The Stories We Tell

Hey, there. It's me again!

What are some of your favorite stories?

Books or movies or shows or plays or stories about people you know or stories about yourself?

Do you like to escape into stories or do you like ones that make you think more about your own life? Or both? None of the above all of the above?

I supposed I'm an all of the above person. Depends on the day, my mood, my general season of life. Most of you probably know by now that I've spent a lot of my life studying and working in theatre, so it won't be surprising if I say that I think storytelling is an

essential-primal-emotional-intellectual

necessary part of being a human

Being the MOST human.

For better or worse.

The worse part only being - we can get stuck in the stories we tell.

We can get stuck in the stories we tell ourselves about our Self.

We can get stuck in the stories we've been told about the world.

There's this idea in yoga philosophy that the story we tell of self is one of the great causes of suffering. Ahankara (sometimes spelled ahamkara) is a function of the mind, which creates a story of self. Asmita is then our ongoing experience of ahankara, of ego, of "I, me, mine."

Together they are a cycle of creating and telling a story about what we are experiencing in any given moment. Which is totally normal and how we make sense of things we experience.

EXCEPT!

It means we are, over and over, filtering each experience in a self-centered way. This is said ot cause suffering because it prevents us from any direct experience of actual reality.

My favorite explanation of these concepts is to imagine a giant rubber band ball.

Ya know what I mean? Layers and layers of rubber bands. Have you ever made one??

(even if you haven't, I'm sure you could imagine a story of making one)

To start a giant rubber band ball, you take a couple rubber bands and wrap one around the other. At first it's not so fixed. The whole construction could fall apart or be restructured quite easily. Then you layer more and more rubber bands. With each layer the thing grows while also becoming....tighter, denser, less yielding.

We build our personalities the same way. Our stories layer on top of older stories. The center is put under greater and greater pressure. It no longer feels so elastic.

The core feels more and more real.

But. And.

Notice as it grows (as we grow and age) how far the new rubber bands have to stretch to be added.

We keep getting further from direct experience. We have to stretch and maneuver and change shape in order to reinforce what we've decided is "real."

The idea of the practices of yoga is that we get better at unlayering.

We practice in order to reveal.

Rather than layering on new stories, we unravel the center.

The relief from suffering is illumination.

(it's no accident the word enlightenment has LIGHT in it)

We have to be veeeeery brave to unwind that rubber band ball.

To get down to the messy, uncertain center.

And we can accept that it's part of being human to keep remaking the ball. To keep adding new layers and new stories.

As long as we remember to unravel those, too.

Over and over, we build and reveal.

And each time we're willing, the stories might get a little closer to truth.

And when we get soooo wrapped up in our own epic journey of creation and destruction, when we get self-centered about not being self-centered?

We remind ourselves:

EVERY SINGLE PERSON THAT EXISTS IS DOING THE SAME THING.

Every single person is the center of their own story.

That is so many stories to tell.

So many stories to hear.

So many stories to believe.

To escape into.

To learn from.

You might be thinking, wait, is the point of all this that we LIKE stories or we DO NOT LIKE stories?!?

LOLZ. Both.

All of existence is a story.

As long as we remember that,

we're doing okay.

We're gonna be fine.

We can keep rewriting.

Now excuse me while I go watch my stories and eat a snack. And full credit for the rubber band ball image, to Michael Stone, in his book "The Inner Traditions of Yoga." One of my favorite yoga philosophy books ever, if you're looking for a good read!