Change Your Story, Change Your Life
🌀 The 4 Phases of Change: Paradigm Shift, Catharsis, Corrective Experience, and Integration
Of Change.
Transformation. Change.
We crave it and we resist it.
We pray for it, but on our terms. We try to control it.
But change rarely shows up the way we want.
We don’t want change, we want our desires to come true.
But life brings change according to its rhythm. Not to our likings.
Change is inevitable.
Everything, everyone changes.
Yet masterful change is rare.
Because to master change, we must change from the inside out.
And that requires one radical move:
Taking full responsibility for our reality.
Owning our creatorship is an all-or-nothing deal.
Most people would rather blame something than claim everything.
Because responsibility is confronting.
It does not feel right, it does not feel good, it does not feel fair.
Blame is easier. Victimhood has perks.
But no true transformation happens without this shift in the story:
I create my story. I shape my experience. 100% of it.
From that point forward, everything becomes possible.
And still, it doesn’t happen overnight.
Transformation unfolds in phases.
Each one matters.
Phase 1: Paradigm Shift / The Mind Sees Differently
In the post “Creating Reality” we have seen how Beliefs Systems (BS) shape our thoughts, emotions and experiences. With that understanding we can begin to change, and that is phase one of transformation: the paradigm shift.
I also like to call this phase “Clarity” because that’s what it feel like.
Yet Clarity is not change.
It’s the recognition of where I stand now.
It’s awareness of what’s really happening.
It’s the awakening from the sleepwalking, not the cure to it.
Form a scientific perspective this shift is possible due to neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to change its neural connections), and neurogenesis (the creation of new neurons). Neuroplasticity is the brain’s remarkable capacity to rewire itself in response to experience, learning, and intention.
In the post "Psychedelic Healing Part 1", I described how psychedelics can tremendously enhance this process, but they’re not the only way.
The oldest method in the book? Slow down.
Observe the inner process. Start from the moment of sensory input. Pause here. Before the mind get’s online with a story. Stay with it through presence and feeling. Then only, move on to interpretation, to your response.
Break it down. And discover where in the cognitive process you have agency.
In sleepwalking mode, we jump from stimuli to response in microseconds. But once we realize that sensory stimuli pass through filters, our belief systems, we begin to understand the power of those filters.
A simple example: An unknown person shouting at me in the street might trigger one response. My partner shouting the exact same words will likely trigger another.
The difference? My filters. My BS.
A great way to reveal your filters is to listen to someone whose filters differ from yours, or better yet, someone who has done the work to clear most of them.
You stop searching for the glasses already sitting on your nose.
Now, you see the glasses. It’s the “aha” moment.
You gain insight.
Clarity allows you to discern between facts and stories.
And that’s when, psychologically, the possibility of new choices opens. That’s when, in yogic terms, you can start unraveling your samskaras, the conditioned imprints shaping your perception.
This moment is important. It is sacred. It has an associated feeling of homecoming, the smell of Zen. But it is not enough to stabilize change.
Because seeing the story doesn’t mean it has changed.
It means now, you can begin to change.
Phase 2: Catharsis / The Body Releases
Clarity is the mind’s awakening.
Catharsis is the body’s liberation.
This second phase marks the beginning of what I call freedom, a freedom that cannot be achieved through insight alone.
Catharsis refers to the emotional purification that follows the dissolving of old belief systems. It is the discharge of the energetic residue left by past stories, unhealed trauma and repressed emotions. Without this release, the body remains contracted, tense, reactive, and unable to embody the insight.
You “know” you are free but you don’t “feel” free.
The term catharsis originates from ancient Greek tragedy, where Aristotle used it to describe the emotional cleansing experienced by audiences of tragic plays.
Through witnessing characters endure loss, rage, or revelation, spectators could vicariously process their own emotions, leaving the theater somehow lighter, more whole.
People find catharsis through empathy, art, movement, music, poetry, conversation, silence, and many other forms. Catharsis is a natural excretory function of the body, when we allow it.
Emotion must move. Only then can the system reset.
I often use the image of our belief systems as a complex network of wiring (mirroring the neural network) and emotions are the energy running through it.
And while neuroplasticity allows us to rewire our mental circuits, that rewiring is only sustainable when the emotional charge that shaped the old patterns is also released.
The cognitive pattern is understood, now the somatic charge must be released.
Many people get stuck here. Because we are “in the mind” and disconnected from our bodies. I’ve observed two main channels of catharsis:
Movement: Shaking Dancing, Stretching, Rolling...
Sound: Shouting, Singing, Weeping, Laughing…
These primal expressions support the excretory alchemy.
Singing and dancing are among the most shared human behaviors,
across all cultures...
People who sing and dance everyday are often the happiest people.
These practices act as emotional regulators, letting energy move before it accumulates and becomes burden.
Yogic traditions understood this long ago.
