Sunday, December 19, 2010

Bound Lotus in the Fire Tent with Gurunam Singh

Day 229 of Bound Lotus I did in the Fire Tent at Winter Solstice 2010. Having missed a day back in the Spring of this year, I will now actually reach Day 235 on Christmas Day! On that same day I will complete 90 days of Laya Yoga & the Ashtang Mantra. I am tracking that practice on another blog: aphoenixrisesthroughlayayoga.blogspot.com. When I was working on some rough spots I also kept a seperate blog. On Christmas Day I will come back to write on this one regularly, after finishing the Laya Yoga blog.

Doing Bound Lotus AND Laya Yoga (both for 31 minutes a day) has been challenging, to say the least, at Winter Solstice. It is easier to do them both in my tent. Yet, this morning, for the start of Solstice, I actually wanted to go to Sadhana and Gurdwara. I do Sadhana alone, normally, except for when I am at Teacher Training in Kansas City. So really, even though I went to Winter Solstice 2009 and Summer Solstice 2010, I never went to Sadhana there...it was too much. I was sick at both and in a lot of pain, and lucky to even be there, and to keep up with Bound Lotus. So this morning was my first time doing group Sadhana with more than 6 people. I think there were 100?

It was wonderful, though I kept falling asleep sitting up. Gurunam Singh led Sadhana. His voice is so lovely...

In Gurdwara for the first time at Solstice too, I accidentally sat on the men's side. Now I am pretty sure I was a guy in a past life. At any rate, I am back in my tent, with all of the rain and damp, keeping things dry, and planning to continue blogging on the blog for Laya Yoga until Christmas Day. Wahe Guru!

Thursday, September 23, 2010

A Phoenix rises from the ashes...

On the other side of my first KRI Teacher Training weekend, with a hellacious moontime for the third time this month, and serious issues with my lower chakras, I have a headache. When I opened up Yogi Bhajan's "Master's Touch" after Sadhana this morning I saw this and it made me smile:

"The purpose of visiting Earth and being a human is to unload your karma here, not to carry it to the next life. That's the purpose. That's why you serve the Master. You don't love the Master, you don't learn from the Master. Learn what you can learn. You have everything in you. Youcan learn from books from the library, but you learn from the Master how to surrender. You do not understand that there is a catch-22. When you surrender, the karma surrenders too. You rise like a phoenix rises from the ashes, and the karma remains behind. Then it's the Master's headache." (p. 168)

That made me laugh!

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Aadays Tisai Aadays Meditation

This one, from p. 176 of "The Master's Touch", I have been doing as well as Bound Lotus for 1'000 days...I began it later and never missed a day, so I am farther along with it now. Yogi B says this mudra helps to release fear which is the cause of all Emotional Compensation, which he discusses in Class 16. He states:

"Fear is the cause of all emotional compensation ~ which is the cause of many personality imbalances and behavioral problems. A normal person has anywhere from sixteen to twenty split personalities. These are personalities we have created to deal with life. When you are speaking with a person, you don't know just who you are really talking to. This meditation will help to correct this problem.

This mantra is a salutation to the Infinite God. Its meaning is:

Aadays tisai aadays. Aad aneel anaad anaahat jug jug ayko vays. (30th pauree of Japji Sahib)
I salute God again and again. God is primal and pure, with unknown beginning, Who cannot be destroyed, and who remains the same through all the ages.

"With practice, this mantra can give you siddhis, spiritual powers. A secondary effect of this meditation is that by sitting on your heels, you can help to clear away any digestive problems."

Also he says about the whole pauree:

"If you just learn this pauree of japji, make it as a routine, the entire knowledge of the entire universe and beyond the universe will come to you without reading a book. In this sutra is initiation of that knowledge which is in all of you...This meditation gives the siddhis, the occult powers we talk about?"

I'm not sure after what else I've read that I want them, but I like what the meditation does for me otherwise.

Monday, August 30, 2010

111 Days of Bound Lotus

Yes, if I started again in May, this is where I am at. I have begun to write more privately, because there are issues I am dealing with that have led me down a rather dark path to try and befriend some painful inner demons of hate. Among other things, I am planning my own version of a magickal ritual to heal my Erishkegal, and go down like Orpheus into Hades to retrieve Eurydice. It appears that like Persephone, I have eaten too many pomegranate seeds. These are seeds of anger and rage that have germinated and grown, have spread like weeds or dandelions, and every time I think I've cleared a field they come back in greater numbers.

This is the truth of what Tsultrim Allione writes in her book "Feeding Your Demons". The Hydra just grows more heads, and the last one is immortal, so burying it is pointless and worse. It will just give the demon greater power. So, in my version of the Tibetan practice of Chöd, without a bell, thighbone trumpet or drum, I am honoring my demons by dialoguing with them in the form of the Vodoun Loa/Lwa. Many of the older spiritual egregores in that religion are more daemons than demons, guiding spirits that have been demonized and and lumped in with those that actually are more demonic. In theory, Vodoun does not seperate good from evil, but in practice there are Rada Loa like Erzulie Freda, full of love and beauty, Papa Legba who is like a Ganesha of sorts; and there are Guede or Ghede who are the spirits of our dead ancestors, who cuss a lot and are disrespectful and a bit mercenary, but funny. The Petro Loa are like spirit egregores of all the rage, hate and pain within the African diasporic past.

I feel a connection to the path of Vodoun, and have begun to metaphysically clear the closets of my mind as well as my physical closets. These entities seem no different than the Tibetan Buddhist Wrathful deities that we must pass through and befriend. And the Tibetan brand of Buddhism blends with their native Bon religion, which seems much like the African Fon religion out of which Vodoun grew. And yes, there is evil, there are Bocors and Caplatas who exploit the Petro loa, just as there were great sorcerers like Milarepa in the mists of Tibetan Buddhist antiquity, and Thug Cults surrounding Kali in the Hindu faith.

But there are also those who have befriended Kali and allowed her to become a protectress. And the same with Ganesha in the distant past who became both a giver and remover of obstacles from his past as a more wrathful deity. My demons and Voodoun's demons can become daemons...guides and friends, no longer enemies. I don't want to fight anymore...I want to be friends.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Blissful Beauty

So even though it creeps me out that my ex of 10 years disrespected my recent request to be left alone, and sent me a sexual innuendo via facebook on Friday the 13th, no less, I am enjoying subbing classes. I had a wonderful group of students, and little Alexander came by to say hello. I feel the studio is blessed by his presence. And I got to try out new sequences of postures because the students at this studio are well-versed in the basics, and beyond. I love teaching! I love it!

Friday, August 13, 2010

Pavęlle, Æmmash § a black cat

...from PVELL ...PALE ...Aleph & Shamain (not Shaman). Shamain for Heaven, and Aleph, as in the miraculous mystery of... On this 95th Day of Bound Lotus, this is where my mind is...on this egregore no different in purpose than the changes wrought by the practice of Kundalini Yoga.

My day was hard going, with my personal demons rebelling against the disciplinary measures I've undertaken since November 3rd, 2009, compounded by what they feel is cruel, unusual, and boring punishment derived from my binding them with many more Kundalini practices. Sometimes it feels like smoking the rats out of the house. Today felt like poo (likely due to a subterranean and DNA-inscribed superstition of Friday the 13th which, though my ego likes to believe it does not heed, my subconscious does...), until I chanced to have a conversation with Harry (as in Harold Roth), about all things magickal. I had occasion to do this when I placed an order for incense. Specifically the Faux Ambergris I used for scrying the sephira of Kether on the Tree of Life in 08', as well as Crowley's Tetragrammaton, La Belle Femme Love Oil for Aphrodite, Tagriel's 26th Mansion of the Moon incense, and Bone Flower Necromancy oil. This latter sounded deliciously infused with the essence of tuberose, like the tuberose I planted under an overpass on highway 55, to negate a vicious memory of personal torture at the hands of an aspiring Beelzebub impersonator, already previously documented as an ex of mine. That little 'expose' had me standing behind a cement wall, looking like Kilroy, but with a trowel and a garbage bag containing said plant.

