How Stories Shape Us with Barry Boyce

Stephanie Domet: Hello, and welcome to Real Mindful. This is where we speak mindfully about things that matter.

We meet here twice a month to introduce you to some of the teachers, thinkers, writers, and researchers who are engaged in the mindfulness movement. You’ll hear all kinds of conversations here about the science of mindfulness, the practice of mindfulness—and the heart of it. And if you have been a listener of Point of View with Barry Boyce, you have come to the right place. Barry is our guest today, as a matter of fact.

I’m Stephanie Domet. I’m the managing editor at mindful magazine and mindful.org and this is Real Mindful.

Barry Boyce is the founding editor of Mindful and mindful.org, and in every issue of the magazine, he writes the back-page column “Point of View.” Barry has a deep mindfulness practice developed over decades, and is the author of The Mindfulness Revolution. 

Barry and I connected on Zoom recently to talk about his column in the December issue of Mindful. Barry explores the role stories play, the way they sometimes expire, and what’s at stake when we don’t look past our stories to tune in with what’s actually happening in our first hand experience. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Barry Boyce, hello, welcome back. 

Barry Boyce: Great to be back. Always a pleasure.

SD: A pleasure for me as well. And in this conversation, in this column in the December issue of the magazine, you’re writing about one of my favorite subjects in life and one of my thorniest challenges as a meditator. And that’s stories. We’re both writers, so we’re probably oriented in somewhat the same direction: stories are vital, they tell us who we are, where we come from, how to be human. But of course, that’s not the full story on stories and you get into some of that in your column. Some stories don’t stand the test of time. Often they don’t show the whole picture and you make the point, the more time we spend engrossed in stories, the less time we spend in firsthand experience. So I wonder if you could start by talking more about that. What do we get from firsthand experience that we don’t get from stories? 

BB: Yeah. Well, this whole story thing has been a deep and ongoing contemplation for me. As you’re saying, you know, as a writer and editor and basically a professional storyteller and a curator of stories and a collector of stories, you know, I love them. I love a good raconteur. So often when people get together, if you’re hanging out, you give your friends a PowerPoint presentation about your son. “So, let me give you the five points of this previous week.” 

SD: “Let me summarize my story about the most bonkers thing that happened to me recently.”  

BB: You collect your experience into a story. Obviously it’s a rich and wonderful part of being human. So to answer your first question, rather than to tell a story, I was inspired to talk about direct experience based on some discussions I’ve been having with some mindfulness teacher friends who’ve been emphasizing in their experience working with teaching people in meditation the value of our sense of where we are. Propreoception is kind of like—Even before you do any formal meditation with somebody or for yourself, listener, just touch something. Like, I’m touching my laptop. It’s warm. That’s what sensory experience is. Or if I just reach over here and drink some water. I mean, it’s water, it doesn’t have a lot of taste to it, but it’s a whole experience. And you know, it’s been pointed out that if you go back really far in human history, our sensory engagement on a daily basis would be necessarily more intense than we have now. For example, to get that water, I would have to walk somewhere. And, you know, maybe turn a crank or there’d be so much more involved in just living our daily life that would keep us on the ground. So in teaching people meditation, if you could just say, “OK feel your butt touching the seat,” start there, and that really is the first part of mindfulness. We call mindfulness a body, but “body” doesn’t just mean this body. It’s mindfulness of your sensory field and that you are someplace. There’s a lot of power in that and that’s a place that we can always return to when we get lost in the story we’re telling ourselves. I think that’s an important aspect of this. 

SD: Is there something here about what’s real or what’s true? And I think those are two different things and is harder to assess in stories than it is in sipping from a glass of water.  

BB: Yeah, I think in a story, part of its power is that it’s dangerous.

SD: Because it can be persuasive. It can hide all sorts of things.

BB: I’ve been writing a little bit recently about some things that happened. Now, you see, 55 years ago, I realize, OK, there’s no way this is photographically or objectively true, right? All stories that are old, that are people’s memoirs from my childhood or something should carry that kind of disclaimer. There’s no way that what I’m recollecting isn’t a narration that I’m creating on the spot from fragments. So when we try to think, what happened yesterday when I had that argument with Jane? When you start constructing that narrative of what happened, it organizes it and makes it coherent. But, it’s also no longer firsthand experience and, therefore, it’s a little bit dangerous, right? 

SD: And it doesn’t take into account Jane’s point of view either, does it?

BB: Exactly. You start making up stuff about where Jane was at and, well, you narrow the context. You have to put a frame around something.  

SD: A container of some sort.  

BB:Yeah, you’re not going to like, OK, this novel is about everything that happened all the time everywhere.

SD: That’s right. The flashlight that you’re using, you can only shine it on part of the story and you’re making that choice. And we’re doing that too, when we’re distilling our own experience into a story, right?  

BB: I think that’s a really good observation. Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist who is the sister of Adam Gopnik, the writer, she talks about the childhood brain and the difference between the flashlight and the search light or the lantern. When we focus that flashlight in order to make a coherent story, what are we leaving out at the edges? The lantern is where we’re stepping back and loosening the desire to make it all coherent and it’s not like one is bad and the other is good, but we need both.  

SD: Right, right. I’m having this moment of realization that that drive toward coherence has been my whole life, like that’s that’