Through asanas (movement) and mantras (sound), yoga deliberately channels catharsis. Kriyas are practices designed precisely to access, release, and transform stored tension, creating spaciousness for something new to take root.
At this stage of transformation, one may feel both clarity and freedom,
the veil has lifted, and the weight is lifting, too.
But this, too, is not the end.
Two more phase are needed to ensure freedom doesn’t fade,
and that the new story isn’t just seen or felt… but lived.
Phase 3: Corrective Experience / The Body Learns Safety
Now you see the story (clarity).
You feel free to make another one (freedom).
But your body still contracts, unsure it can trust the new story, still waiting for the old one to return. May be you’ve a great experience, or two, but you mostly remember all the bad ones and the body contract at the idea alone.
The body does not learn like the mind.
You may “know you are safe”. You may be “free to make new choices”. But do you “feel safe” enough to make them? This is where corrective experience becomes essential.
Corrective experience means repeated, gentle, affirming encounters with safety, until it becomes the new baseline. This is how your body learned its current behavior, and this is how it will learn a new one.
If you want to feel safe you have to experience feeling safe again, and again,
and again.
“To fell safe you must first feel safe” may sound like a paradox, but now you have two powerful allies: a mind that is awake and aware, and freedom from the emotional reactivity of the past. Together, they create the space for new experiences your body can actually trust.
When you were born, you depended on others for survival. You had no choice.
But now, you do. You can re-educate, even re-parent yourself, gently guiding your nervous system back to sanity, back to safety.
Corrective experience is how the body learns something different.
This is the terrain of inner child work, nervous system rewiring, somatic resourcing, and compassionate self-care. Each of us will need something slightly different, but all of us need this phase.
This is about changing the world within before you can change the world without.
And now the outer phase!
Phase 4: Integration / The Change Becomes Life Style
Now, you see clearly.
You are are free to make choices.
You feel safe.
But transformation isn’t complete until it lives in your everyday choices.
Your life is the result of your choices. Now is the time for new choices.
This is the phase of integration, the day to day, often uncomfortable process of turning a breakthrough into a way of life. The final phase, though never truly final, is about designing a world that reflects your new internal state.
Change won’t hold if your environment is built for the old version of you.
After the insight (Clarity), the release (Freedom), and the retraining (Safety),
you now begin the outer work: reorganizing your relationships, rhythms, rituals, and environments to support the new emerging story.
Taking new activities, shifting habits, establishing boundaries, pruning relationships, or opening new and unfamiliar spaces. It requires choosing resonance over habit, and designing your life to match the frequency you now carry.
I have seen it often: someone returns home after a breakthrough session. The same car, same house, same job, same relationship. Everything around them is still vibrating at the old frequency.
It is difficult to embody transformation among people who expects you to be your past self.
And among habits, the most difficult to change are often those formed in relationships: at home, at work, friends, family or partners. Humans are like tuning fork, we tend to vibrate at the frequencies of those around us. A subject I explore more deeply in “The 5 people who shape your destiny”.
To truly integrate, your outer life must begin to mirror your inner evolution. This may require facing discomfort. There are reasons you didn’t make these changes before: because they’re not easy.
It takes commitment to stay in the new story when no one else believes in it yet.
And sometimes, you will be the one who doubts it most.
What blocks integration: our attachments to identities, to relationships, to comfort.
Sustainable growth requires radical honesty:
What’s truly changing?
What’s just temporarily tainted?
What structure do I need to hold this new way of being?
It is tempting to seek another peak experience, when what we really need is to build around the one we already have.
Most people stay stuck because the pain of change still feels worse than the pain of staying the same.
Integration isn’t glamorous. Paradigm shift is a peak experience.
Integration is the homeopathic remedy you take daily, long after you’ve forgotten why you wanted change in the first place. It’s cleaning up after the storm. It’s picking up the pieces after the crash.
Only when change becomes a rhythm in your body and a pattern in your day one can truly say “the story has changed.
There Is No Final Chapter
This isn’t a one-time process.
It’s not something you “complete.”
It’s a practice. A rhythm. A way of living.
You’ll form new beliefs.
You’ll find new stories hiding in the shadows.
You’ll outgrow the beliefs that once saved you.
The story that served you yesterday may not serve you tomorrow.
There’s no finish line. No final copy.
Because life is fluid.
And so must you.
Change is not a result. It is not something we control.
It is something we ride. It’s a relationship.
With the wave, with the rhythm, with life itself.
Change will ask all of you, for no guaranteed results.
Because change is here to teach us surrender and trust.
And our only power may well be to change the story again.
🌀 This post is part of the “Change Your Story Companion Workshop” — a 12-week journey to rewrite your inner narrative and transform your life.
PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.
Because the stories we tell are not just stories—they are the reality we live.
This was so good Gabriel.
Beautiful ❤️