So.. after two hours of discussing the merits of Kabbalistic magick, I got off the phone feeling much better, and twisted myself into Bound Lotus before setting out to teach Yoga. At the designated studio, I drove up to find sweet little Alexander, the black cat who frequents the studio, parked under the window, waiting to be let in. His furry, purring sweet self graced our practice, while I taught my recently named new poses: Santocha Vyaghrasana § Nighudanagasana...or 'Crouching Tiger' and 'Hidden Dragon'.

A lovely dinner after with my newfound friend Maria rounded out my evening, as we chatted like old girlfriends. Old girlfriends I've never had before in my life! So tell me Kundalini Yoga is not like magick? And tell me that magick doesn't work as I contemplate creating servitors to protect me as I sleep, from people who would like to fuck me, and whom I don't wish to fuck because I don't feel they love ME, just my energy. Tell me magick doesn't work on this -Friday the 13th - as I complete my entire Banishings, Invocations, Middle Pillar and Rose Cross Rituals to cut cords and protect after my request to be left alone was ignored.

I will be sleeping like a baby. Dreaming of black cats and Pavęlle § Æmmash.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Shaking Like a Leaf

This past Sunday I had an experience which I did not write about because it was so intense I still had to process it. I was at the very first Morning Sadhana practice for St. Louis, and as I listened to Sat Inder read Japji I felt tremendous peace. When we sang the Morning Call and the mantras, by the time we were midway through Wahe Guru, I was crying and shaking. As we finished I did not want to come back from the lightness I felt. Each time I tried to open my eyes or unwind from the pose, I felt tremendous grief, as if I would cry and not stop. So I sat. And sat.

Finally, I was able to move, and sit and talk with Sat Inder and Pavan Deep. Then I was able to get up and eat some granola with bananas and rice milk. Sat Inder and Guru Sandesh left, and Pavan Deep and I sat talking about the years we worked in the bars, and how hard it was to leave behind all the people who want to be miserable. I'd come home resolving to sing Japji and Morning Sadhana every day...wanting very much to let go of my inner demons from my past.

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

It's August 3rd, (40 Days since White Tantric) and for once...

...it's a good day. I am NOT depressed. 14 years after mom's death, I feel normal. The last few days have been rough, but I've also been clearing from White Tantric, and this is the last day. How did that get set up that way? But White Tantric is the same time every year, so 40 days must always have ended on the anniversary of my mom's death. Strange that I'll finish 1'000 Days of Bound Lotus on her birthday, Groundhog's Day, in 2012. Kinda funny in a way...I think.

Monday, August 2, 2010

We keep circling~ coming back to old themes

Everything spirals and coils and winds and unwinds. I dust a little here, I dust a little there. I read a little from Virginia Woolf's "The Waves"...then Rachel Corrie's diaries, where she spoofs Anaïs Nin. Where she reflects on Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". I finish "Orlando".

I go to get my back cracked. I have lunch. I run into Sat Inder and Danielle, and Sat Inder talks about how he does not have anything in his life that is not yoga. He offers that he might develop a hobby stitching Teddy bears. I think of my writing. Three manuscripts: "Flowers * .•....", "As Red ......•*•.....•*•....*•", and "?" When will I finish them? I re-read Idalith Marie's e-mails. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to kiss her?

Did I hurt Joe when I told him I was in love with a woman many months ago? All the games we've played...I'm no better than he ~ telling me all about Magan. We are mean to each other.

I read Gina B. Nahai's "Caspian Rain" and think: that was the Iran my mother would have lived in had she married the other man besides my father....

Idalith is interested in what I read, what I love...is Joe? Did Dad know my mother even though it took him years to realize that her favorite poet was not Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but Edna St. Vincent Millay? My mother the reader, writer of letters to the editor, of essay-long letters to me...my father talking on and on and on ad infinitum~ lingering in his library~ his house a library...House of Leaves. No wonder the book scared me. And the words of the Kennedy Sisters...Gray Gardens: "Oh, it's a sea of leaves...if you drop it, it's gone forever."???

The Goetic Demons...

...aren't in a stoppered bottle belonging to King Solomon...they are in every bottle of alcohol! And if you've made peace with your personal inner demons, they don't collude with the ones in the bottle. But most of us haven't. And I've heard it told there are yogis in the Himalayas who can drink alcohol and not get drunk. I'd say that's conquering your demons. But most of us haven't. And they don't call alcohol spirits for nothing.

Perfume is 'distilled' from living material too, and no wonder some scents are so incredibly intoxicating. I think, laughingly, of Brian Froud's pressed faeries! Maybe I'm serious, maybe I'm not. All I know is that on p. 83 of of Sandy Boucher's "Discovering Kuan Yin", she talks about a little girl attacked by the long, sharp, fang-toothed hounds of hell spoken of in Buddhist Sutras, and how Master Hua, the family's teacher, told them they weren't sincere enough in their efforts to work for her healing. The doctors could never find anything, but the little girl was dying nonetheless. They prayed the Great Compassion Mantra, they chanted to Kuan Yin endlessly...and she slowly recovered.

I'd heard a story that the reason Mahan Kirn developed that horrible nuerological disorder was because evil spirits were trying to attack Yogi Bhajan through her...? If it were true, I wonder about evil spirits and angels and demons? Do they exist? Only in our minds? But isn't the world OUR mind? So if we imagine it, do we create it? Everything? What was that quote of Shakespeare's: "There are more things in heaven and on earth than you have imagined..."? Or something of that nature~

~this world of ours~ how did it REALLY come into being? I mean the whole truth? All I know is that last night, after a late afternoon deep slumber from nowhere, I awoke with a horrible migraine, like the one's I had years ago. It would not abate. In the darkness I felt so much anxiety and panic that I wished I were in oblivion. I thought of alcohol, of weed, of chocolate, of sex with people I can't trust...and then I thought of Bach Flower Remedies in my kitchen: Cherry Plum, Rock Rose...Star of Bethlehem. I took them sublingualy.

In 20 minutes, as I folded into Bound Lotus, the intense panic morphed into a flood, an avalanche of tears, for almost the entire 31 minutes. Then I sat up to read Santokh's e-mails, and my e-mails, and I knew at least one realization which had shattered my equilibrium. I am Bi. And inside my head I feel like a freak, because society only seems to accept Bis as titullary material for horny men. And if I love a woman, I'm missing being with a man, vice versa. But I don't think I want more than one love relationship. And I'm sorry to say that hermaphrodites don't do it for me...definitely not the one I met. And this fear of being different, of standing out for more than a unique pair of jeans is draining, exhausting...

I sat, my hand resting on a piece of Deep Mine Drusy Quartz, letting it fill me with energy that I could feel like a drumbeat pulsing up from the earth, like an underground stream, or waterfall, like a great generator tingling beneath my fingertips~ I let my heart slow down, and I thought of the peace of Kuan Yin, Kuan Yin as the temple prostitute in one ancient story...healing men~ of The Red Thread Kwan Yin with her thin moustache.

A moustache~
...on the Mona Lisa.•*•.•*•.•*•.

Kwan Yin, whose statue in Jade I purchased in 2002, while sick with mono, strep and CFS. Whose cool green jade flesh I kissed as I laid roses at her feet during those many months in 2005 when I was to weak to stand, and could only chant, while inclining my head toward her resting on my bedside table. The Kwan Yin who smiled at me, the Kwan Yin some say is connected with the Virgin Mary, and hence the Black Madonna, and therefore Kali, and therefore Ammachi...Sri Amritanandamayi, my namesake, the incarnation of Kali on earth, with her Kali temple in India. Kwan Yin who is every goddess, who passes through 1'000 demons unharmed, because she is 1'000 armed. Every goddess.

To night, with my head still hurting, I take refuge with her beside my bed. And as I have no flower to offer, and it is too late at night to go to the store, I offer her the votive candle in a lotus-blossom-shaped holder. I sleep like a child, and awaken to memories~ not of demons, but of meeting the Dalai Lama in person when I was 18. In Anaheim, CA at an aerobics convention. I saw myself standing in an impromptu line with hotel staff, as he floated past like a sweet angel of mercy, kind eyes, gentle nods, in his ochre robes. And I thought...Kwan Yin is everyone. The demons are simply unruly children got way out of hand, and she can get them underhand, with one of her 1'000 hands.

