As I walked across Central Park on my way to office one morning this week, I had an experience that still brings a chuckle as I think about it. I was walking along, enjoying the trees as I usually do, and a young woman walked toward me. She wasn’t on the phone, and didn’t seem to be listening to any kind of device – just walking along the same as I, but in the opposite direction. She was smiling and happened to look my way. As she did, she burst out laughing – a huge belly laugh that took her over and she couldn’t stop. As we passed, she continued to laugh out loud, and I began to laugh, as well.

As she went on by, an old part of my brain wondered, fleetingly, if she had been laughing at me for some reason I didn’t know. Was there something wrong with my clothing? Was my hair strange looking? The good news was that these thoughts were like whispers and moved through my awareness pretty quickly. What stayed with me was the energy and delight of her laughter, and how it touched into my own. I really enjoyed that laugh and continued to chuckle for a good bit of the way to my office. Her face and the sound of her laughter were like sunshine, and it didn’t really matter what had tickled her funny bone.

This all got me to thinking about the power of the stories we tell ourselves, and how they affect our internal experience of who we are and the quality of the world around us. If the stories are good, that tends to support us. If they’re bad, our mood or self-image are likely to take a dip. The good news is that we can learn not to get caught in our own stories at all but, instead, to recognize that we’re making something up and then let it go.

For this week’s experiment, I invite you to notice the stories you tell yourself and whether they enhance your experience or diminish it. It can be hard to recognize when we’re making up what we think is going on around us, but it’s pretty likely that if we’re attributing motives, thoughts, or feelings to someone else, we’re in the realm of story-telling. In some psychotherapy approaches, this is called “mind-reading”, and it leads to all kinds of difficulties, not the least of which how bad it makes the person feel who’s doing the mind-reading.

Even if you think you’re right about what someone is thinking about you or something you care about, I invite you to play with what you experience if you let go of the story and tell yourself that you really don’t know for sure. Then, just hang out with the present moment and notice what shifts. The key intention here isn’t to get to the “truth” of whatever is going on. Rather, it’s to have an opportunity to explore the tendency we all have to make up stories about our world and other people based on the maps we carry around from a lifetime of experience. Sometimes our stories are right; sometimes they aren’t. That’s not the point. The emphasis here is to notice how quickly you fall into interpreting what others mean and the impact this process has on you, as well as developing a greater capacity to let go of stories that reinforce old patterns of hurt and distress.

As always, play with this as a support for living more consciously. There’s no right or wrong here- just an opportunity to discover how story-making and mind-reading add to discomfort and distress, and how being free of these habits allow you to engage the present moment even more fully.