Naming the Real Brandon Cook

This conversation with Daphne Larkin and Dr. Christy Bauman is an exploration of the importance of knowing and telling our hard stories. Through real life-examples, we survey how telling stories creates greater flexibility in our perspective, resilience in our attitudes, and kindness in how we hold our own narratives, as we become empowered to live well. Ultimately, telling hard stories leads us to re-parent ourselves and re-story our lives, leading not only to our flourishing, but to a flourishing world around us. 

In this Short, we explore a simple two-step practice for seizing the day rather than letting the day seize you. The practice is straightforward: a commitment to spend a few moments in a slow, unhurried posture combined with a consistent engagement of your “grounding story.” In this episode, we explain what a grounding story is, how to create one, and how you can use it to pursue freedom and clarity every morning.

In this Naming the Real Short—a bonus episode in our Storytelling Series—we explore the idea of “discharging a loyal soldier,” which is releasing a belief/part of us that kept us safe but now keeps us stuck. By thanking the part, releasing the part, and re-assigning the part to a new role, we can transcend the places where we’ve got mired and move to greater flourishing. 

The person that we are includes many parts, organized around our true Self. But many times we feel stuck, because we believe our most frustrated or seemingly dysfunctional part is our actual identity, or because we don’t how to integrate our parts into a greater whole. In this episode, we consider the reality that you aren’t crazy for talking to yourself—far from it! That, in fact, dialoguing with our various parts can release us into freedom. To that end, we consider a rubric for having mindful conversations with our parts, which can call our entire being into wholeness and flourishing.

In this episode—our first Naming the Real SHORT—we explore the two primary ways that Celtic spirituality helps us see the world differently than the way promulgated by Western Imperial Christianity. 

Human beings tend to resist and avoid; it’s a default state for us. But resistance and avoidance lock us into a life of gray horizons—on automatic, far from the thrill of fully feeling or fully flourishing. And yet we are never without tools to get us unstuck. In this episode, we explore the incredible power of telling hard stories for reinventing what we see as possible. We dive into some fascinating data and science around what telling hard stories does for our bodies. And we lay out practical steps for taking on your own stories. Finally, we close with an example of a hard story.