I now know why Diane Stein, the Reiki Master, collects dozens of Kwan Yin statues. Imagine either an entire apartment filled with statues of Kwan Yin~ every shape and size, or dozens of roses~ even the scent of roses heavy everywhere in the room, as it was one morning in 2005, early on my path that began with Kwan Yin giving me her hand, like the detachable hand on many a Kwan Yin statue. The book about her that came to me after mom died in 1996....Kwan Yin, the princess Miao Shan in legend, whom I named a cat after~ Kashmira Miao Shan.

Kwan Yin protects with the compassion of the Virgin, with fierceness of Kali, and the humaness of Ammachi. She teaches with the steadiness of Yogi Bhajan. She floats in and out of my life like a rose petal on a lake. She hovered near me last night, and will tonight, and tomorrow, as the anniversary of my mother's death comes to pass.. This time without the grief-stricken anguish of the past. But with slightly painful and very fond memories of a woman struggling to heal her inner demons, just as I am, just as we all are~

Saturday, July 31, 2010

In 3 more days...the 14th anniversary of my mother's death

I'm exhausted, tired, almost done reading "Orlando". I go to sub a beginner's class. I sit for Bound Lotus. I go to see the movie "Great Directors", and fall in love with Agnés Vardàs speech patterns...David Lynch is so strange...The Rabbits, Inland Empire, Lost Highway, dark, dark, dark...All those nights watching these movies in the past under coercion. With that monster asking me did I know what the word "covet" meant, or "coerced"? Little did I know that he coveted my happiness and was coercing me into giving it to him. The spider~ sucking my insides out.

I'm home. My head feels like a war-zone. When will the bulldozer come? I just want to read about nothing.

Friday, July 30, 2010

My Beloved Mother Was An Alcoholic...

...why will my father not admit it? She always kept a bottle of "cooking Sherry" and Kahlua and a Danish cherry cordial I used to know the name of, and honeymead in the house. The honeymead was always in the living room. The rest she hid under the sink. I caught her many times taking a nip. Her rages when she was drunk (after cooking), were incredible. Yelling, screaming, growling she'd send us to the orphanage all because one of broke some china accidentally, or damaged something in her precious home. No wonder I wanted nothing to do with alcohol, really, until, as a dancer, I needed it to swallow down the 'jagged little pill' of the work. No wonder I am a relationship addict. No wonder I fell in love with a functional alcoholic and drug abuser, and have let him remain a part of my life for almost 10 AFTER we broke up. No wonder: I AM A RELATIONSHIP ADDICT. No wonder I dated a sex addict in more recent years. No wonder, with no true sense of self all those years...I allowed a Solipsistic, Narcissistic Psychopath to almost kill me the year and year after my mother died, from cancer, and with a noose around her neck and a bottle of Dad's Glen Livet.

The only fly in the ointment for healing is that the love of my life came after the Narcissist and stole my heart. How do I get it back?

And for all his drinking, he never rhapsodized about alcohol the way my parent's did...Mom talking about the pleasures of honeymead, her beloved Cherry Kirsch, and Kahlua and Cream...while Dad extolled the virtues of the best scotch: The Glen Livet. The Glen Livet she drank to make it easier to die. I did not fuck myself up alone...MY MOTHER WAS AN ALCOHOLIC. I can say that now. In 42 years, almost 43, no one in our family ever spoke those words.

And I WAS (as I disagree with AA) an alcoholic. Until 2005. I am, though, still a drug addict, in the sense that, if my body would let me, I'd smoke weed again, and a lot. I am a food addict and am addicted to chocolate. It get's better. I'm addicted to reading, to knitting and to yoga. But I am no longer addicted to alcohol. And I am no longer addicted to silence. And I can say these words out loud: My mother was an alcoholic, God bless her heart and soul. And I loved her, Jekyl and Hyde though she was until she mellowed with age like fine wine, and then died literally on the vine at the end of a rope. She was an alcoholic. But I loved her, I love her now, and I miss her.

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Wild as the Wind I Go...

Everything is sort of fine until lunch with Dad. Then my grief over Joe comes plunging out. We are eating at Dressel's...dark, wood-paneled bar I hate. Perfect backdrop for strippers. We're in a bar! WTF? Then, as my soul comes spilling out on the table like a gutted fish, entrails hanging everywhere, draping like an octopus over my salad and hummus~ lo and behold: an ex-stripper bitch sits down behind and eavesdrops a little...long enough to see that I am about to cry. Then she laughs at me to her boyfriend. I can imagine all the internal references in her mind to 'Crazy Brianna'. Finally I get up and ask, with eyes flashing, if she remembers me, how she is doing, and if she likes her hummus. Catty bitch. The look of abject fear in her stupid little gossipy eyes is immensely gratifying.

Later, I go home and become crazy like I used to be... I can't stop crying. I want out of this shithole of a city where people are so frequently dull, and hooked on the Busch family beer. I want to leave my giant behind me, stop running into people who formerly bullied me, and just rise above the sun and smile.

For a while I am afraid I won't be able to teach my class. I call Jen and tell her I need a sub. Then I do Bound and change my mind. If I can do Bound, I can teach. I draw inner strength I didn't know I had. I teach my class and it is fine. But I think my boss might think I am little crazy, and I am, but aren't we all? I come home and crash.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Blood and Brown Tires

I finally talk to the owner of the BP station where the gas turned my tires brown. He tells me it is my fault for pumping the gas? I tell him I will report him to the BBB, the IL Dept of Agriculture, and the EPA. He says if they find nothing that he'll sue me for slander. Idiot, I say, you can't. This is not a totalitarian state. Last I checked. Maybe in the Gaza Strip he could. Bastard.

I tell my father and he patronizes me, placates me, which infuriates me. I tell him that he used to do this to mom. Joe did it to me. Brad did it me. None of them can see it. I can walk away from Joe and Brad, but not Dad. Infuriating. Who do these men think they are talking down to the little crazy woman? Just because I'm righteously angry doesn't make me crazy or hysterical. Who do they think they are!!!!????!

I'm bleeding everywhere this month. My period is simply and utterly horrid! Bound Lotus is the last thing I want to do, but I do it anyway. Then I go back to reading.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Snow White/Rose Red

I feel myself drowned in grief.

"In the fairy tales I read as a child, I will tell Bahar on that day, the heroine is always damaged: she has spent two decades asleep under a curse, or locked up in a tower. She has lost her mother and been betrayed by her father, forced to promise her firstborn to a gnome, taken into the woods and left to die. Even after the prince arrives to awaken her from her sleep, or breaks into the tower by using her hair to climb to the top, even after the gnome self-destructs and the witch is boiled in the pot she had prepared for the children, the heroine cannot undo the damage done to her. I know this - that I will always remain damaged - but I do believe that I can be real in spite of the damage, that I can find my way through the dark and thorny woods, climb up the valley of The Tango Dancer's despair, and emerge, if not whole, triumphant nevertheless." - 'Caspian Rain', Gina B. Nahai

Monday, July 26, 2010

"Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves"

When I was young, in my twenties, I saw the movie "The Lover". Then I began to devour Duras. I went to Paul's Books in The Loop and bookshops in New Orleans looking for Duras. I found "Emily L." I found "The Passion" and "Sexing the Cherry" by Jeanette Winterson, who concedes she modeled the latter on "Four Quartets". I did not read Eliot's "Four Quartets" until last year, last April, while poring over "Reading Lolita in Tehran". I stopped reading that 2/3rds through to read "Lolita".

Now that I am back at reading about atrocities to women, i.e., FGM and stoning for adulteresses in Iran, and reading and seeing plays about Palestine, and feeling beleageured by the Middle East...I find myself wanting to write again. I think of my very first short story, more like a part of a larger work, say, in the style of Amos Oz' "The Same Sea", and remember how it was inspired by a love affair going bad, and the ravaging, or ravishing of my soul at 26. I called it: "A Death Not Mourned". Maybe it should be: "The Ravaging of Mary Rose"...to reference my fake album cover, and the sinking of a ship.

It had a lot about roses, dried roses, love never truly experienced. And today, I reopen "Reading Lolita in Tehran", to find words which waft like a musty closet scent from my old manuscript, infused before I even knew it, with words I had not yet read from Eliot's "Four Quartets":

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.


My lover and I disturbed the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves....and to what end?

