts about animals or something like
that like we do in elementary school. It's just good
exercise for the brain as we get older since we
don't have to do that as often. And it's also
this great comfort, this handhold, this grounding mechanism that we
can use in times of stress. And so poetry, I
think for some people poetry can feel like it's kind
(06:35):
of highbrow or elitist, or it's like out of reach
kind of And I've heard a lot of people say
about poetry, and I used to feel this way too
about poetry before I had a major in English in
college and really fell in love with poetry. But I
used to always say, I don't really get it. You know,
you read a poem and you're like, I don't understand
what the author was trying to say, because poetry isn't
(06:58):
spoken as directly as a book is. It's not, you know,
a piece of prose. The author's job is to really
directly explain to you what they're trying to say. And
if you walk away from a piece of prose without
knowing what the author's trying to say, then the author
didn't really do their job. But poetry is different. Poetry
is about creating images and drawing connections from one thing
(07:20):
to another, and so it's a less linear piece of writing,
and it can be sometimes more challenging for us to
wrap our brains around. But I think this is the
invitation that poetry offers to us, is it offers us
to move from brain to heart. It offers us to
drop from intellectualizing everything and needing to fully understand every
(07:42):
single thing that an author says, to just dropping into
our heart space and hearing words and asking yourself, how
do these words make me feel? And one of the
things that my a poetry teacher in college, used to
always ask us that was really helpful is what are
some of the sounds in this poem that really stick
out to you? Because poetry isn't always about, you know,
(08:05):
the literal meaning of the words. Sometimes it's just about
the way that it sounds rolling off the tongue of
the person who reads it. And David White talks about
this in the episode with Rick Rubin. He talks about
how poetry originally was an oral art form. It was
always meant to be spoken out loud. I don't know
if you've ever heard a spoken word poet speak their
(08:27):
poetry and it sounds like music. But this is really
what poetry was meant to be. It was meant to
be an art form for the ears, you know, so
sort of like tickle your ears like you're hearing senses.
And yes, poetry can be read on the page two,
of course, but I think there's something really special about
hearing it spoken out loud. So I do recommend going
(08:48):
to listen to that Rick Rubin episode with David White. Again,
like I said, this is a three hour episode. It's
two back topack episodes, and each one is an hour
and a half. But it's absolutely worth the listen, even
if you don't make it all the way through both
episodes if it feels too long for you. But I
have a feeling that when you get into the episodes,
you're going to be enraptured like I was, and really
taken with the sound of David White's voice and the
(09:14):
beauty of the words that he's written and the way
that he speaks them, and just the interchange between Rick
and David is so special, and I'm very curious to
hear what you think of it after you take a
minute to listen. Anyways, all of that was kind of
a big detour, but I think it will apply to
what I want to talk about today. A detour to
(09:34):
introduce you to David White and to the concept and
the power of poetry and why that matters so much,
because David White is the person who originally turned me
on to this idea of the story we need to
stop telling. The way he says it is there's a
conversation you need to stop having. And he teaches a
conversational leadership class that lasts for seven weeks, and my
(09:57):
husband took the class, and each the seven weeks has
a different theme, but the very first theme in conversational
leadership is about the conversations we need to stop having.
And this is what made me think of this idea
of the story that we need to stop telling, because
each of us have a conversation we need to stop having,
or a story we need to stop telling. And you
could talk about it either way. I think it's the
(10:18):
same concept, but with the idea of write your story.
All of us find ourselves telling a certain story over
and over and over again in our lives, and there
comes a point where you realize, I need to stop
(10:39):
telling this story. You know, the stories that we write,
the stories that we tell, become kind of the architecture
of our life. And I talk about this both in
the power of writing it down and I talk about
it and write your story, and I even unpack the
science behind this. This is not like woo woo stuff.
There's actual science that shows that the stories that we
tell are building the network of the web of neural
(11:01):
pathways that are in our brain that help us understand
how the world works. So when you tell yourself a
story like I'm a loser, I'm a failure, whatever, that
neural pathway really becomes the architecture of how you see
the world. So in some ways, no matter what happens
to you, that's the lens that you're reading your life through,
(11:23):
and so you're always going to find a way to
make the events that take place in your life fit
into that lens. So this is the power of utilizing
a tool like write your Story, is that you can
take an old story and upgrade the story, rewrite the
story into something new, into something more expansive, into something
with a little bit more spaciousness to it, so that
(11:45):
you can begin to experience your life in a different way.
And all of us have these moments of frustration where
we feel like we're banging our head against a brick wall,
or we're bumping up against a glass ceiling or whatever.
And I've had these moments so many times in my life,
and I've had them really intensely in the last five years,
which I've talked about at length on this show. So
(12:06):
that's no secret here. We have these periods of time,
these seasons in our life where we feel like I'm stuck,
like I can't get out of this environment that I'm in,
this small room that I've built myself inside of the
architecture that I've created inside my brain. No matter what
I do, I can't seem to kind of get myself
(12:26):
beyond these four walls. And I think this is the
power of asking ourselves the question before we say, how
do I want to rewrite my story? Or you know,
what story do I want to tell? We almost can't
even get there yet, is David White's point. His point
that he makes is we can't get to what story
do I want to tell? Or what conversation do I
want to have? Is how he would say it, until
(12:48):
we ask ourselves the question what conversation do I need
to stop having? And I love how David White talks
about if you don't know what conversation you need to
stop having, just ask your spouse, or ask your close friends,
or ask a family member, because they will tell you
what conversation you need to stop having. It's likely a
conversation that's been on repeat for a really long time.
