Lessons From Swamiji.

I was playing a frivolous game with my higher self when I lost sight of her. Perhaps I pawned her off for a pithy glance from one I considered to be a more worthy being than myself.  Maybe she was traded in exchange for another’s love and adoration.  However it happened, she seemed to have departed and I was left with a feeling of deep loss.  Why I thought that someone else has the power to provide inner strength and love and radiating sustenance in the same way as oneself, I do not know.  That is a bigger question for another time.

I blindly filled myself up with manifestations of charm and collapsed into anger due to the lack of her presence.  Without her strength I protected myself with a sometimes placating but more so messy and sputtering ego.  And it worked.  I survived.  Until a fetid inquietude erupted with raw force that left me questioning my strategy.  And my practice.

The realization of my irresponsibility struck like a thunderbolt.  Or perhaps more of a being-quake from deep within the dense folds of my consciousness that exploded outwards.  Regardless of from whence it came, it hit with an unnerving, clenching thwack to my energetic composure.  At the time, this realization was not yet defined by words nor had a name but I had a gnawing feeling of utter sadness.

Instead of being overwhelmed and rejecting the pain, I wrapped it around me like a blanket, hiding myself in its folds until the fear of its existence was overcome. And in the acceptance, in the cloaking, the holding, the touching, the grasping- I understood the texture of the sadness; the threads of mistake and inexperience, patches of rough falseness, patterns of self trickery. And also, the warmth of my dear humanness.  The fuzzy, worn and scrappy humbleness of humanity.  I clung on until I was done with the weight of this ignorance and ready to see.

Never was she, was I, truly gone.  Never was I without my higher self, my grace, my brilliance.  Never was I alone.  There is no lack, it is here, I am deeply, intricately wound, I am one with my higher self.  At risk of sounding like a schizophrenic; my higher self, lower self, middling reality, inner child, physical being, my spirit- we are all one. One fabulous tangle of existence enmeshed in a web of humanity trying to weave through this life.  There is so much, so very much to navigate.  Maybe sometimes it takes the periscope of the higher self to see an honest way through the beautiful myriad of exquisite struggle of life.

For a moment in time we might forget. Or I do. When I am distracted and a lens of fear or the blinders of attachment are haphazardly perched before my eyes, I cannot see clearly.  And so it is.  On goes the great patient quest for defining and thinning and clearing out of that which stops me from seeing, from shining from love, from soul, from the place of integrated connection and unity and harmony.  There is a layered depth of human form through which my soul luminates.  Fractured and reflecting light uniquely shining.  But may I let it shine.  Brightly.

Unit 5, SF Juvenile Justice Center

Your smile
lights up the windowless room
the cement walls.
Your entire smile fills my eyes and brightens up my heart and
I believe that this radiance
this brilliance
this momentary whole soulbody expression of vibrancy
does not come from crime alone nor anger nor heartbreak nor revenge nor frustration nor impatience nor sorrow nor abuse nor losing
but elseplace within you and is
a river of unbound beauty of colors tinted with night blooming trumpet vine.
Arms suddenly thrown so wide open and the world is embraced.
In that one smile.
You daughter of the Universe,
You who matters much to me to us to this to you.
Know this now, please know this now.
And I wish I want I entice I ask you to dive into that place into that river of beauty within you and soak and swim and rest and flow and be carried.
Yes carried.
Carry yourself to the sweet sweet shore.
Your smile.

Lovely Tangles.

Do we know if we give too much or too little?  Have we a clue if that acquaintance thinks you we I am fabulous or a drag?  Frankly, I can’t seem to guess whether that man, that woman thinks I am his/hers, or not.  I have no idea.  Teachings have taught me not to look not to act for the fruits. Work hard work with love but not in expectation of the outcome, the result. So do we know?

I realize that I look not and wind up seeing no reflection of myself at all.

I have read I have heard I have listened volumes about knowing the Self, spending endless hours engrossed in the thoughts in the thinking in the feeling in the virtues of being self-aware.  But in being so self involved, so true to sensation of presence unfolding and following the snaking of ego, I have failed to gauge the results thus not knowing at least one of the facets of self: self as seen. Is it important?

And so I am left with not knowing myself by not knowing the impact I have upon the world right outside my window, under my own roof.

