I went to the season finale of Boulder's Playback Theatre West last Saturday with some old high school friends. It was an outrageous evening in which four actors improv your life's stories.
The audience will tell something simple, such as how a garage sale went, to something deeper, such as nervousness about going into high school. The actors will hilariously and yet also tenderly, replay that story to you in the third person as they improv, move and interact with each other. It's really brilliant and hilarious.
The beauty in it is the capacity for self-reflection, or svadyaya, in yogic terms. One of those niyamas. Story is the ultimate tool for svadyaya, as one is able to see oneself separate from the ego's constant attachment to what it thinks it is. A third person narrative gives one the capacity to make conscious the habits, thoughts, and feelings not readily available. One then can continue to dismantle the ego and arrive at self-realization, while one is able to see the story and say, "neti, neti," not this, not this. For the self is beyond all of this.
It was satisfying for me to tell a story about working at the dairy, for the theatre is based in the Boulder Dairy Center for the Arts, in the former Watts-Hardy Dairy where I worked my first job out of high school. I sat on stage next to one of the improv actors under bright lights as I just told this story of how I worked in home delivery in 1984 Boulder, Colorado. How no technology was used that we have ubiquitous today; how an old woman scrutinized my young inexperienced and wild self; how we all had crushes on the milk men.
I simply told my story and what I saw played back to me was equally touching, hilarious, and healing. There was the ability to see my life honored and witnessed and transformed into art. Any fear or shame I held about the story was released on the stage and the audience shared in my experience. Somehow it made my story and my experience more real.
Narrative therapy, much like Playback, is effective in helping children and others deal with life's stories. We can listen to a child and tell the story back to him or her sheilded in the third person, either as a fairy tale or simple story.
In Yoga, the Self strives for self-awareness. To see itself clearly and recognize the true "I" that is doing the seeing. As the cosmos expands, so it can self reflect. It comes with age too.
Telling stories to children is yet another way to open them up to yoga and their true selves, as well as the capacity to heal and connect with others deeply.
See you at Playback Theatre West next September when its season starts again!