Carl Jerome: Letting Go of the Story—Returning to Raw Data
“The raw data without a painful narrative can be healing.”
Chapter Summary:
In Letting Go of the Story, Buddhist teacher Carl Jerome explores how painful emotional narratives often obscure the simpler, less distressing truths of our experience. Drawing from both Buddhist psychology and contemporary neuroscience, he explains how our minds construct stories from raw sensory data—stories that can become rigid, self-defining, and untrue. Healing, he suggests, lies in returning to the raw data: what’s actually happening in the present moment. Through teaching and clinical example, Carl shows how mindfulness, stripped of narrative distortion, allows people to shift from fear and identity-based suffering to clarity, agency, and relief.
About Carl:
Carl Jerome is the founder of North Shore Meditation Center and DeepDharma.org. He teaches mindfulness, Buddhist psychology, and meditation practices aimed at relieving anxiety, trauma, and other forms of psychological suffering.