When I was a little girl my father had a painting in our living room that I would stare at from a saddle that he kept for me on the railings of our stairs. The realistic oil painting was of a passenger ship from the mid-1910s. The voyagers were preparing to disembark and were looking cheerfully from the railings of the deck or waving to loved ones out of perspective. Everything seemed normal except that among them giant catfish were swimming unperturbed.
I watched the painting for hours from that ridding saddle. It was some kind of riddle that my father refused to answer. I didn’t realize I was doing this as a child but I treated the painting like an equation. If I examined it with my full attention I could try to solve it, but I never did.
It wasn’t until recently that I learned the meaning of samskara, or the manifestation of the story in our lives. Samskara is the story we tell ourselves of our perceived realities and we become the willing and active participants in its production. My teachers E.J. Gold and Claude Needham, Ph.D. have successfully found a method to deconstruct the stories we tell ourselves by having us answer three questions: what do you see, what do you know, you tell the story. You can watch a short video introduction about the P.L.S. Method here.
If I were to do the P.L.S. Method for my father’s painting then it would have gone like this: What was shown? Fish… A boat… People smiling… What did I know? I knew fish could not breathe oxygen and I knew people could not breathe water. Why? ten thousand reasons why and each more creative than the last. The real story was still a mystery.
Part of my training as a Kripalu Yoga Instructor is to investigate my own samskara, bear witness to it, making space to be heard, and then thank it for it’s wisdom - but needless to say- the practice is humbling and always more convenient to ignore… but what kind of Yoga teacher would I be if I were to tell you to move in a direction that I hadn’t been in?
Friday night I experienced the phenomenon of stepping off the Peter-Pan bus from the Berkshires to the Port Authority bus terminal. To me, there is something unsettling and spooky about a bus terminal at night… It could be anywhere and still, it’s one of those places where I begin to feel an automatic heightened sense of self. After a short while, I was oriented and made my way up to the flashing lights and sounds-of-sirens on 42nd Street. I was not outside the doors yet and my back was pressed against the cold glass doors frozen with dizziness and apprehensive sweat. The swimming activity outside was as if I had spent a heavy night with whiskey but was stone-cold sober.
In meditation since the image of my father’s painting came back. I realized that whether the fish were flying, if the liner shipwrecked, or if the voyagers were plastic people in the fish’s tank… It didn’t matter, what did matter was the confrontation of the two forceful opposing unknowns. As my meditation progressed I visualized the moment of sound/light impact as I emerged from the terminal into the pulsating rhythm of light and sound prepared to navigate it as best I could.
Out of all of the feature’s of my father’s painting, if you asked me what I remember the most, it would be that none of the voyagers looked frightened and the fish were calm. If my encounter at 42nd street Port Authority bus terminal was a test of my “off-the-mat” practice… I would say that I passed but with room for improvement. My samskara of the “overwhelming city” was stronger than my serenity. Next time when I meet with dizziness of self I want to meet the light and sounds of my story with more equanimity, but that’s the beauty of a practice… it’s the only way to Carnegie Hall.
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