And sometimes the people in our life who are closest
(13:10):
to us are much better at pinpointing those conversations that
are old and tired than we are, because to us,
it's just normal life, and to them, they're just able
to see it with more objectivity than we are. So
if you're not sure what story you need to stop telling,
you could ask someone in your life. But before we
can think about what story do I want to tell,
(13:31):
we have to ask ourselves the question, what story do
I need to be done telling? And this really opened
up an epiphany for me when I heard him say
this on the interview with Rick Rubin, because I started
to think, you know, I've done a lot of thinking
in the last five years about the conversations I do
want to be having the story I do want to
be telling what I do want to be taking place
(13:53):
in my life. And I think in the world of
self help or spirituality or manifestation or whatever you want
to call it, we hear a lot of talk about
focusing on the positive. And I think I've been trying
to do that, really focusing on like what do I
want instead of what don't I want? And I think
David White brings up a really amazing point that we
can't really create something new until we take a good
(14:16):
look at what we have created, what we have already created,
where it came from. And even he he doesn't use
this language, but I would use this language. Even can
we find a way to bring some love to the
story that we created that needs to be done, It
needs to be gone, it needs to be you know, buried.
(14:39):
Can we find a way to bring some love to
that story? Because maybe you have a story that you
always fail at what you try, or maybe you have
a story that you don't deserve love, or maybe you
have a story that you know don't have what it
takes to be in a long term committed relationship, or
maybe you have a story that you know you can't
take up too much space in the world, or that
(15:00):
you're irresponsible or whatever. It is these stories that we
carry around in our bodies, and until we're willing to
really sit with that story and take a look at
it and ask ourselves, are we ready to be done
with this? You know, where did this story come from?
Until we take some time to do that, we're not
really ready to build something new. And so I think
(15:22):
I've gotten caught in this trap a few times in
the last handful of years as we've been navigating some
challenges and difficulties in our life, particularly with my career
or my husband's career. I guess I should say we
took a big risk on a business venture. We felt
like it was a strong calling in our lives, like
we were invited into this thing that felt much bigger
(15:43):
than us. We knew that, we knew that, we knew
we were supposed to do it. We invested tons of
time and energy and all of our savings into this
venture and ended up losing everything. And I had so
many questions after it all fell apart, about why would
we be taken on this journey if it was just
going to all fall apart at the end. You know,
(16:04):
at first, it was just like, well, this whole thing
feels really unfair. Then it felt like maybe I misunderstood.
Maybe it was never a calling, Maybe it was just
we were out there on our own, just kind of
deciding that we were going to do these things, and
it's just kind of a coin toss, like maybe you succeed,
maybe you fail. And so I spent a long time
trying to figure out which was which. And here's the
(16:25):
point that I'm trying to make. I think there comes
a point where you have to look at the way
you're telling the story to yourself and ask yourself, am
I ready to be done with this story? Am I
ready to be done telling the story of Pinewood Surf Club?
And I want to just share with you if you're
a longtime listener, especially if you listened all the way
(16:48):
through the last season, for example, if you've been with
me for a while and you've heard me tell the
whole story start to finish, you're probably one of those
people in my life who could say, Okay, we're maybe
ready to be done telling this story. And I do
feel like I'm coming to the end of the usefulness
of the story. There's a period of time where a
(17:08):
story telling a story over and over feels pretty useful
because you're still trying to understand it. In fact, I
read this amazing statistic, or not even really as statistic,
I don't know what you would call it. I read
this amazing article about kids and why kids like to
read the same books and watch the same shows over
and over again, and since I have a three and
four year old, this was so poignant to me. I'm like,
(17:31):
why will they watch the same episode of the same
show over and over again. There's this episode of a
show that my daughter likes to watch. She's four and
a half, and it's an episode where in the episode,
the little girl learns how to swim, and I swear
to you she's watched this episode probably fifty times, and
she still asks for it when we sit down to
watch TV. She wants to watch the same episode of
(17:53):
the same show again. And this article was essentially saying
that kids watch the same show or read the same
books over and over and over again until they understand
them and then they're ready to move on. And it
made me wonder if maybe we do the same thing
with our stories. Maybe we tell our stories over and
over and over and over again until we fully understand them,
(18:17):
and then when we fully understand them, we're ready to
move on. And I do feel like this story that
I've been telling about this risk that we took and
the way things turned out and it not going the
way that I hoped it did, is a story that
I've been trying to understand. And I've been really telling
myself the story, telling you, the story, telling anybody who
(18:38):
will listen to the story hundreds of times until I
can understand it. And only recently have I felt like, oh,
I think I'm really starting to get it. Like I
talked about on last week's episode, I'm starting to be
able to receive the gifts that this difficulty wanted to
show me. And when I first started telling the story,
I wasn't in that place. I wasn't ready to receive
(19:00):
what the story was trying to offer me. But now
I'm really beginning to see it from that perspective. And
one of the things I'll tell, just this quick example,
just as a way to put some meat on the bones,
(19:22):
my daughter recently came home from the little day camp
that she goes to, and one of her friends at
camp had told her this scary story about a were
wolf that I think the little girl's older brother had
told to her. And when this friend told Nella about
the werewolf, this like set off a chain reaction of
just absolute fear and terror. At bedtime, Nella couldn't, you know,
(19:46):
whereas normally bedtime as no drama, no fuss. She would
go down very easily, and now all of a sudden,
she didn't want to be left in her room. She
didn't want to be in the dark by herself. You know,
her bedroom's upstairs and our main family room is downstairs,
so she didn't want to go upstairs and put her
clothes on by herself. She didn't want to be even
in the other room from mom or dad. You know.
