You are listening to the place we find ourselves podcasts. I am Adam Young and I am joined today by Kathy Lorzel.

Kathy, it's good to see you. Welcome back.

Thank you. It's good to be back.

Here's the purpose of today's episode. It's really twofold. First, we want to talk big picture about why it's necessary to understand your story.

In other words, why it's so important to do story work. And then second, we want to tell you about a step you can take to continue working on your story or to start if you haven't.

And namely, that step is to participate in an upcoming workshop that we are doing called Understanding Your Story, which will take place via Zoom on Saturday, November 19th.

So first, let's talk about why it's so essential to understand your story. And I want to share three reasons and then we will flesh each of them out in more depth.

Why is it so important to do the work to understand your story? Number one, it is the single most important thing you can do to experience healing.

Number two, it's the only way to stop re-enacting your past harm and therefore hurting the people often the people that you love the most.

Spouse, children, friends. And number three, it's the best way story work, engaging your story is the best way to understand your kingdom and your purpose on earth.

But you are to be about here on planet earth. So those are, you know, the three reasons just stated, now we'll flesh them out. We'll talk about them in more depth.

The first reason that you need to understand your story is because understanding your story is very important for you to experience healing.

It's important to remember that we are created for Shalom, which means that each person is created to feel at peace inside our body, at peace interpersonally, like in our relationships, and at peace with God.

That's how human beings are designed to function. You're not created for anxiety, emotional pain, relationship problems, hopelessness.

But the place we find ourselves is living in a fractured broken world. And as a result, we do have anxiety. We do have emotional pain. We do have relationships that are struggling.

And you probably, if you're like me, feel some hopelessness in certain areas of your life. So here's the point, who among us is not in need of healing.

Our brains, our hearts, our bodies are wounded, which begs the question, how do our brains, hearts, and bodies heal?

And in my experience, the one thing that has brought the most healing for me is simply this. It's understanding my story, the story of my life in, especially my family of origin, the experiences that I've had living on this earth.

And I think it, me too. And as we step into our stories, I think it's also important to understand how evil has attended to our stories, to keep us bound to our trauma, to keep us bound to our past, and to really take us out of what we were created, what we were meant to bring to this world.

And each of us has a calling, not to necessarily do big, huge things, but we have a calling to create beauty and goodness in our lives. And we'll get into that in a little bit.

But it's really important because evil has set us up from the beginning to try to thwart that, to try to keep us bound to hopelessness, to despair.

We can't experience freedom because we haven't gone back to understand one, where our stories have been bound in the first place, and then two, how evil has been attended to that over time.

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