Let my twist my heart while I twist my legs. I do not want to do Bound Lotus today.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

I've said goodbye...

...and my heart aches. Even floating for almost a minute in handstand does not ease the grief. Singing the Akal brings it up. Now I know why I began singing it on the 12th. Reading Virginia Woolf's "Orlando" is welcome respite, but even dropping myself into a book has to end. Classes must be taught, Bound Lotus be done, and food chewed and swallowed. On the 19th when my heart sank, I saw a blurb on facebook about making up your fake album cover from random names, quotes and photos. My band name was the Mary Rose ( a ship which sunk fully intact on July 19th -no less- of 1545), the photo of a girl in a flowered dress fallen into a pool as if drowning and fully clothed, and the title: "Thanks for Telling Me". That's how I felt on Monday, like I just drowned. And I wanted to say to Joe:" thanks for telling me." He should have told me before the play...and it took me all day Monday to realize that I was hurt. I was like a ship sinking slowly. I've been letting water come in the hull all week. Now I have to swim out of the sinking ship and get away...

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Bhavar tumaaraa ih man hova-o har charnaa hohu ka-ulaa

What I love about being in love with the Divine, is that whenever you go looking, He/She is always there, never sleeping, never far away...I never have to doubt the Truth. And when I posted this yesterday on facebook, two friends from Solstice had already e-mailed and texted me 2 minutes before my post showed up...which means means they were listening to their souls and knew I was in pain. They responded when I first had the thought to write, before I posted it. I didn't see their messages until later...

Friday, July 23, 2010

Doing a New Meditation called "Laya Yoga"!

I started it yesterday...and "It makes you creative and focused on your real priorities and helps you sacrifice what is needed to accomplish them." Also, "Laya Yoga fixes your attention and energy on your essence and higher consciousness without normal distractions and attachments having power over your reactive awareness."

"This mantra (Ek Ong Kaar [uh] Sa Ta Na Ma [uh] Siree Wha [uh] Hay Guru) was guarded like a secret gem. It is the key to the inner doors of naad, the realm of creative sound. If you listen to the sound of the mantra and then concentrate into its subtle sounds, you will become absorbed into the inner domain of your Higher Self."

"...This mantra takes you to the most subtle realm of creativity. It awakens the Kundalini force that energizes the whole Creation. It awakens your awareness and empowers the sense of the Subtle Body of the Aura. The practice of the meditation gives intuition and the ability to heal."

I wondered why I was doing it when I have all these other meditations. And more importantly, I wondered why I was doing it at all...then today I realized, as I spoke with a good girlfriend, that I need to let go of my ex of 10 years ago, who talks to me frequently, and whom I talk to just as frequently. He is draining me intensely. What happened this weekend with him buying tickets for me to see a show, and then letting me know later that the talented young woman in the one-woman monologue was his most recent ex, and not only that, but the woman he loved more than me...was just so many kinds of wrong.

And then making plans to have me come over to wash out my tent, and be halfway present because of constantly needing to look at his phone, the same the next day when I picked it up, and making plans for lunch the following day, only to have him call me an hour later to say he just woke up! We did end up having a bite to eat, and a nice conversation...but WTF!?

This is ExACtly the way he behaved 10 years ago. And it didn't help seeing a woman outside the restaurant who recognized him and then shot me a dirty look. Yet another person he can't introduce me to because he can't remember her name. Schmuck! Need I explain why I think she might have been smug toward him, and toward me? Same old, same old. Nothing has changed.

And so this meditation is to help you be focused on your real priorities and to sacrifice what is needed to accomplish them. I'd say my biggest priority is to stay physically, emotionally and mentally sound. To accomplish this, his friendship needs to be sacrificed. He has pulled me down and drained me too much in the past. I will not allow him to ever make me feel like shit for 5 days, or even one day. Enough!

Thursday, July 22, 2010

I can touch my toes!!!!!!

Holy Cow of Govinda! Thank the Baby Jesus! Ram Das Guru! I can touch my toes!!!! I can touch my toes!!! For the first time, on the right side, I can pull right leg up first, then the left, then clasp my elbows, bend forward and touch my forehead to the blessed ground, and THEN touch both of my toes, just barely! I am so EXCITED! This calls for chocolate!

Saturday, July 17, 2010

7-Wave Chakra Meditation

I went to Nancy's class today, and we did the 7-Wave Chakra Meditation. It was wonderful! I've seen it in the KRI manual, but never done it. A friend came with me, and she really enjoyed the class. Then I had to endure the snobbery and eliteism of a few students there, one in particular who was gauche enough several months ago to comment on the fact that my teeth are streaked from Tetracycline, and then suggest that I should get them whitened. I try to be nice to her when I see her, but she's such a snob. How does that happen with yoga?

At any rate, I came home and sang the "Akal" for the 6th day in a 17-day practice, looked up the KRI Teacher Training in Chicago, and sat for Bound Lotus, before going to see the movie "MicMacs", which was a hilarious farce and tongue-in-cheek comedy about arms and munitions providers, complete with an inventor, a homemaker in the city dump, and a contortionist. Comic relief that was well needed.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

I Feel Yucky But I'm Getting Up Anyway...

I just got up and went to Sat Inder's class, and felt better. Then we went to lunch at Winslow's Place. We talked about taking Sikh Vows, and what it was like for him to take Amrit, and about taking Teacher Training. I feel so much better just being around someone else who reminds me of how much I loved being at Summer Solstice.

I did Bound, and when I went to teach tonight, the class was really beautiful! I feel as if my teaching has expanded to a new level. It's so much richer, and so much more rewarding. If I can just get my energy back on an even keel...it fluctuates so much. I'm supposed to go to Lilith Fair with Jen tomorrow, but I don't know if I'll be able to stay up that late...we'll see...

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Destiny Whispers Its Clues To Us...

...about who we are from the day we are born. My parents were always trying to get me to come out of my room, or out of what they called a trance. I simply loved to sit and meditate, basically. My mother kept my sister's hair short, and mine long, and I wanted more than ever to wear it in a bun, not braids. Then when I finally began to wear my hair in a bun, I wore it high, right on the posterior fontanel where American Sikhs who are women wear theirs, so they can attain their destiny and clarity just like men. People made fun of me for wearing my bun so high, but I didn't care...

I saw Lilias Folan doing yoga when I was four, at the President of Berry College's house, and fell in love.

I loved to wear bracelets as a young woman, and now I wear Karas.

I loved to dance, and so I was a dancer for a while...

I love to cook, so maybe I will be a chef?

I love to sing so much, and have sung at Kirtans, played the flute, violin, piano and French horn...and my birth announcement had a long-haired baby playing an electric guitar! So maybe one day I will?

I loved books about magic as a child, and I've weaved magic to undo the magic done on me...and others.

I do Bound Lotus - a modified version - every day, so one day I will be able to do the full pose.

Monday, July 12, 2010

The Maha Shakti Mantra...

...is changing me! Every day I sit to sing it, a tear escapes from my right eye, and I feel tingles of energy! As Yogi Bhajan says: "Woman needs her own power."

Leigh-Ann from class yesterday fell in love with Simrit Kaur's music, as I found myself directing everyone to lie in Shavasana at the beginning of class, and talked about 'death and rebirth' as the 'Akal' mantra played. I found out today that it is sung for 17 days following someone's death to help them expand into the light and a state of deathlessness. Then I played the "Divine Birth" CD by Snatam Kaur, and was delighted when Leigh-Ann asked for the info on both so that she can play them during her birth experience!

At home, today, I began singing the 'Akal' mantra for my mother. Everything exists in a place of timelessness as well as in time, so I can sing it for her now, while I couldn't have when she died...even if I had known it. Then I continued singing the mantras for children and babies, to help them all be born strong.

And, of course, I sat for Bound.

Bound Lotus & The Solar Eclipse/New Moon

Yes, I am still sitting for Bound! And trying not to turn into a pumpkin.

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Just resting and still relaxing...

I feel as if someone special, very special died. It is a struggle to just get up and do Bound Lotus. I just keep getting up to do more Kundalini, chant more mantras, and then eat a little and go back to bed. It's like the days I have to work, I muster up all the strength I have, and then I crash when I can. I'm crashing.

Friday, July 9, 2010

I sat and cried today...