Sometimes I would load the kids into the car and
then like run back inside and get something else that
(20:08):
we needed before we leave. And it's not like I'm
leaving the kids for thirty minutes. I'm just you know,
for thirty seconds while I run in the house and
get a water bottle or something. The kids would sit
in the car and Nella has started asking me when
I walk out to the car, Mom, do you have
everything that we need? Well, this fear has just taken
over her life. It's just taken over her body. It's
(20:30):
so much fear. And I've been in these long conversations
with her recently about how important it is to face
our fears, because until we face our fears, we are
overcome by them. They rule our lives. I said to her,
do you want to spend the rest of your life
being afraid that a werewolf is going to jump out
of your closet in your room? Or do you want
(20:50):
to come with mom? And I'll hold your hand and
we can go up to your room together and look
in the closet and you'll see there's nothing there, and
I'll be with you the whole time, and we're going
to look your fear right in the face, and we're
going to see that you're totally safe, and then we
can just put this whole thing to bed. And so
she's been kind of percolating that and processing it, and
as I've been having that conversation with her, I've thought
so much about myself and about this time that we've
(21:13):
been in and about how this season for me is
really about facing my fears. It's about facing my fears
of not having enough, facing my fears of running out,
facing my fears of bankruptcy, facing my fears of losing
our house, facing my fears of failure, facing my fears
of the list could go on. So much of this
(21:33):
time has been about facing my fears and realizing that
the thing that I have let unconsciously control my life,
this fear that I'm not going to have enough, that
I'm going to run out, that we're going to lose,
this that even after everything we've built, it's all going
to be taken away from us, that the rug's going
to be pulled out. That fear has been unconsciously ruling
my life. And it isn't until you face your fear
(21:57):
that you're able to conquer it, to overcome, to move
on in such a way where, yeah, maybe that happens.
Is it the preference? No? Is it the ideal? No?
Is it something that I'm pointing myself toward. No. But oddly,
this is the weird thing. The more we fear something,
the more we point ourselves towards it. And so I've
(22:18):
realized this that because I was so afraid of all
of these things happening in a weird way, it either
needed to happen or I invited it to happen. I'm
not sure around the language of this. Yet it needed
to happen, or I invited it to happen, or it
is a gift that it happened, because then when it happens,
(22:39):
you can look it right in the face and go, oh,
this thing, this were wolf, that I've been afraid of
all this time, is actually pretend it doesn't even exist.
It's all in my mind. It's imaginary. And once I
realized that, I can put it to bed, and then
I don't have to live my life in fear of
it anymore. And can it still happen? Sure? Maybe it could.
(23:00):
I do think it's sort of a coin toss. It's
like you try something risky and it's the toss of
a coin. Maybe it's heads, maybe it's tails. Maybe when
maybe you lose. That's true with anything that we try,
and the more risk that you put into something, this
is the whole point of risk, right, It's the whole
definition of risk that the risky or something is, the
more you have to lose if it falls through. And
(23:22):
so we took a risk. It didn't work out the
way that we thought it would, and that's just the
end of the story, and we can be done telling
that story. Now, I really do feel like I'm coming
to the place in my life where I'm ready to
be done telling that story, because I've already extracted all
of the goodness, Like I've pulled out all the gifts
that this hardship wanted to offer me, and I'm ready
to move on to the next story in my life.
(23:45):
So I don't know what that story is for you, or,
as David White would say, what's the conversation you need
to stop having. What's the story you need to stop telling.
What's the conversation you need to stop having? And I
want to really make sure that I say, I'm not
asking this question from a place of shame, So let
me just parse out the difference for you. I'm not
(24:06):
asking this question to say, like, if you were really strong,
you know, if you were really evolved, if you were
really wise, you'd stop telling this story. You know, get
over it already. That's a very different energy than the
energy I'm bringing to this question, Because the story in
your life that's ready to be put to bed will
(24:26):
feel ready to be put to bed. If you would
have asked me two years ago if I was ready
to be done telling the story about this thing we
were trying to build, and how it might not work out.
