So some of my favorite stories are ones that happen right after people get out of retreats.

And one of them that I've shared with some of you, a woman, was having to travel and switch planes and she was exhausted.

And so she was tired, she was hungry, she got some cookies, put them in her purse, sat down at a table.

There's another man nearby. She also got a newspaper.

Well, he was reading his newspaper and she took a cookie, ate it, and he did the same thing.

He reached into the bag and took a cookie, ate it.

And she was very confused and weirded out by that because she didn't know them.

But she didn't want to make a scene, so she just took another cookie and ate it, and he did the same.

And it kept going and she was getting angry and angry until she took a cookie and then there was just one more and he broke in and half.

He gave her half, he ate the other half, and then he left.

Well, sometime later the public announcement system called her to her gate and much to her surprise when she reached to get her ticket, she found her bag of cookies.

She had been eating his.

Now, part of why I really like that story is because we so live in our narrative inside and a story in our mind of what is actually happening.

Now, we're not always reading reality quite as she did, but sometimes what's going on, our storyline has a useful representation of the world.

Somebody is taking advantage of us or somebody might be treating us in a disrespectful way or something might be going on where it's completely appropriate for us to respond and draw boundaries and so on.

And so often, and this is, you might remember Mark Twain's, one of his famous comments that the worst things in my life never actually happened.

So often, we are moving through our day with a story about what is either wrong right now or what could go wrong.

And if we're not totally conscious of that story, our body is kind of living in that mentality.

So our inner story is based on fear beliefs that were developed very early.

And for most of us is, you know, we have some difficult experiences with caregivers, with our environment, and we start believing how we can't trust certain things or how something's wrong with us.

And then because our survival brain has a scan for what's wrong, we collect evidence.

And so age collect evidence to kind of have some certainty, gives us a sense of being on top of things, even of its bad news, about what can go wrong and what is wrong.

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