...because there was no one at my donation-only Kundalini Class, and I just came back from Kundalini Summer Solstice and have so much to share and no one to share it with. I did my Bound Lotus practice there, and then did the Set I'd planned on teaching for building the aura, which really helped to get me to stop crying enought to drive safely home. I feel like St. Louis is square, so closed off, so not where I want to be at all. I want go back to New Mexico, to Albuquerque, or Santa Fe, or to Portland, Oregon, or San Francisco...even if I have to live in a little box.

Once, years ago, while flying back from Montreal, and stuck on a layover, a kind businessman looked at me with my braids, and hippie clothes, and said, "What is a funky girl like you doing living in St. Louis?" I told him that I didn't know...I just live here. But I don't want to. I want to move. I want to leave. I'm tired of struggling to make a living to teach here, when there are cities like the above-mentioned and even Philadelphia where Justicia is, that I could move to and really thrive! This city...and Granite City, teaching here, especially. I love the students in my class, but too many people at this studio are so closed-minded and so focused on just physical fitness. It is so frustrating to want to show people how to follow the path of yoga back to their souls and centers, and watch them have no interest. St. Louis is such a struggle. It's the tight spot of the U.S. The heartland that won't open.

I need to sleep.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Teaching my 2nd class back...

I did Bound Lotus already, of course, sang, meditated, did laundry, caught up with some bills, but still feel a little dizzy and shaky. When I got to the studio to teach I decided to play Simrit Kaur's and Snatam Kaur's new CDs. As I began the class, I ran into a wall, rather freakishly, and had to teach the first ten minutes of class with an ice pack on my head. My students were chuckling at my clumsiness. I felt, though, like the class was very special, and infused with so much light and love...that it was all pouring into that basement room. I don't think it was my imagination, because the students afterwards were smiling so widely and laughing and talking more vibrantly than usual. I feel like my teaching has expanded to a blessed new level, I've never experienced before. But I still feel dizzy, and actually a little unsafe to drive...just as I have since Coming Down The Mountain...literally.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

A Memory of Love and Kindness

At Summer Solstice, one afternoon when I showered to avoid the bracing cold of early morning showers on the mountain, I opened the curtain to the shower to see a beautiful and petite woman with long, blonde hair, seated like a mermaid combing her hair. I was awestruck by how she held my gaze. I turned away, embarrased that I was staring, and she said, in a very soft voice, "You look a bit sunkissed." I looked at her again, speechless. There was a long pause, as I remember it, and then I said meekly, "I guess I am a bit." She said, "Let me put some raw coconut oil on you, it is very healing." I smiled shyly, wondering why, and allowed her to touch me. I watched as she dipped her fingers in the liquid coconut oil, and rubbed it into my back and arms. The way her hands glided over my arms felt so sweet, so full of love. So unassuming. I realized, even at the time, that no one has ever touched me that way. No one. There was no lust. Only love.

And now, I remember her, and her soft hands on my arms, and the woman as well who I was embarrased to see naked at Winter Solstice, and whom I had dreams about. So many women I've seen naked, but those two I wanted to kiss and to touch and to hold. It's sweet, I think, that I was embarrased to see them both naked, knowing without really knowing each time, that I desired them; and knowing that I have the unfair privilege of seeing them naked because we are the same sex.

This is a revealation to me. I used to wish I loved women, so that men could not hurt me by not returning my love. Now I realize that I love men and women both in a sexual way. I think women's bodies are so beautiful, and I am sad that I could not say to either of them how much I wanted find a secluded corner and hold them close and kiss them. I think of the anguish I felt at 23, when watching the movie "The Lover", based on my beloved Marguerite Duras' book, and how my eyes were focused not on Tony Leung, but Jane March. And when I saw "When Night is Falling", I loved the women. I think of Greta Garbo's words: "In America, sex is a scandal, in Europe, it's a fact," and I miss those hands covered in coconut oil.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

My first class back...

My students said "Welcome Back!" and told me that they missed me. I felt as if my teaching was much deeper, and coming from a deeply inspired place. I just walked in, feeling a little out of practice, as if months had gone by since I last taught, when it was really only weeks...and I just prayed and asked internally to be told what to do. When the class was over, people were smiling and said that they really enjoyed my class very much, and had missed me, and was glad that I was back. I've never smiled so wide after teaching! Kundalini White Tantric Yoga is changing my life overnight. It is a gift and a very special practice.

Monday, July 5, 2010

As "The Sunday Tertulia" continues...

I love this book. No wonder it has been calling to me since before Solstice. And I want to re-read Amos Oz' "The Same Sea". But first, a few quotes from "The Sunday Tertulia":

Sunday, July 4, 2010

"The Sunday Tertulia"

I did not realize, until about 8:15 pm, long after doing Bound Lotus, singing mantras, eating and walking in the Park, that today was the 4th of July. Hm. I think of it as a holiday that is an excuse for most people to get drunk and be obnoxious, and the fireworks don't really blow my mind in St. Louis, so I guess it barely registers on my radar.

Today, I began reading a book I purchased on May 15th, 2000, that I attempted several times to read since then, but never did. I remember, once, taking it over to the house of that evil and ugly little German boy I foolishly dated. The one who hid this very book under the bed so he could sleep with someone else while I was at work. I knew the whole time, just like I always know when I am being betrayed. If only I had read this book then. It isn't, on the surface, a monumental piece of work: it looks to be sappy and sickly sweet. And yet it isn't. To read it like a diary...ruminations, documentation of conversations deep within a circle of women who love each other dearly. Women who uplift each other...so unlike the women I have known in the past...or have been myself.

So much love in this book. Kindness. Prescriptions for good eating, traveling, relationships and health. I took 'Isabella's' advice and made toast of some bread, drizzles with olive oil, layered with tomato slices, and sprinkled with salt and pepper. Heaven! I'll take Pearl's advice and go to stay by the edge of the Ocean or Lake Michigan later this year to do some healing. I want to go back to New Mexico and meet a curandera too, but until then, several dozen white candles and a bath filled with sage, Rosemary, fresh cut lemons and limes and peppers will, I am sure, recharge my soul. Healing it from the damage of all the cheating, lying, philandering, gruesome meanness, lecherous and draining behaviour of men from my past.

And then, there will be more room for the lovely masculine souls who are beginning to grace my life as friends. And for the men from my past who have truly changed and grown. More room for my own healing heart as this deeply held bitterness, anger and rage continues to diminish. Forgiveness to myself for not having found the opportunity to be a mom. I so desperately want a child. I had not realized this until the day before White Tantric Yoga began at Summer Solstice...the day I heard Snatam Kaur singing "Poota Maata Ke Asees", without knowing the words meant: "Oh, my child, this is your mother's blessing."

I am really, really tired. I also feel a little disillusioned about Amma. Everyone seems so focused on 'getting' from her, rather than 'doing their own work' like Yogi Bhajan's teachers. After all, YB said he came not to create students, but teachers. Amma, on the other hand, seems to have a lot of students who have gone beyond the stage where they needed her help desperately, and now could do their own work, but aren't.

The guy there who hit on me back in 2008, and then pretended to his friends that I pursued him so he wouldn't get in trouble with his friends was there. He tried to act angry with me, and I told him in front of his friends that he was a schmuck for trying to start something with me when he had a girlfriend. Predictably, he got angry. Has he learned anything from being with Amma? I doubt it.

The lady whose friend and granddaughter wiped me out so much being energy vampires the two times I drove with them, to the point that last year I barely made it in my front door from seeing Amma before I shit all over myself, was there. I was happy to say hello, but she was upset because I hadn't called her back after last July, and the last straw with her, when she was so angry with me because I stood up to a bullying friend of hers. Her anger had been so intense, it made me sick. Why would I want to hang out with these people?

Besides that, many of Amma's workers were rude and unkind. Yelling at everyone, ordering people around without a shred of kindness. Snappy. Irritable. They need to sleep and rest. Her All-Night programs may not exhaust her, but they exhaust her supporters, and make them mean. I decided to google anything about Amma and disillusionment. Surprisingly, I found a lot. A blog where a British man discussed how monumentally unhappy her devotees on the Amritapuri Ashram seem, and how utterly depressing the Ashram seems. This tireless devotion to Amma and her causes is apparently tiresome to many. It seems like all work and no play. Unlike Yogi Bhajan's devotees and his 3HO organization. 3HO stands for: Happy, Healthy, Holy Organization.

