By Dawna Markova , Ph.d., CEO of Professional Thinking Partners LLC

“Stories are our nearest and dearest way of understanding our lives and finding our way onward.” --Ursula LeGuin

I’ve been told that as it is about to shed its skin, its eyes turn milky white, leaving it temporarily blind. The creature then withdraws into the familiar darkness of its burrow to wait. It begins the shedding process by rubbing its nose against rocks or other hard objects to start the separation of the old layer from its lips, then opens its mouth very wide, as if to scream. The snake literally crawls out of the old skin that was restricting its growth.

How can we humans shed the old stories that are not big enough for what we have to do now. How can we crawl out of our armor and participate in transformation through relationship and meaningful conversation?  How can we move beyond the fear of our own imagination.

What has never been understood so fully before is that we co-author our future. Life doesn’t just happen to us; we inhabit a participatory universe, influencing and being influenced on a cellular level by everything that is around us. We know now that we are not simply parts of a machine, and that the greatest gift we can offer is the use of our consciousness to transform our experience. We need to create new images and stories that will unify us.

Current research on learning indicates that we have the capacity to think in many modes—analyzing and organizing, but also those dormant capacities of relational logic, synthesizing, and mythologizing—which give us the spider-like capacity to weave new connections between things that historically could not be held in the same room. Stories are much more than entertainment.  Researchers place them at the foundation of memory and learning where they provide the meaning that structures our lives. Whether we tell them publicly to others or murmur them secretly to ourselves, stories fuel the engine of our desire and evoke our actions.

Not all stories are created equal. Some rally against understanding, others promote it. Some are toxic and keep our problems festering. Others are tonic, bringing us into healing. Some have the potential to expand possibilities, some limit them. We need to differentiate between those which tranquilize us into passivity—let's call these “rut” stories-- and those that energize us into exploring the current of our lives through all its tributaries—let’s call these river stories. Rut stories tell you. You tell river stories. The most effective way to discern one from the other is to gather with others, step outside of the habitual and pay exquisite attention to those narratives that limit life and those that liberate it.

The forces of fragmentation that surrounds us convince us continually of our separation.  We can balance them by engaging in the kind of individual and collective inquiry that encourages “leaky margins”: Who is there that I will not allow myself to learn with? What do I love so much that, in the doing of it, I find a kind of grace in the world? What are the ways of working and relating that bring me alive? How can I move the pivot of my existence so that I am serving a fine purpose?  What is it that if I don’t do, I die a little each day? Who are the people and what are the conditions that bring out the best in me? How do I risk becoming more real and more alive? What will liberate my heart?

Questions like these cannot be answered. They become companions that draw you forward, connecting you to your heart. They are allies in the unknown and thresholds to the possible. The stories we tell each other in response to these questions can bring us together or tear us apart. We have inherited collective stories that have limited human possibility for generations. We are also at a wonderful intersection, a second innocence, perhaps, where we can use our consciousness to realize the dreams of all those who have nourished, protected, and passed on their life to us.

It is within the sphere of influence of every person reading this to choose to connect with others in order to create a new engagement with our present and future. If we let go of the too-small circles we have drawn around ourselves, if we allow ourselves permeable boundaries, we may discover that we are not as alone as we think. We may find ourselves meeting at an intersection, a threshold, a turning point where the limitations of our previous history become the liberation of our collective future. We may, in fact, discover that we are held  by hidden hands.

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something is more important than fear." -- Ambrose Redmoon