I AM NOT ONLY MY STORY!

The Dual perspective says: “My story explains me. I am my story.”

The Nondual perspective says: “It’s more than that. My story is part of me and definitely shaped me, but it does not contain all of me.”

The dot is the personal self: history, wounds, trauma, childhood, attachment, diagnosis, astrology chart, numerology, personality, and so on.

The circle is the Being itself (the impersonal): the mystery (unknown) that cannot be reduced to explanation. That cannot be contained in words and the human mind.

And there comes the day when the explanations stop nourishing us. Not because they are wrong. Not because our wounds are not real. But because we begin to sense that there is something in us that cannot be defined by a narrative only.

Since I know myself, I wanted to understand everything. Why relationships unfolded the way they did. Why certain people appeared and vanished. Why grief arrived in the middle of a calm and apparent happiness. Why fear remained to win often over principles and stoic fundaments of life. Why I chose a road over another, a destination over the journey, and why have I danced the dance of urgent action-reaction/cause-effect.

And understanding it helped. Until it didn’t.

At some point, the search for explanations became another way of avoiding life.

I noticed how easy it was to reduce myself to a narrative. A collection of memories. A psychological profile. A childhood wound. A pattern. My attention was totally focused on the dot, forgetting about the circle around it.

Don’t get me wrong, the dot matters. And the circle matters too. It’s not choosing one over another. It’s integrating both. It’s marrying both.

The dot brings to the table all that is personal: my history, my losses, my conditioning, my victories and disappointments.

The circle brings a wider container: Presence, Being, Existence itself. The mystery that was before the story began and remains when the story changes. The Ocean. The Great Unknown.

Suffering often appears when in our foolishness :) (dearly said), we mistake the dot for the whole circle. And so, we become historians of ourselves. Experts in our wounds. Curators of our pain. We seem to know exactly why we are the way we are, yet somehow, we remain trapped with the same walls.

We notice often that nowadays there is a growing culture of analysis. We learn about attachment styles, defence mechanisms, boundaries, trauma responses, red/green flags, personality structures, and planetary influences and so on.

Again, none of these are wrong.

But sometimes I wonder if we have become so committed to understanding the theories about life that we have forgotten how to live it.

We meet someone and immediately begin evaluating. Maybe you heard around you often (as I also did hear), the common question, “what’s your star sign?”.

We search for warning signs.

We diagnose.

We categorize.

We compare.

We explain.

RARELY DO WE SIMPLY MEET.

Rarely do we allow a moment to remain mysterious.

The mind feels safer when everything has a cause. But life itself is not only a problem waiting to be solved. Life is something to be experienced.

THERE IS KINDNESS IN NOT KNOWING.

You allow yourself to be in a natural inherited human condition. You allow yourself to be who you are.

There is a freedom in allowing a person to be more than our interpretation of them.

And equally, there is a freedom in allowing ourselves to be more than our own interpretation.

What if not everything needs an explanation?

What if some experiences arrive simply to be lived?

What if Existence is larger than the psychological narrative we keep telling and reflecting about it?

The victim is not someone who has suffered.

The victim is the identity that believes the suffering is the whole story. And perhaps the real healing is not found in constructing a better narrative. Perhaps it is found in the courageous choice to put the narrative down for some time.

In feeling the wind.

In drinking the coffee.

In watching the sea.

In meeting another human being without first consulting our fears.

In remembering that we are held by something larger than our understanding.

The mystery has always been here. We cannot point at the margins of the Unknown. All we do is relate something to something else that existed before. We call this comparative/associative thinking. We name, we define something, and we include our feeling about it. We add words, but we don’t separate the filter through which something was experienced.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

Right here, this biblical verse is an invitation to sit with the mystery. And this is not unique to a single tradition. It echoes throughout sacred texts and spiritual writing across cultures. While each speaks through its own language, symbolism, and etymology, they all point toward the same essential truth.

To meet the mystery with curiosity, rather than certainty, expands our capacity to receive. It softens our need for answers and opens us to life's unfolding. In that openness, we discover the gift of spaciousness - a horizon no longer limited by what we already know but made infinite by what we are willing to welcome.

Dear one, before the explanation appeared, you were.

Before the memory appeared, you were.

Before the personal identity, stays the impersonal.

The one who narrates a story can be the character and narrator at the same time, by a mutual co-arising. The one who is noticing is being noticed at the same moment. We dream a life, we live a dream, we dream a dream, and eventually we also choose to live a life.

The problem is not that we have a personal story. The issue becomes noticed when we forget the immensity in which the story appears.

Modern culture encourages us to become archaeologists of ourselves. We tirelessly excavate the past, searching for the final conclusion that will set us free.

However, the mystery of existence is infinitely larger than our autobiography. Life is not asking us to solve ourselves. Life is asking us to participate. To be here. To meet what arrives. To stop standing at the shore analysing the ocean and finally enter the water.

There is a profound permission in not needing to know. A profound humility in allowing reality to remain what it is.

Perhaps the greatest illusion is not that we have suffered. We have. The illusion is that our suffering tells us who we are. We tend to listen to this voice only and from this place choose the quality of our living.

A story can explain what happened to us, but it cannot reveal the immensity we are.

It can describe the waves, but not the exact margins of the ocean.

The mind is endlessly devoted to the biography. It wants causes, timelines, explanations, and conclusions. It needs hierarchy for creating a false control of what might happen further.

At some point, I became less interested in why life was happening and more interested in experiencing that it was happening. The explanation could never taste the coffee.

The explanation could never feel the sea breeze. The explanation could never fall in love.

Only PRESENCE can do that.

Dear you,

Stay curious about what remains when the story falls silent. Life is revealing itself, softly…