Anyway, I also found a post by a former devotee of Amma's on the Amritapuri Ashram, who describes her stay there in such unglowing terms that I wonder about Amma. Apparently she can be very 'catty'. Kind to you as long as she needs you, and then assassinating your character if you try to leave the Ashram. Sounds like 'Hotel California'. I wonder if when The Eagles wrote that song they were talking about an Ashram?

Oh well, I guess that disillusionment with one's guru is part of the journey...part of growing up. Relying on a hug from Amma to get juiced up for the year no longer sounds appropriate now that I am way more healthy. I am strong enough to do my own work, and am doing it with Kundalini Yoga, where I left off in the first place back in 2000, before I ever met Amma. She helped me when I needed it, and she helps others, thousands of others with her donations to things such as the Tsunami Relief...but many of her 'followers' need to get off their duffs and do their own work, and stop vampirizing her and her workers.

Gosh, I hate to say it, but the analogy that A.S. Byatt uses in her novel "Angels & Insects", is appropriate I think. Amma is like a Queen Bee with all these drones, workers around her. She is never alone. She never gets to leave the hive, it seems, and have any time alone. I don't see that as healthy. I don't care if she is a Saint, there is something so unhealthy about all of this...

Let me just get back to processing from Kundalini Yoga Summer Solstice. I think I might be done with going to see Amma for awhile. I no longer want to join an Ashram of any sort. I want to teach yoga. All kinds of yoga. I'm happy teaching. It is what I do best.

Saturday, July 3, 2010

Sleeping at Funk's Grove

...I did Bound this morning at 2:30 am, and then most of the other meditations as well while waiting for Amma's Darshan, since my token was X1.

Driving to Amma's Darshan...

Around 9 am, after Bound Lotus, I checked all my e-mails and had received encouragement to go to Amma's even though I was so tired. I resolved to go, packed a few bags, and left finally at 2:15 pm after going to the bank and getting directions. It was a long drive through work zones in Illinois with a new $375 fine for speeding, on camera. I kept my speed below 55, but people were pushing. I don't understand why they'd want a ticket? I finally arrived at Amma's in Lombard, Illinois at 7:15. I arrived just in time for Puja, received my Holy Water, and cried as I sat for meditation.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Mmm...Spicy Potato and Onion Soup with Bananas!

The benefits of working Kitchen Seva are paying off, in that I know how to make this soup and the wonderful foods from Summer Solstice. After spending my last $70 yesterday on groceries, I set to work making Taboulleh and Potato and Onion Soup. I bought dolmas and hummus flavored with lemon and artichokes and spinach. I am finally hungry again, after not being hungry since Sunday. I was so exhausted and tired these last 3 days...

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Sleeping....

I am so tired. I just feel like sleeping all day, rather than driving up to see Ammachi right now. I've done Bound Lotus, and sung a bunch of mantras, done my other meditations, eaten a little bit, and gone back to bed.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Day 50 of Bound Lotus (again...he) ...and back from Ram Das Puri

It's also the 172nd day of doing the Releasing Fear meditation to Aadays Tisay Aadays.

Last night, I began Kirtan Kriya for 31 min, as suggested for processing the work from Summer Solstice. It was so pleasant. Sweet even. I slept listening to Nirinjan Kaur's "Jai Te Gung" on repeat, and awoke to look at the patterns of light on my bedroom wall over the Planetary Yantras. I felt like a little girl again. Like the way I used to feel as a small child when our family came back from a summer camping trip. I feel so much love, the presence of my mother, and of angels. I never thought I would say that!

And yet I'm very tired too. Tired but happy. Hungry, but not really anxious to go out into the dimness of the world to forage for food. Out I went anyway. My doorman wanted to know about the trip, and smiled at my joy. The apartment manager only perked up when I mentioned troubles on the trip. Typical of her. I love her, but she looooves to be miserable. She's resistant to my no longer always resonating with her in that way...too bad. :-(

I went around the corner with my head held high, and found some veggie wraps just behind the door of O.R. Juice and Smoothie. I retraced my steps and went to Bissinger's, where Tambora and the girl behind the counter ended up giving me free chocolate! Then on to Straub's for a larger jar of raw Tupelo honey...craving it for some reason...like I did chocolate after Winter Solstice.

Back home I got really tired. I think the vibration of people in the CWE was so low compared to where I was that it drained me. I put Aap Sahaee Hoa on repeat and napped while giving myself Reiki. Then I got up to do the 'Creating Self-Love' set, which physically hurt my chest a lot, so I must still have a lot of hidden anger... Then back to lie down.

Monday, June 28, 2010

Sleep and Bliss

After arriving at the Drury Inn in Joplin, Missouri after 11 pm, I was overtired and sat staring at the floor for an hour. Then I grabbed my D-core pillow and fell asleep without brushing my teeth. I awoke groggy and weak at 8:30 am, asked for a 1pm checkout, and took advantage of the last fifteen minutes of the Quick Start breakfast to have a waffle, 3 cups of O.J., and a biscuit with blackberry jam.

In my room I did Chhe Kriya, Bound Lotus, and the Banishings and Rose Cross. I showered, languished in the bath with truly warm water, drank some electrolytes, and got on the road after thanking Mina for my late check-out. In Rolla, I ate at Subway, and met some guys from L.A. driving to Maryland. I said I was so happy to see spinach again in a Subway, after being in the meat-lover's paradise of Texas. They said that Subways in California have avocado slices. I need to move!

I sent Sat Inder a text hoping he had a safe trip, apparently just as he arrived home! Then 2 hours later I was home, doing Releasing Fear and finishing just as Dad arrived to go get a piece of chocolate with me. I bought us each a jar of honey, and we sat in The Chase as he told me that he fell at the church last Thursday. He acts like he feels old. He calls himself a slob, and yet he seems happy. I just wish he would do some Kundalini Yoga. But he's so worried about if it jives with being Christian. But Kirtan Kriya...if he would just try it.

Leaving Amarillo for 'The Hotel Tulsa'

I awoke from a long sleep and promptly did Bound, Chhe Kriya and Releasing Fear. After slathering myself with more coconut oil to ease the eczema and heat rash, I ate at Subway, and got on the road to sing Sadhana, the Divine Birth mantras and listen to Ashana! I had a lovely but long drive through Texas, past Oklahoma City, and landed outside Tulsa at a Days Inn from Hell. The lady behind the front desk was sweet, but her boss from India was wierd. And the minute they finished an overly lengthy process of checking me in, rain started heavily outside, making it an ordeal to empty the car. As the thunder and lightning crackled, and I painstakingly moved my luggage with three trips up the elevator, I felt a funky vibe in the hotel.

A huge number of club kids were there, reeking of dozens of kinds of perfume, and each one looked like a zombie on either coke, X, or heroin, or copious amounts of alcohol. They bitched that I didn't say hi, and because I had a disgusted look on my face...but they WERE disgusting to be around, and it was making me sick to my stomach. When I decided to leave, the manager took it personally and tried to block me from leaving. It was like The Hotel California!!!! I told him I'd just been in the mountains of New Mexico, camping, eating vegetarian food, and not being around a bunch of drug addicts and alcoholics, and it was too much. Culture shock. I pushed past him and left.

An hour later, I holed up at Joplin's Drury Inn, courtesy of the kindness of Liz at the front desk. It was Sweet Dreams...truly. Safe and sound away from the junkies and pimps. I felt like Dorothy clicking her spangly red pumps. Half-way home in the storm.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

The Last Day...

I awoke ready to shower and pack up my tent. Not ready to leave Ram Das Puri, but tired of the heat and dryness. I did Chee Kriya and Bound Lotus... Then said goodbye to Kristikka and Sat Siri and her son Rajpreet (Sebastian). We promised to see each other next year, and they packed up and left. I wrapped myself in a shawl to prevent burning, and worsening of my eczema, and covered myself with raw coconut oil to stop the itching, while I quickly made 3 more trips to the car with my things, and then swept and packed up the tent.