Today I step away and investigate the whole process.  I learn about myself by watching myself, as a second party might.  I see myself doing things for the entertainment, for the drama.  I watch myself, I recognize myself, I am currently self-aware.  Do I tangle in and tell myself to do the right thing?  Am I then becoming the prisoner a child reprimanded by my second party awareness?  And who watches their movements?  Mind one and mind two.

I watch my behavior as if someone else is acting the drama.  I laugh at my ego flashing in a movement; I raise a brow at an indeterminate undercurrent in a conversation; I am surprised by the truth behind my face.  Not always but yes the truth does stand horribly rigidly at attention: frozen, in fact, so still so quiet not to be seen so much becoming a part of the backdrop.  Invisible to my spiritual eye.

Concurrently I see a reaction of a conversational recipient and I become perplexed and lost between the words and the facial expression, are their words reacting to my unspoken undercurrent undermined truth?  Is their face reacting to my wraparound words?  And vice versa.  The conversation of a conversation.  Too bad that my hidden truth might be ill-communicating with their words, and their truth communicating with my conspired words. Or perhaps happy confusion confounds and creates humor and lightness and preposterousnous abound.  And thus yet nothing is to be seen of self from outside self as the reflection is never clear never still always flux in me in you in us.

Softly then, quietly, winding back down from confusion from layers of mind, trying to know who I am from outside from echoing I go back within and I soak in my favorite simple distillation: when I don’t shine from within, when I don’t when you don’t when we do not trust our place in the world and honor and appreciate our Truth our Self our soul, we end up a collection of borrowed behavior.  Expression, sentences, configurations of thought, stolen borrowed begged from someone else, whose expression we liked enough better than our very own.  We become “normal” alike someone like everyone else.  The real characters are the individuals who speak their own mind, yes inspired and no, not copies, wear their own style, think their fresh thoughts, and act upon them.  Run their own show.  I want to run my own show.  And not be at the mercy of a cast of invasive expressions.  Granted, if I owned my own theater, that is.

And thus onward, moving flowing falling rising in to and with grace and in human friction, motivated by this that or the other thing worrylessly may I simply be just inspired and not conspired me and not as I see me in you.  Or him.  Or her.  Or you.  Settling down now from mental flurries, lovely tangles to just just just

me, here, this breath.

I Dreamt of India

May 7, 2011

I dreamt that I was still in India.  Needing to travel from one point to the other, I had many miles to walk.  And each time that I lifted a foot to take a step I had to consider the contradicting advice from a hundred head-waggling Indians while stumbling over broken brick walls and gaping open sewers only to someday arrive late at my destination; and then only to fill out numerous copies of the same long forms.  It was the kind of dream that I had as a feverish child, one where I’d awake and all I could say of the overwhelming mental jumble was that ‘the numbers in my head are mixed up and I cannot count all of the stars (or grains of sand… or people on earth…or…)’. And whereas when I was young, I desperately needed to take control and make linear sense of my abstruse life, today I arose from my chaotic India dream, simply missing India.

And I grasped for any last traces of India, in my nose, on my skin...  But the forced air of the 20 hour flight home had sanitized the exotic scents of burning sandalwood, night blooming flower essences, divinely combined spices, smoldering garbage, Himalayan breath, fresh mountain Ganges water, and lowland desert dust from within and around me.  The song of India, a thick melody of the beeps and horn sequences of trucks blaring, the gentle buzz of a million voices haggling, overlapping ashram loudspeakers spiritually chanting, peacocks singing, ceiling fans whirring, donkey/camel/bull/horse hooves beating on uneven cement, tinny sounds of chai pots clanging- had departed, and in the empty silences of my countryside home all that existed was the sound of my own blood pounding through my body.

When I was just there, exploring the streets of India with Simone, my 13 year old daughter- I knew that the trip was fleeting and too rapidly disappearing behind me.  As I cradled each moment with longing, wanting to sear it into my memory, wanting to wrap my arms around each experience and hold it tightly in my heart, I wondered why.  Why India? Why this land teeming with cracked open buildings surrounded with piles of brick or gravel or dirt-buildings that I could not decide whether they were half built or half in ruins? Why India and its system of haggling and mysterious train schedules and Giardia laden waters and garbage strewn underfoot and marble palaces flanked by extreme poverty and 16 million children- homeless, parentless and begging? Why did I bring Simone all the way to the other side of the world and our reality, to India?