I wouldn't have been ready to be done because it
wasn't time for it to be done. But like everything,
stories run their course, and there comes a point where
you are ready to be done telling the story. You've
(24:48):
already extracted all the goodness that the story had to
offer you. You've already learned all the lessons that the
story had to teach you. You've already fully understood everything
that took place in the story. And if you haven't
gotten there yet, there's no shame. It doesn't mean that
you're not as evolved, it doesn't mean that you're not
as wise. It doesn't mean anything about you, except just
(25:09):
that the story is still working in your life. And
if there's a story that's ready to be done, it
will feel really ready to be done. It's going to
feel like what a relief. I can set this aside.
I have just exhausted this story for all that it's worth.
I've told it a thousand times. It is ready to
be put to bed. One other quick example I'll give,
(25:32):
because it's slightly different, is a client I worked with
a long time ago. I actually wrote about her and
write your story. Her name is Mary, and she told
me that she had a story from her childhood that
was really fascinating and very dramatic and had lots of
human interest in it, and people loved to hear her story,
and so she would be asked in church groups or
(25:53):
in school groups, or in front of, you know, large
crowds of people to come and tell this story to folks.
And she did that for a long time, and people
would always say, it's so inspiring, I can't believe that
you've overcome what you've overcome. Amazing how you've become the
person who you are inspite of everything you faced. And
for a while that worked really well for her, and
(26:13):
at one point she realized, I'm very ready to be
done telling this story. It's not that it's stopped being
inspiring for others, it's that it's stopped being expansive for me.
So I want you to take that into consideration too,
as you think about the story that you're ready to
be done telling. It may not be that the story
is no longer inspiring for others. It may be that
(26:35):
the story is no longer expansive for you. That telling
the story for you in order to tell it. You
almost have to put yourself back into a smaller box,
and you're ready to move on from that box. You're
ready to tell a bigger story. Is there a story
in your life that you keep telling repetitively even though
you can kind of feel in your system, in your heart,
(26:57):
in your gut that you're ready to be done telling
this story. That's the story that is ready to be done.
That's the story that you're ready to stop telling. So
as you consider the story that you're ready to be
done telling, also take some time and listen to Rick
Rubin and David White and report back. Let me know
how it feels for you to listen to David White
(27:18):
share his poetry, to share other poetry, to hear the
two of them talk. Let me know if you feel
what I felt, that feeling of being transported to another world,
or like you're sitting next to the roaring sound of
the ocean waves, or like in the middle of a
forest or something and it just completely changes your vibration.
And also let me know if you're going to take
on the poetry challenge, what poems are you going to memorize?
(27:40):
Are you going to do one a week or one
a month. I would love to hear from you. You
can find me over on Instagram and Ali Fallon and
I will look forward to seeing you next week on
The Writer Story podcast
Pick up the pieces of your life who put them
back together with the words you write, all the beauty
and piece and the magic that you'll start too fun
when you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down on Colord. It's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back
to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm
your host, and on today's episode, I want to talk
about this idea of the story you need to stop telling.
And I have to give a lot of credit to
the unmatched, the amazing, the immortal David White, who is
(00:46):
an Irish poet, a philosopher, an author, an amazing thinker
that I've been following for a long time now. I
think I originally learned about David White via John o'donahue,
who also similar description. Also Irish poets famously wrote books
of blessings that are just the most incredible, amazing pieces
of writing. A lot of the blessings are written for
(01:08):
certain occasions, so you could read the blessing at like
a graduation, but they're blessings for thresholds, they're blessings for death,
or blessing for someone who's in a funk, or blessing
for a depression someone who's experiencing depression. So they're kind
of themed blessings, but they are really these little miniature
poems that are so profound and so beautiful and just
(01:30):
like speak exactly to the circumstance that you're in. They're
really really incredible. I found John o'donahue first through his
book that I think is just called Book of Blessings,
and then learned about David White and David White's poetry
through John o'donahue. And by the way, if you want
to do yourself a favor, like a three hour favor,
go find Rick Rubin's podcast and listen to the two
(01:50):
back to back episodes that are conversations with David White.
This man will just enrapture you with his wisdom, with
his just his tone a voice, the approach he takes,
the way he reads his poetry. It's almost like having
a prayer spoken over you or a blessing read over you,
like your your whole body. Your vibration will change instantly
(02:12):
when you hear this man begin reading his own poetry,
or not even reading he's reciting his own poetry. He
says in that interview that he has thousands of poems memorized,
many of which are his own, and then many of
which are written by other poets. And hearing him recite
the poetry, hearing him talk about his love for poetry,
it's like it takes you into a different dimension and
(02:34):
whatever felt like it was weighing on you just feels
like it lifts right off of you. I don't know
if you've had that experience before in like a spiritual
environment or just even in nature, where you feel like
your whole vibration shifts because of something that's going on
in your environment, like you're really stressed. But then you're
sitting by the ocean and something about the sound of
the waves and sitting there in the sand just feels
(02:56):
like it changes the entire nature of of how you're
relating to the world. And suddenly your heart rate slows
and you aren't feeling that same heaviness, and your whole
body relaxes and you feel like you can take a
deep breath. That's the feeling of listening to David White
read his poetry, and something I've been trying to do recently,
(03:17):
and this is a challenge I'll extend to you as well,
because I think it's really beneficial. Is I've been trying
to memorize a poem a week, or you could even
do a poem a month. You don't have to do
a poem a week. There are a couple of reasons
why I think this is really beneficial and helpful. One
is that with the introduction of technology into our lives
and with smartphones and just the space that technology is
(03:39):
taking up, we have to memorize so much less today
than we did ten or twenty years ago that our
brains don't often get that practice of memorization. So memorizing
really anything is such good exercise for your brain. It's
like taking your brain to the gym and doing a
workout of the gym for your brain. And poetry is
(03:59):
an opportunity for your brain to memorize something that you
can go back to in times of distress and use
as a tool the same way that I was talking
about that feeling of sitting next to the ocean when
you're feeling like life is really chaotic and there's all
this input and you can't find a way to ground
yourself Poetry is a really amazing way to ground yourself.