Then I took a much needed warm shower (for once it wasn't cold), and headed for the car with the last of my things. I passed Sat Inder on the way, and he said he'd come by my tent but I wasn't there. He said he'd taken Amrit and Sikh Vows, which I figured he had. I was sorry I hadn't been there, but I wasn't doing well with getting up at 3 am. I am very happy for him though...

Lunch was being served, and I saw Jiwan Shakti, my 2nd Tantric partner, and so we sat and ate together in the Admin trailer, with a beautiful white-haired woman who was none other than Prabhu Prakash Kaur, the head of Administration! I love her voice. We talked about Sikh Karas and sprouts, and making Golden Milk. Then I left and said goodbye to Pavan Deep and Sat Inder, and promptly got off in the wrong direction down the mountain, but Sat Inder helped me out.

At the end of that long, rocky road, I stopped to get gas and realized how spacy I was...I then drove that way through Santa Fe, and onto the wrong highway through the sagebrush. As I listened to Simrit Kaur singing Akal Moorat, I fell in love with the mountain I had just come down from, and began to cry. I cried even more when I finally saw a gas station: Pecos River Station, with hummingbird feeders, and I saw my first ever real hummingbird! What magic! I cried as I listened to Snatam Kaur's "Poota Mataa Ke Asees", knowing that the singing of it is healing for my relationship with my mother, just as I had known instinctively 2 days before White Tantric Yoga.

I cried on and off until arriving in Amarillo, Texas to find that almost every room had been rented by Jehovah's Witnesses. That grounded me a little, and then I crashed when I finally found a room.

Friday, June 25, 2010

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Day 3 of White Tantric Yoga...

with Guru Simran Singh Khalsa.

I'd had permission to skip kitchen Seva, and so did Bound again, and went to the Tantric Shelter much earlier. Guru Simran had asked to partner with me, and he pointed out his mat and sheepskin dead center, away from the sun. This kind old man, 76? I believe, was the one who gave me a Heart-to-Heart at my tent. He'd also given me the Chee Kriya to do for a protective circle, much like the Banishings and Middle Pillar Exercise and Rose Cross Ritual that I did not want to do, because I was afraid that some more Christian-oriented types might think strangely of me for doing it. He was also the person I helped set a tent up for someone else with. Very kind and easy to be around. I was overjoyed just to relax. The meditations were intense, but I made it through almost everything. I needed to sleep, and he wanted to as well, and touched my thigh, but I asked him not to...

During the last meditation I had to get up because I was exhausted. In the bathroom I saw blood in the toilet, wondered whose it was, and realized it was mine. I'd bled through my whites. I went back to my tent and washed them out, and then came back just in time for the Blind Walk, which I decided to skip, being quite exhausted and having no desire to fall and twist my ankle from fatigue.

Someone mentioned going into Albuquerque to see Ammachi for Devi Bhava as well, but I couldn't come up with the energy. I went to bed and slept, and slept, and slept.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Day 2 of White Tantric Yoga...

with Hari Prashad Singh.

I was too tired to get up and work in the kitchen today, so I slept until 5:30 am and did Bound Lotus so I wouldn't be worried about doing it later. I ate a Baraka Bar and an orange for breakfast in my tent, then went to the Tantric shelter. I was stressed out with the sunburn and eczema on my arms and shoulders, and was starting to get upset because there were no spaces out of the sun. A woman who was going to partner with me, started an argument with someone she knew, and I told her I had to leave. Then I walked past a woman I knew from the kitchen and there was space beside her. I asked if it was available, and at first she said no, but then looked up and said, "Oh! It's you! Sure!" She said she just knew it was as important who was to the side of you as across from you.

So I found a space and went looking for a partner. A woman told me just to put my hand up, and the minute I did, a guy with a red beard said, "Do you need a partner?" His name was Hari Prashad. He was going to be a monitor, unless someone right then raised their hand, and I did, so he partnered with me. He is going to S.F. to meet his new wife after this...she doesn't do Kundalini Yoga.

The first meditation was hard, and the second. We sat perfectly still through all of it. Toward the end, I began to cry, then laugh at the same time, then I felt intense rage well up, rage at myself for what I went through years ago in that abusive relationship with that Kurdish asshole, and my body began to shake violently. I was shaking so much I was vibrating like a hummingbird! Just when I thought I couldn't take it anymore, and wondered if Hari Prashad could stand to see the rage in my eyes, the meditation ended. I let out a cry that sounded like a moan and a scream. The girl from Poland to my right rubbed my back, and so did the other woman on my right. My partner said, "Wow! Props to you for riding that one out! You are really getting your money's worth! That was intense!"

I felt like something deep and profound had changed within me, and yet somehow very calm. As I sat for a few minutes, the women on either side of me massaged my back, and my partner gave me a hug. I returned the favor by doing some Thai massage for the lady to my right, and massaging my partner's hands that were aching. Then I got up to go and get some Ginger juice at the Oasis Cafe, and passed my Seva leader. I told him I had not been able to be in the kitchen that morning as I was so exhausted, and that I unfortunately needed to ask if I could not come in tomorrow, because I was worried I wouldn't be able to do the White Tantric otherwise. He said I should take care of myself and that obviously the White Tantric was working! I laughed and went back up to the pavilion to lie down. Then I proceeded to feel really, really queazy, and realized that I had not had enough water or electrolytes, because I hadn't needed to pee in a long time. The queaziness got worse, even though I drank, and so I finally got up and went down to the First Aid trailer.

A wonderful woman named Onna Lo was there, and she held my hand while I felt sick, and then gave me a Pedialyte popsicle and had me lie down. I kept trying to get up and go back for the rest of White Tantric, but she said that I was way too dehydrated, and had better keep resting. I then slept like a brick, missed my partner coming to look for me, and finally woke up, and just rested. Onna got to go and do one of the meditations,and then came back and talked to me, and we talked about our mothers, babies, and families, and loss. I really grew to like her very, very much. And we exchanged e-mails before I went back up to tell my partner that I was okay. By then, White Tantric was just finishing up, and I gave Hari Prashad a hug and went back to rest in my tent. The rest of the day was rather uneventful, and I slept deeply.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Day 1 of White Tantric Yoga...

with Amar Bir Kaur (Valeria Grunnebaum).

I woke up and did not have time to do Bound because we had to be in the kitchen at 5 am to chop veggies for two hours, before White Tantric. I was frustrated because most of the time there were not enough things to do, and I could have been doing Bound. I said so, and this woman across from me made it her mission to see if I could let it go, just by watching me and turning to her husband and saying, "She can't let it go." I wanted to say neither can you, bitch, but I just moved to another table and started chopping onions.

I know I was partly angry because I had visions of Amar Bir picking another partner the way Sat Inder did. I did not want to be late. When I finally was able to get there, Amar Bir was waiting. Even though the monitors had continually pressured her to get another partner. She said she told them I had to work and would be late. I was so relieved. It really hurt and made me cry when Sat Inder basically dumped me on my first day of White Tantric, but Amar Bir, without knowing it, was making up for it.

And on the Spanish side I did not have to worry about the sun at all. Amar Bir had told me this was an added benefit to being Spanish-speaking: the area reserved was way under the shelter, next to the Gurdwara. This meant no dirt and debris on my sheepie either.

The first set was 62 minutes, and was purely cooling Sitali breath. Sweet. Wonderful. The next was also beautiful. We had an easy lunch of yummy Tantric burgers, and then time for a nap and stretch. This woman next to me was watching everything I did, and commenting on my looks and flexibility. It was so draining, that I got distracted, and actually pulled my left hamstring. This will take weeks to heal. I finally asked her to stop watching me, and, amazingly, she finally did...after she'd sucked quite a bit of energy. This is a problem, because I can't do the Banishings here without drawing attention, you know, invoking Isis and Osiris....

Monday, June 21, 2010

Dreaming of Love...

After a long day, starting with Bound Lotus, and the vegetable chopping in the kitchen, I took my bowl again, like Oliver Twist, up to get lunch. When I sat down to eat in the Tantric shelter, a man named Patrick came to sit with me and we talked about music, and his working in the producing room with Michael Jackson and Jimmy Page. Something about the conversation lifted something in me to the surface...