And it is this: India is so very, very raw.  India is an experience of the beautiful range and explosive expression of the human plight. India passionately exists without obscuring anything- she is all there, layered out in colorful splendor and pungent grotesqueness and vivid dreaminess and history and with scars and hopes and mistakes and dramas and reverent spirituality and contradictions and beliefs.  India is honest and faithful in her perfect imperfection.  I know exactly what I can expect from India, so much more than here in the US with our noble attempts at hiding behind thick plasticized masks of fearlessness and organization and youth and beauty and success.  Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for the incredible gifts, ease and richness of my American living and I appreciate how my people built this country upon the lessons learned from the old countries; but I ache for the colorful truth of humanity and spirituality that I had lost and now find in India.

And this is what I wanted to share with my child.  Human truth and how it is translated and explained by the many humans, religions, languages, cultures, philosophies abound. I wanted her to witness India and how India deals with the depth of humanness with the heights of spirituality and all that lives in between. What Simone makes of her experience with me I cannot say, but I will one day die knowing that I did everything I could to crack open our earthy and ethereal world and expose her heart and perhaps reconnect her soul to the fabulously unruly and tragic and sweet and spicy and all encompassing realm of utter existence.

Coming of Age.

April 20, 2011

My voice, once roaring and unable to be kept held within is gone. It could be gone with the swami who inhabited my spare room for three nose to the grindstone and Snicker sweetened weeks. Swami Shantanand Saraswati, aka Swamiji or Shantji, harnessed the sentences roiling around in my brain and the visions in my eyes and tapped the desire in my heart and made me, yes, made me put them to paper. Swamiji lovingly, glaringly, honestly stood his small body over my height and commanded me to wake up, realize my Truth, follow my passion.  Now that he has returned into the unknown from whence he came, I have not had the impetus or the focus to sit down and write.  And truly, about what?  When Swamiji departed, with him went a million and one stories.  True, I am currently eyeball high in plans, in plane tickets, in covering my ass while I fly far away on a two week travel.  Can therefore I cut myself some writing slack? Am I priming for what will be an adventure to scribe?  Nope, there are no acceptable excuses.  Any way that I spin the story, I am absolutely too sucked into my Drama of Leaving to maintain a sense of clarity, to view the big picture, to step back and breathe.  Which makes me off balance; in body (I practically broke my foot yesterday, awoke with a strep throat today), in mind (why is everybody mad at me?), energy (can you say p-a-n-i-c a-t-t-a-c-k) and spirit (What? Who? Where?).

I can feel Swamiji now, haunting me like a Yoda apparition, narrowing his eyes and why scrutinizing: why are you doing this?  And he is so very right.  Needless worrying is killing me.  Why boggle my being for a Drama that I could have right here in an SF soup kitchen?  Instead, I am flying to India: hassling with new passports, vaulting visa obstacles, enduring immunization pain, busting out midnight lists of not-to-be-forgotten details, negotiating planes, trains, buses and taxis for 30 hours to arrive ready to serve at a stifling hot orphanage in the middle of the summery Rajastanian desert?  Why? Um, I love India? Adventure?  Service? Is it worth it? Am I ready? Yep, I’ll be grounded any second now.  Right after this panic attack, as soon as I unclench my jaw, as soon as I don’t sleep.

See? I caught myself? See how wonderful and mindful the practice of yoga makes one?  It took but a moment, a twinkling of a swami’s eye, for me to witness my behavior.  So I surrender.  I laugh.  I breathe.  I will sleep.  I will enjoy my plans and adventure as I have, until these last patchy moments.  And on the plane, I will stare contentedly at the blank seat in front of me for hours. And hours.  Days, in fact.

Even better, I will be sitting next to my 13 year old daughter Simone.  I’m taking her to India.