And just like people will do with scripture memorization or
(04:23):
memorization of like maybe inspirational quotes or quotes from books
or whatever, I use poetry the same type of a way,
where I go back to the phrases that are in poems,
or you know, just a particular word combination. Maybe it's
not even an entire sentence, but I'll go back to
that particular part of a poem and I'll use it
as a way to soothe myself in times of stress.
(04:45):
So David White, for example, has a poem called Everything
Is Waiting for You, And I won't spoil it by
reciting the entire poem because he recites it on that
Rick Rubin interview and does it much better than I
ever could. But I go back to these lines all
the time. Great mistake is to act the drama as
if you were alone, as if life were a progressive
and cunning crime, with no witness to the tiny, hidden transgressions.
(05:08):
To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.
I'll go back to that line over and over and
over again. Now that I have that poem memorized and
say to myself, to feel abandoned is to deny the
intimacy of your surroundings. Or Marry Oliver her poem wild Geese.
You do not have to be good. You do not
have to walk for a thousand miles on your knees
through the desert repenting. You only have to let the
(05:30):
soft animal of your body love what it loves. I
might be getting some of that wording wrong, but that
idea of being able to go back to that phrase
you do not have to be good. I'll remind myself
that in certain moments of perfectionism, or when I find
myself being really hard on myself or moving to shame,
when I make a mistake or I have a moment
of failure, I'll tell myself, you do not have to
(05:51):
be good. You only have to let yourself. You only
have to let the soft animal of your body love
what it loves. And it's such a comfort in time
of great stress or chaos, or when I'm feeling really overwhelmed.
These are anchors, there are words that I can come
back to. So it's both just really good exercise for
the brain, like memorizing times tables or memorizing. You know,
(06:15):
I don't know, like facts about animals or something like
that like we do in elementary school. It's just good
exercise for the brain as we get older since we
don't have to do that as often. And it's also
this great comfort, this handhold, this grounding mechanism that we
can use in times of stress. And so poetry, I
think for some people poetry can feel like it's kind
(06:35):
of highbrow or elitist, or it's like out of reach
kind of And I've heard a lot of people say
about poetry, and I used to feel this way too
about poetry before I had a major in English in
college and really fell in love with poetry. But I
used to always say, I don't really get it. You know,
you read a poem and you're like, I don't understand
what the author was trying to say, because poetry isn't
(06:58):
spoken as directly as a book is. It's not, you know,
a piece of prose. The author's job is to really
directly explain to you what they're trying to say. And
if you walk away from a piece of prose without
knowing what the author's trying to say, then the author
didn't really do their job. But poetry is different. Poetry
is about creating images and drawing connections from one thing
(07:20):
to another, and so it's a less linear piece of writing,
and it can be sometimes more challenging for us to
wrap our brains around. But I think this is the
invitation that poetry offers to us, is it offers us
to move from brain to heart. It offers us to
drop from intellectualizing everything and needing to fully understand every
(07:42):
single thing that an author says, to just dropping into
our heart space and hearing words and asking yourself, how
do these words make me feel? And one of the
things that my a poetry teacher in college, used to
always ask us that was really helpful is what are
some of the sounds in this poem that really stick
out to you? Because poetry isn't always about, you know,
(08:05):
the literal meaning of the words. Sometimes it's just about
the way that it sounds rolling off the tongue of
the person who reads it. And David White talks about
this in the episode with Rick Rubin. He talks about
how poetry originally was an oral art form. It was
always meant to be spoken out loud. I don't know
if you've ever heard a spoken word poet speak their
(08:27):
poetry and it sounds like music. But this is really
what poetry was meant to be. It was meant to
be an art form for the ears, you know, so
sort of like tickle your ears like you're hearing senses.
And yes, poetry can be read on the page two,
of course, but I think there's something really special about
hearing it spoken out loud. So I do recommend going
(08:48):
to listen to that Rick Rubin episode with David White. Again,
like I said, this is a three hour episode. It's
two back topack episodes, and each one is an hour
and a half. But it's absolutely worth the listen, even
if you don't make it all the way through both
episodes if it feels too long for you. But I
have a feeling that when you get into the episodes,
you're going to be enraptured like I was, and really
taken with the sound of David White's voice and the
(09:14):
beauty of the words that he's written and the way
that he speaks them, and just the interchange between Rick
and David is so special, and I'm very curious to
hear what you think of it after you take a
minute to listen. Anyways, all of that was kind of
a big detour, but I think it will apply to
what I want to talk about today. A detour to
(09:34):
introduce you to David White and to the concept and
the power of poetry and why that matters so much,
because David White is the person who originally turned me
on to this idea of the story we need to
stop telling. The way he says it is there's a
conversation you need to stop having. And he teaches a
conversational leadership class that lasts for seven weeks, and my
(09:57):
husband took the class, and each the seven weeks has
a different theme, but the very first theme in conversational
leadership is about the conversations we need to stop having.
