On p.126 of Gurmukh's "The Eight Human Talents" is an exercise called 'Figure-Eight Neck Rolls'. She states that:
It helps release muscle tension in the neck, which then takes more newly oxygenated blood to your brain, eyes, and ears. Your thyroid gets massaged and balanced; it brilliance brings a more youthful glow to your face.
I've added these to my warm-ups that I now use according to Saul's system. But my neck is really hurting since the massage. It keeps going into spasms. Maybe the massage was too deep? Holding Bound Lotus today felt a little tighter in my shoulders even though I warmed up with Saul's Ritam Kriyas. I fell asleep for an hour in savasana I was so exhausted! I woke up and did Bound Lotus straight away, felt some anxiety just before the end, and then did mulha bhanda and forward fold as suggested. In Forward Fold I began to cry. It was intense grief with so many images and I missed my mother so much...so much.
When I really needed to grieve her death back in 1996, I was too busy being the sexual slave of my boyfriend and living in fear of when he would get angry. I'd been a very shy reclusive person very attached to my mother before her death, and had only recently begun exploring my sexuality prior to her death in 1996. I was so very lonely at a time when the few friends I had abandoned me, unable to handle my grief over my mother's death from cancer and ultimately suicide.
This new boyfriend had an amazing hold on me due to his own frightening level of charisma, and my intense grief and loneliness. I didn't want to lose him and be alone with my pain, so I did whatever he asked, including allowing myself to be repeatedly sodomized and bent over tombstones in dark graveyards for more than a year, while he told me stories of how some forms of yoga involved meditating in graveyards. But this was not meditation it was torture - mental and physical. He was always careful to punctuate these sorts of 'sessions' with deeply intellectual discussions of how my obedience to him was helping me to become a much more humble and kind person to others; that my obedience and ultimate surrender to his will was equivalent to that of surrendering to God. His ability to twist the truth of Tantra - of seeing the 'other' as a manifestation of the Divine - was criminal; verging on the twisted and extreme intelligence of people like Charles Manson with his 'family'. I was considered to be a part of his 'family', which I initially saw as kindness, but grew to see was bondage. He still has a 'family' of women devoted to him, not all of whom live with him - some whose glossy 8 x 10s with their devoted signatures on them grace his walls in a sort of shrine to him. As far as I know, I'm the only one who saw him for what he was...
All his stories of how my mother was living in Hell because of her suicide from the pain of Stage IV cancer, and his assertions that she came to him in dreams and visions to advise him how to deal with me were hideously cruel. I wonder how many people on earth are the victim of such cruelty, and talk of duality and the necessity for ever action and thought to exist in creation does little to assuage my lingering grief and anger at the loss of my mother and the mental and emotional mutilation I endured at the hands of this monster of a human being. His stories of his own rape and abuse don't ring true, so theories of how that behaviour gets passed along... I don't know.
On one of the few occassions when he was honest about his ulterior motives he said that there were some people like himself on earth who were just evil because it was their nature. He told the story of the turtle crossing the river on the scorpion's back. The scorpion assures the turtle that he will get him safely across and not sting him, but halfway across he stings the turtle and they both begin to sink. When the turtle asks why the scorpion says: "It's in my nature."
No amount of intellectualizing the behaviour of people such as him, taking advantage of those in deep emotional pain and grief will lay the compounded grief to rest. I know that. I'm not quite sure why I wrote this, other than to be able to do so... I have every right to talk publicly about what happened, as long as I don't mention his name. Sometimes I wonder if in a past life I was a gypsy at Auschwitz and he was my tormentor. Was this lifetime to learn to forgive him? And to forgive people like him for the endless evil they do? All I know is wrestling with the issues takes me deeper into the places in my body that are blocked and need healing.
The experience of being in Bound Lotus is not a closing of my heart as the physical therapist suggested; it is a learning to sit patiently with my pain and grief as they leave my body a little bit at a time. This sort of 'bondage' to my Self IS connection to the Divine and a deepening of trust in the ultimate goodness of the universe that transcends human cruelty and atrocity. My journey down the path of Yoga has introduced me to people and situations full of human frailty, but predominantly peppered with human kindness.
For all that man's assertions that it is in man's nature to be evil, and his tendency to regard William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" as a sort of Bible, he is wrong. People are both little angels and little demons. We have free will to choose if we will stumble through the darkness to find the warmth of the darkness and light co-existing in such a way as to render the light as real and not sappy, the dark as warm and comforting, not angry at being abandoned. It would be rude to be exclusive and only invite one guest and not the other. The acceptance of both heals the difficulties of each seperately. Maybe someday I will be able to hug this man and not feel the bile rising in my throat and the urge to spit. Who knows? He talked often of how forgiveness is really to heal the person doing the forgiving because you can't change the other. You can't change the other. Acceptance of the co-existance of light and dark, or "light and shade" as Jimmy Page would put it -- this is the essence of Tantra. Non-exclusivity. Hmm. Hum.
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