For months, maybe years I have considered and mulled an appropriate coming-of-age experience for my daughters.  How to usher them into womanhood in a way that feels true to me, and them, and our family?  Then I was struck, of course: travel.  For me, exploring the magnificence of the world and its different cultures, various traditions, expressions of spirituality and learned wisdoms cracked open the container in which I held my universe.  Every country, every tribe, clan, family and human is vibrantly unique and the earth is covered and crawling with beautiful beings. Whether it be a Hmong in the hills of Thailand, a Muslim man scraping a living fishing on the coast of Sulawesi, a Tibetan boy trying to make ends meet in Pokara, a Dutch aristocrat, or an Indian woman feeding a family of eight and more; I am no more or less important than any of them.  There is no one way to live.  There is not just my way.  It blew my ego into fabulous smithereens and I sank into the lap of community and bow down to the pain and the tragedy and the magic and the spice of this sensational life.

And so it is time.  Simone is beautifully metamorphosing into an individual.  At 13 she is properly engulfed and a little too enamored with the teen social scene and its distinguishing features: pop music, boyfriends, experimentation, shop lifting, empowerment, sexting, freedom, dances, unchaperoned forays around San Francisco, invincibility...   A little dip into the bigger picture and maybe even the Mother Ganges feels like the right balance to her American private school upbringing for an already pushing 6 foot potential runway model beauty queen.  But did I say that she attends the San Francisco Waldorf School?  We sent our children to this pedagogical heaven to learn to think outside of the box, to build survival shelters, to speak many languages, to knit me some socks, to understand the value of commitment, of service.  Not to shake my house in Trey Songz cranking: Girl, your body’s a problem and they call me the problem solver. But teenage city life is what it is; there is no encapsulating her and no wish to overprotect her from modern living. Ok, maybe a wee bit.  However I still have the power to balance it out while supporting her education.  So into the world we go.  Not just any world, my favorite world: India.  And we will work in an orphanage.  And we will ride elephants, visit pink cities and amber forts and monkey temples and sit on buses going nowhere and trains stopping for chai and be surrounded by ritual and reverence and the nitty gritty human experience.

Yes, we could have ladled up meals at a soup kitchen in Vegas for half the hassle.  But also a fraction of the thrill, a quarter of the beauty, a 1/1000,000^th of the people and conversation and smiles.  And I know in my heart and soul that Simone, and I, will have the time of our lives, together.

Once. Upon. A. Time

A poem
When I throw myself at you
I don’t feel you there
To catch me with brilliant arms
And I fall to the earth.
Is it we who cannot feel cannot see cannot meet
or you who have gone?
Lying there a time, seconds spilling into days.
(Instead)
This time
 I will watch me
Lift up and walk away.

Another poem
My words are tangled in purgatory
They reach for the good and fall heavily to the floor
They fall heavily and shatter into a million glass splinters whose pain
Is felt everywhere.

Poem 3
Each moment weighs upon my chest
A boulder of ice melting drip by drip
My breath is short and I am
Cold.

Freed.
After many minutes hours asanas I melt into a twist. At the same time that my sweating body sinks unwinding spilling onto the earth;
so too begins warm teardrops sliding down my open face.
This is my yoga today here.
Closed joints breathing open creating space in blocks of pent up energy cracking open emotional scar tissue respinning rusty old chakra wheels.
Present
see
feel
observe the sensations thoughts emotions that arise.
Emerging patterns appear vividly unattractive,
this self jumps out like a jack-in-the-box …scary, and then almost nothing once it is exposed.
The strength I need to mindfully standby or
standlow
and let the unbridled eruption belch out is the practice of letting go.
This time this era this on the mat
eons of unconscious springs up is felt and coddled and processed and I become
I am
the soft featherlike sweet beauty of breath of lightsunlight a streaming body dancing, existing, being here
now
on
this
earth.

The American Dream. (Or Crash? I cannot decide which title.)

I crashed.  Somewhere in between the kitchen dishes and the office stacks. Sometime in between acting as Lead Motivator: cheerleading my budding teen daughters out of bed /off to school on time; and assuming SF Site Directorship for The Art of Yoga Project and diving into a laundry list of deadlines piled up after events and trainings and teaching. Someplace amidst the chaos of my muddled home betwixt the stacks of books for goodwill, heaps of un-hung jackets and corners coated with dust bunnies, I went down.  I tried to look out the window for a shot of pure and fresh and innocent and inspiring nature love and all I could see was a collection of fingerprints, dried raindrops and dust streaks.  Rupa over excitedly urgently nudged me with her nose and eyeballed the front door.