And this is what made me think of this idea
of the story that we need to stop telling, because
each of us have a conversation we need to stop having,
or a story we need to stop telling. And you
could talk about it either way. I think it's the
(10:18):
same concept, but with the idea of write your story.
All of us find ourselves telling a certain story over
and over and over again in our lives, and there
comes a point where you realize, I need to stop
(10:39):
telling this story. You know, the stories that we write,
the stories that we tell, become kind of the architecture
of our life. And I talk about this both in
the power of writing it down and I talk about
it and write your story, and I even unpack the
science behind this. This is not like woo woo stuff.
There's actual science that shows that the stories that we
tell are building the network of the web of neural
(11:01):
pathways that are in our brain that help us understand
how the world works. So when you tell yourself a
story like I'm a loser, I'm a failure, whatever, that
neural pathway really becomes the architecture of how you see
the world. So in some ways, no matter what happens
to you, that's the lens that you're reading your life through,
(11:23):
and so you're always going to find a way to
make the events that take place in your life fit
into that lens. So this is the power of utilizing
a tool like write your Story, is that you can
take an old story and upgrade the story, rewrite the
story into something new, into something more expansive, into something
with a little bit more spaciousness to it, so that
(11:45):
you can begin to experience your life in a different way.
And all of us have these moments of frustration where
we feel like we're banging our head against a brick wall,
or we're bumping up against a glass ceiling or whatever.
And I've had these moments so many times in my life,
and I've had them really intensely in the last five years,
which I've talked about at length on this show. So
(12:06):
that's no secret here. We have these periods of time,
these seasons in our life where we feel like I'm stuck,
like I can't get out of this environment that I'm in,
this small room that I've built myself inside of the
architecture that I've created inside my brain. No matter what
I do, I can't seem to kind of get myself
(12:26):
beyond these four walls. And I think this is the
power of asking ourselves the question before we say, how
do I want to rewrite my story? Or you know,
what story do I want to tell? We almost can't
even get there yet, is David White's point. His point
that he makes is we can't get to what story
do I want to tell? Or what conversation do I
want to have? Is how he would say it, until
(12:48):
we ask ourselves the question what conversation do I need
to stop having? And I love how David White talks
about if you don't know what conversation you need to
stop having, just ask your spouse, or ask your close friends,
or ask a family member, because they will tell you
what conversation you need to stop having. It's likely a
conversation that's been on repeat for a really long time.
And sometimes the people in our life who are closest
(13:10):
to us are much better at pinpointing those conversations that
are old and tired than we are, because to us,
it's just normal life, and to them, they're just able
to see it with more objectivity than we are. So
if you're not sure what story you need to stop telling,
you could ask someone in your life. But before we
can think about what story do I want to tell,
(13:31):
we have to ask ourselves the question, what story do
I need to be done telling? And this really opened
up an epiphany for me when I heard him say
this on the interview with Rick Rubin, because I started
to think, you know, I've done a lot of thinking
in the last five years about the conversations I do
want to be having the story I do want to
be telling what I do want to be taking place
(13:53):
in my life. And I think in the world of
self help or spirituality or manifestation or whatever you want
to call it, we hear a lot of talk about
focusing on the positive. And I think I've been trying
to do that, really focusing on like what do I
want instead of what don't I want? And I think
David White brings up a really amazing point that we
can't really create something new until we take a good
(14:16):
look at what we have created, what we have already created,
where it came from. And even he he doesn't use
this language, but I would use this language. Even can
we find a way to bring some love to the
story that we created that needs to be done, It
needs to be gone, it needs to be you know, buried.
(14:39):
Can we find a way to bring some love to
that story? Because maybe you have a story that you
always fail at what you try, or maybe you have
a story that you don't deserve love, or maybe you
have a story that you know don't have what it
takes to be in a long term committed relationship, or
maybe you have a story that you know you can't
take up too much space in the world, or that
(15:00):
you're irresponsible or whatever. It is these stories that we
carry around in our bodies, and until we're willing to
really sit with that story and take a look at
it and ask ourselves, are we ready to be done
with this? You know, where did this story come from?
Until we take some time to do that, we're not
really ready to build something new. And so I think
(15:22):
I've gotten caught in this trap a few times in
the last handful of years as we've been navigating some
challenges and difficulties in our life, particularly with my career
or my husband's career. I guess I should say we
took a big risk on a business venture. We felt
like it was a strong calling in our lives, like
we were invited into this thing that felt much bigger
(15:43):
than us. We knew that, we knew that, we knew
we were supposed to do it. We invested tons of
time and energy and all of our savings into this
venture and ended up losing everything. And I had so
many questions after it all fell apart, about why would
we be taken on this journey if it was just
going to all fall apart at the end. You know,
(16:04):
at first, it was just like, well, this whole thing
feels really unfair. Then it felt like maybe I misunderstood.
