As is often the case, childbirth gets very intense at the end. Tim is exhibiting all of the symptoms of being there: He forgets to breathe and immediately calms down when he remembers. He has an intense desire to push and be done with it. He feels the immensity of this time and needs quiet and focus to accomplish this last part of the creative process: Actually getting the baby into the world.

Tim Bennett is about to publish his first novel, All of the Above.

As his spouse and one of his editors I am, of course, excited and pleased. Last week I visited the Blue Hag Books website to find this tagline of Blue Hag’s purpose:

New Stories for the Next Paradigm.

As soon as I read those words I felt something shift inside my gut. All at once Tim’s journey of the last two years, my journey alongside him, and now the publishing of this book became connected to a greater purpose than simply telling a good story, selling some books and supporting the next effort. All at once, all this effort felt connected to a much larger purpose that resonates deeply and runs as a deep current through my life: We are part of a quantum shift from an old paradigm which is culminating in social and environmental destruction of unfathomable scale to something else, some new way of being that will come next. We don’t know what that will be because paradigm shifts are that way: so profound and different that while in the throes of the current one it is impossible to know what the next one will be.

Human beings are myth-makers and story-tellers. And now the insights of quantum physics point to something we’ve only begun to understand: That our stories actually create our reality.

How incredibly important and vital at this particular time, then, to be creating and telling new stories.

Even the “story” that “Our stories create our reality” is a NEW story.

My background in counseling and psychotherapy, on both sides of the couch, underscores on a personal level how important it is to find a new story. I’ve witnessed, personally and in the journeys of scores of clients and friends, that when a core belief or story changes, everything changes. Victims become heroes. Perpetrators become fallible, wounded egos with souls worth saving. The rich become poor and the poor become strong. Everything turns around. I’m no longer the wounded daughter of crazy, insecure, isolated parents. I’m the noble soul who came to help unravel a family system based on fear and scarcity, to heal a generations-old story of abuse and neglect embedded in a social system of exploitation and dis-empowerment.

We are living in exciting and frightening times. As people alive during unprecedented social, political, and environmental upheaval, it feels exciting to step into what becomes possible when we shed stories of victimization, exploitation, helplessness, and domination and step into new stories of transformation, evolution, and the power of consciousness to change circumstances.

All of the Above is a wonderful part of that movement into new stories. This book tells the engaging story of an intelligent, caring, courageous woman president, elected on a platform of truth and integrity, who actually lives up to her promises. She’s not a bimbo or a puppet. And she refuses to tell less than the truth. How different a story is that?

What about our own personal stories? What unquestioned core beliefs run our personal, economic, political, and social realities? What if we can change outcomes by changing what we tell ourselves, by rewriting our own stories? What if we are way more powerful than we’ve been schooled to believe?

I hope you will celebrate with us this new baby that Tim is about to deliver. I hope you will be inspired, and also challenged by the story, willing to examine and question personal and cultural beliefs and assumptions, just a the protagonist Linda Travis is. I hope you will step into your own new story for the next paradigm.

Come “Like” All of the Above on Facebook and be one of the first to get the birth announcement, hopefully early next week. It’s going to be quite a celebration!