I crashed.  The clothes dryer has died, my cheap Microsoft Word suddenly displayed mysteriously odd polka dots instead of spaces, and my train of thought collided with the juggled bowling balls I dropped.  Hopes, dreams, expectations, fears, current dramas, imagined/unimagined judgments of people I love, demands, decisions, delightlessness!, the weight of my world, it crashed down down down upon me.  And, worse, I felt fat.  Go Outside, my spirit chanted.  I looked up and out the smeary windows as a black cloud forcefully gathered up overhead and squeezed out giant drops of freezing rain.  In May.  I screamed, Rupa hid and I deleted my blog.

Overwhelmence.  It happens.  I live a beautiful, blessed and sacred life yet, overwhelmence happens. And as I write this I suspect a twinge of de ja vu.  Have we been here before?  Yes!  I have, in fact I ought to make Overwhelmence my bud so as least we can play cards during his/her all too frequent visits.  Or what, pray tell, am I excessively doing that invites his/her hot breath on my neck?

It’s simple really.  In fact, that’s just it: Simplicity.  Some have the chutzpa to live the chatterfull, busy, speedy life full of fabulous popping and burgeoning ideas and jobs and moments bursting at the seams with go go go.  Others, like me, dreamed of living off the land in France.  Slowly eating grapes.  Or collecting conch shells in Costa Rica.  Or roaming the windswept beaches of Mexico.  All very very quiet activities. And instead I find myself in media driven and fast paced and materially expensive America, more so, in the Bay Area, in the belly of howling modernity, swirling around with inimitable gas prices and incomparable manic technological ingenuity and intimidating over educated everbodies.  It’s kind of scary.  Yet here I am here I am here I am and mostly, usually I can love the entertainment of it all, the interaction and skimming the edges of potent possibility.  But some days, like now, this reality gathers so much ground speed; collecting bits and pieces of imposing necessity, vagrant ideas, emotional riffraff and oddly shaped fragments of responsibility that my brain, my dear sweet little swiss cheese cerebral membrane that envisaged nothing more complex than mulling over mollusks in Mexico short circuited in the most marvelous of ways.  Crash.

And what to do?  Yes, sadly: unleash upon the unsuspecting husband who unfortunately calls mid morning full of pleasantries.  Yes, walk away from the computer and its dizzying new character space dots. Yes, stuff yet another bag with useless knick knacks and books titled: Chickens in Your Backyard and or California Camping 1997 and toss out 11 year old half-finished paintings and yank out the cardboard box jammed under the desk, overfilled with cords to I-don’t-know-what.  Yes, crack out the Swifter for a quick dusting frenzy, jimmy the broken dryer to serve up one more load that I can heave onto the bed and walk away from and sink to the floor for a little Rupa puppy love scratching.  Yes, return to the laptop, tackle the deadlines, the emails, the phone calls. One at a time.  I even resurrected the deleted blog.  Before I knew it, the skies shifted and I wandered into full sun on the back porch.  I lay myself down on the bench, pretended that it hadn’t missed four years in a row of staining and that I was not in my pajamas at noon or that a few lingering 4 inch pots of saplings weren’t impatiently staring me down,.  Sunshine.  Sweet Sunshine.  I murmured my gratitude as Swamiji taught me, honoring this simple and precious gift of light.

John bravely called back. And gone is the childhusband who had spent years killing me with falsehoods and here was a beautiful grown man smiling at me through the phone not freaking out; and saying, it will all be okay; and here in the tropics of my rainsoaked and lush backyard, I closed my eyes and was peacefully in Mexico.

Completing most of the complicated List and accomplishing Necessary Life I dressed and strolled Rupa down the backroad past fledgling crops and singing birds and beautiful horses; up to my neighbor’s garden where she filled my arms with fresh home grown lettuces and mouth with red raspberries.  Back back back to Simplicity.

And that is that.  Here I am.  Here we are.  In the middle of chaos in the throes of pleasure in the face of pain at the feast of our deliciously divine lives.  Living it.  The American Dream.