Maybe it was never a calling, Maybe it was just
we were out there on our own, just kind of
deciding that we were going to do these things, and
it's just kind of a coin toss, like maybe you succeed,
maybe you fail. And so I spent a long time
trying to figure out which was which. And here's the
(16:25):
point that I'm trying to make. I think there comes
a point where you have to look at the way
you're telling the story to yourself and ask yourself, am
I ready to be done with this story? Am I
ready to be done telling the story of Pinewood Surf Club?
And I want to just share with you if you're
a longtime listener, especially if you listened all the way
(16:48):
through the last season, for example, if you've been with
me for a while and you've heard me tell the
whole story start to finish, you're probably one of those
people in my life who could say, Okay, we're maybe
ready to be done telling this story. And I do
feel like I'm coming to the end of the usefulness
of the story. There's a period of time where a
(17:08):
story telling a story over and over feels pretty useful
because you're still trying to understand it. In fact, I
read this amazing statistic, or not even really as statistic,
I don't know what you would call it. I read
this amazing article about kids and why kids like to
read the same books and watch the same shows over
and over again, and since I have a three and
four year old, this was so poignant to me. I'm like,
(17:31):
why will they watch the same episode of the same
show over and over again. There's this episode of a
show that my daughter likes to watch. She's four and
a half, and it's an episode where in the episode,
the little girl learns how to swim, and I swear
to you she's watched this episode probably fifty times, and
she still asks for it when we sit down to
watch TV. She wants to watch the same episode of
(17:53):
the same show again. And this article was essentially saying
that kids watch the same show or read the same
books over and over and over again until they understand
them and then they're ready to move on. And it
made me wonder if maybe we do the same thing
with our stories. Maybe we tell our stories over and
over and over and over again until we fully understand them,
(18:17):
and then when we fully understand them, we're ready to
move on. And I do feel like this story that
I've been telling about this risk that we took and
the way things turned out and it not going the
way that I hoped it did, is a story that
I've been trying to understand. And I've been really telling
myself the story, telling you, the story, telling anybody who
(18:38):
will listen to the story hundreds of times until I
can understand it. And only recently have I felt like, oh,
I think I'm really starting to get it. Like I
talked about on last week's episode, I'm starting to be
able to receive the gifts that this difficulty wanted to
show me. And when I first started telling the story,
I wasn't in that place. I wasn't ready to receive
(19:00):
what the story was trying to offer me. But now
I'm really beginning to see it from that perspective. And
one of the things I'll tell, just this quick example,
just as a way to put some meat on the bones,
(19:22):
my daughter recently came home from the little day camp
that she goes to, and one of her friends at
camp had told her this scary story about a were
wolf that I think the little girl's older brother had
told to her. And when this friend told Nella about
the werewolf, this like set off a chain reaction of
just absolute fear and terror. At bedtime, Nella couldn't, you know,
(19:46):
whereas normally bedtime as no drama, no fuss. She would
go down very easily, and now all of a sudden,
she didn't want to be left in her room. She
didn't want to be in the dark by herself. You know,
her bedroom's upstairs and our main family room is downstairs,
so she didn't want to go upstairs and put her
clothes on by herself. She didn't want to be even
in the other room from mom or dad. You know.
Sometimes I would load the kids into the car and
then like run back inside and get something else that
(20:08):
we needed before we leave. And it's not like I'm
leaving the kids for thirty minutes. I'm just you know,
for thirty seconds while I run in the house and
get a water bottle or something. The kids would sit
in the car and Nella has started asking me when
I walk out to the car, Mom, do you have
everything that we need? Well, this fear has just taken
over her life. It's just taken over her body. It's
(20:30):
so much fear. And I've been in these long conversations
with her recently about how important it is to face
our fears, because until we face our fears, we are
overcome by them. They rule our lives. I said to her,
do you want to spend the rest of your life
being afraid that a werewolf is going to jump out
of your closet in your room? Or do you want
(20:50):
to come with mom? And I'll hold your hand and
we can go up to your room together and look
in the closet and you'll see there's nothing there, and
I'll be with you the whole time, and we're going
to look your fear right in the face, and we're
going to see that you're totally safe, and then we
can just put this whole thing to bed. And so
she's been kind of percolating that and processing it, and
as I've been having that conversation with her, I've thought
so much about myself and about this time that we've
(21:13):
been in and about how this season for me is
really about facing my fears. It's about facing my fears
of not having enough, facing my fears of running out,
facing my fears of bankruptcy, facing my fears of losing
our house, facing my fears of failure, facing my fears
of the list could go on. So much of this
(21:33):
time has been about facing my fears and realizing that
the thing that I have let unconsciously control my life,
this fear that I'm not going to have enough, that
I'm going to run out, that we're going to lose,
this that even after everything we've built, it's all going
to be taken away from us, that the rug's going
to be pulled out. That fear has been unconsciously ruling
my life. And it isn't until you face your fear
(21:57):
that you're able to conquer it, to overcome, to move
on in such a way where, yeah, maybe that happens.
Is it the preference? No? Is it the ideal? No?
Is it something that I'm pointing myself toward. No. But oddly,
this is the weird thing. The more we fear something,
the more we point ourselves towards it. And so I've
(22:18):
realized this that because I was so afraid of all
of these things happening in a weird way, it either
needed to happen or I invited it to happen. I'm
not sure around the language of this. Yet it needed
to happen, or I invited it to happen, or it
is a gift that it happened, because then when it happens,
(22:39):
you can look it right in the face and go, oh,
this thing, this were wolf, that I've been afraid of
all this time, is actually pretend it doesn't even exist.
It's all in my mind. It's imaginary. And once I
realized that, I can put it to bed, and then
I don't have to live my life in fear of
it anymore. And can it still happen? Sure? Maybe it could.
(23:00):
I do think it's sort of a coin toss. It's
like you try something risky and it's the toss of
a coin. Maybe it's heads, maybe it's tails. Maybe when
maybe you lose. That's true with anything that we try,
and the more risk that you put into something, this
is the whole point of risk, right, It's the whole
definition of risk that the risky or something is, the
more you have to lose if it falls through. And
(23:22):
so we took a risk. It didn't work out the
way that we thought it would, and that's just the
end of the story, and we can be done telling
that story. Now, I really do feel like I'm coming
to the place in my life where I'm ready to
be done telling that story, because I've already extracted all
of the goodness, Like I've pulled out all the gifts
that this hardship wanted to offer me, and I'm ready
to move on to the next story in my life.
(23:45):
So I don't know what that story is for you, or,
as David White would say, what's the conversation you need
to stop having. What's the story you need to stop telling.
What's the conversation you need to stop having? And I
want to really make sure that I say, I'm not
asking this question from a place of shame, So let
me just parse out the difference for you. I'm not
(24:06):
asking this question to say, like, if you were really strong,
you know, if you were really evolved, if you were
really wise, you'd stop telling this story. You know, get
over it already. That's a very different energy than the
energy I'm bringing to this question, Because the story in
your life that's ready to be put to bed will
(24:26):
feel ready to be put to bed. If you would
have asked me two years ago if I was ready
to be done telling the story about this thing we
were trying to build, and how it might not work out.
I wouldn't have been ready to be done because it
wasn't time for it to be done. But like everything,
stories run their course, and there comes a point where
you are ready to be done telling the story. You've
(24:48):
already extracted all the goodness that the story had to
offer you. You've already learned all the lessons that the
story had to teach you. You've already fully understood everything
that took place in the story. And if you haven't
gotten there yet, there's no shame. It doesn't mean that
you're not as evolved, it doesn't mean that you're not
as wise. It doesn't mean anything about you, except just
(25:09):
that the story is still working in your life. And
if there's a story that's ready to be done, it
will feel really ready to be done. It's going to
feel like what a relief. I can set this aside.
I have just exhausted this story for all that it's worth.
I've told it a thousand times. It is ready to
be put to bed. One other quick example I'll give,
(25:32):
because it's slightly different, is a client I worked with
a long time ago. I actually wrote about her and
write your story. Her name is Mary, and she told
me that she had a story from her childhood that
was really fascinating and very dramatic and had lots of
human interest in it, and people loved to hear her story,
and so she would be asked in church groups or
(25:53):
in school groups, or in front of, you know, large
crowds of people to come and tell this story to folks.
And she did that for a long time, and people
would always say, it's so inspiring, I can't believe that
you've overcome what you've overcome. Amazing how you've become the
person who you are inspite of everything you faced. And
for a while that worked really well for her, and
(26:13):
at one point she realized, I'm very ready to be
done telling this story. It's not that it's stopped being
inspiring for others, it's that it's stopped being expansive for me.
So I want you to take that into consideration too,
as you think about the story that you're ready to
be done telling. It may not be that the story
is no longer inspiring for others. It may be that
(26:35):
the story is no longer expansive for you. That telling
the story for you in order to tell it. You
almost have to put yourself back into a smaller box,
and you're ready to move on from that box. You're
ready to tell a bigger story. Is there a story
in your life that you keep telling repetitively even though
you can kind of feel in your system, in your heart,
(26:57):
in your gut that you're ready to be done telling
this story. That's the story that is ready to be done.
That's the story that you're ready to stop telling. So
as you consider the story that you're ready to be
done telling, also take some time and listen to Rick
Rubin and David White and report back. Let me know
how it feels for you to listen to David White
(27:18):
share his poetry, to share other poetry, to hear the
two of them talk. Let me know if you feel
what I felt, that feeling of being transported to another world,
or like you're sitting next to the roaring sound of
the ocean waves, or like in the middle of a
forest or something and it just completely changes your vibration.
And also let me know if you're going to take
on the poetry challenge, what poems are you going to memorize?
(27:40):
Are you going to do one a week or one
a month. I would love to hear from you. You
can find me over on Instagram and Ali Fallon and
I will look forward to seeing you next week on
The Writer Story podcast
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