When he left, I found myself beginning to cry deeply. I sat gazing out over the landscape and the white tent tops, feeling like a Bedouin, and the tears kept coming. The blue topaz clear sky merging with the dusty, red ground and green scrub of Georgia O'Keefe's landscapes was so beautiful. But then, I felt very, very alone, even with everyone there. I felt like a ghost. I felt dead. Then I began to laugh, and a young girl walked by looking at me very funny. I thought, forget her, this needs to come out. So I laughed, and then I cried again, and then I laughed and cried both at the same time. Just then I looked up to see a very small boy, maybe 4, right in front of me at eye level. He gazed into my eyes with this mischievous, conspiratorial sort of look. I paused. He went away. I cried again.

He came back with his sister, and they both gazed at me. They smiled. I smiled back. Then I saw their mother, who smiled and waved. Their job done, they ran back to their mom. It was then I realized the music had triggered the grief. It was Snatam Kaur's "Poota Maata Ke Asees", which translates as: Oh, my child this is your mother's blessing. It can be sung by mothers for their children, but also by a child for a mother. I felt as if my mother were sending her blessings~

I decided that I needed a heart-to-heart, and so went to hospitality to sign up, but despaired of waiting. Very tired, I went back to my tent, and saw the lady who, with her son, had been talking way late into the night. I asked if they could stop talking after 10, or just whisper, and she got really mad. I held my composure until she left, and then sat down and cried. Lo and behold, an angel appeared in the form of Guru Simran Singh Khalsa, who asked if I was okay, and then listened to me cry, and held my hand.

He understood my need to sleep, and why earplugs don't work, after years of growing up with a mother who tried to keep me from sleeping deeply...with her timer rigged to the light switch, stereo and radio. He asked me what I was doing to protect my energy from people like the lady and her son, and I said I couldn't do the Wiccan Banishings there, or the Rose Cross. He mentioned something about having once practiced Santeria, and then told me how to do a kriya called Chee Kriya. He also said I should work to build my aura and electromagnetic field as well... He really helped me, and then asked to do White Tantric with me on the 3rd day.

I slept easily as the woman and her son stopped talking at 10. She heard me. And I heard my mother.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Going to Solstice Alone

I taught this morning, and my classes are dwindling, even though I am teaching better. Sat reminded me that when his style of teaching changed his class attendance dwindled for a while too...he said if they really like you, they'll come back. His class was wonderful! I got into a really fucked-up version of headstand that Edward Clark teaches, and it felt awesome!

Flying high on Yoga, I came home to have an hour-long drawn out conversation with the fellow I would have been driving to Solstice with...peppered with a "Weeeeeeeell..." everytime I asked a fucking question. It was so damned annoying. Then, I found out it isn't possible for him to drive 20 minutes down 70 to I-70 to Forest Park Parkway, just so I can leave my brand-spanking new car in the garage. But that, even though I can sort of see his side, isn't what really upset me. It is the WAY that he said "No", almost with anger in his voice, because I'd disagreed with him that my car would be safer here in a garage on a 24-hour camera than at his place.

That anger at such a simple thing, compounded with his immature behavior toward women since I've known him... Well, let's just say that I should have known better than to agree to ride with him. Ultimately I only have myself to blame. I knew what he was like, and I know he's really just being ignorant because he isn't ever going to get laid by me. Classic!

So, the man I love, and have loved more than anything, someone OTHER than this person, said to me, "What were you thinking?", and he is right. I just started packing, and then went to borrow that sweetie's backpack. Inside were a pair of sunglasses I had been missing from a trip we took years earlier, where I had been more than a pain, and he had been quite the gentleman at the time...though he had his bad days too. He just wasn't petty about it, like this guy.

Meanwhile, I get to drive alone, listen to whatever I like, stop and do yoga whenever I feel like it, and, most importantly, enjoy the drive, instead of enduring it. I don't have to be pressured by him one more time to read his book.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

"Dancing Across Borders"

I took Jen's class this morning, and found myself getting into Hanumanasana completely! My arms were raised and I was amazed! My standing backbends are also almost to the point where I could drop back...I thanked her for a lovely class, chatted with Jeremy, and went home to sit for Bound. Afterwards, I did more cleaning and then went to see this incredible movie about a Cambodian dancer, Sokvannara Sar, who came to America and studied ballet at the unbelievable age of 17, blowing everyone's ideas about how young you have to be to be any good at ballet. He beat the odds with dancing, and I can do it with my life!

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Kundalini Kriya for Creativity and the 5th Chakra

I did Bound early this morning, and then went shopping for a tent. After hanging out in it to meditate, do some Reiki, and just generally get acclimated, I did loads and loads of laundry. Then I taught class, and loved the Kriya I chose! Along with my neck traction, this should give me back my cervical curve...

Friday, June 4, 2010

Quitting D's...

...and the courage it took to stand up to a control freak, is something I could never have done or had the ability to do calmly prior to beginning Bound Lotus. My aura is getting stronger, my skin thicker. In a good way, I'd say.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

...or is it |1| ?

On January 27, 2006, after a short impromptu organ piece by David Knox, filmmaker David Lynch introduced his new film "Inland Empire" to Chicago's Music Box Theater by quoting from the Aitareya Upanishad:

"We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe."

I wrote today. I haven't in a while. And as I felt as if I were pulling my intestines up through my nose, I thought of Anais Nin when she said that some mornings you feel as if something is stuck in your throat and you get up to spit it out, or something like that. I've only written two pieces before that wrench the gut...this makes number 3. Is it the charm?

...or is it |1| ?

Number |1|. With a red square drawn around it.

If I'm cryptic, it is because I refuse to tell the whole story. Not now. And now, I am off to see the Wizard, as my mother used to say, and do Bound Lotus. Life is like that.

"All Day She Sits Upon the Stair,

Or on the chair, or on my hat..."

Or on my blanket to do Bound Lotus. And then the laundry. And then vacuuming. Cleaning. Eating salads with chives, lettuce and black truffle oil. Thinking of Sobin. The Fly-Truffler. My Father. Eating poppy seed toast lost in memories. Watching all eight scenes from Lynch's "Rabbits". Looking at the oxo kitchen utensils in a wierd way. Reading. Always reading. Eating melted chocolate. Valrhona. My favorite. Did the lights go out? Recovering from Memorial Day. I was day-dreaming. Thinking of "Naked Lunch". Reading Phil Hine.

"Periodic descents into the Underworld are a necessary phase in the cycle of personal development, and is also associated with depth psychotherapy."

Anything less is a spiritual bypass. I wouldn't say that a spiritual bypass is what most New Agers are doing, but if they aren't, and they are delving like me...then, they can't talk about it to most other New Agers. It's like the family secret. You can't tell. Can't talk. It would ruin the bliss. But as Ammachi says, "It takes us a long time to get to the bottom of our anger."

And Phil Hine continues in my head.

"According to the Western Esoteric Tradition, one of the key stages of initiatory confrontation is the encounter with 'The Dweller on the Threshold'. Less prosaically, this phrase refers to the experience of our understanding of the gulf between the ego's fiction of itself and ourselves as we truly are."

I am frightened at times. Like Bernadette Roberts. This work is harder. It is nice to come up for air, but sometimes the tunnel is so deep you have to keep going. You can no longer bring up just a few diamonds and pearls of wisdom, proclaiming yourself enlightened. You have to go back down again. And again. And again. Just like the sun. This work is hard.

"This necessitates the acceptance of light into the dark corners of the self, and the acceptance of our short-comings, blind spots and personal weaknesses as aspects of ourselves that we must take responsibility for. The recognition that we are, ultimately, responsible for all aspects of ourselves, especially those bits which we are loathe to admit to ourselves, is a step that must be taken if the initiatory journey is to proceed. It is not uncommon for people to remain at this stage for years, or to come back to it, time and time again. Such ordeals must be worked through, or they will return to 'haunt' us until they are tackled, else they will become 'obsessional complexes' (demons) that will grow until they have power over us. There are a myriad of techniques - both magical exercises and psychotherapeutic tools which can be actively used to examine these complexes, but the core of this ordeal is the beginnings of seeing yourself. In shamanic cultures, physical isolation from the tribe is often reinforced by physical ordeals such as fasting, sleep deprivation, and exposure to rigors of heat or cold - all powerful techniques for producing altered states of consciousness."

I'd venture that making dragon bowls sing, watching David Lynch surrealist video clips while alone for hours, and doing Bound Lotus are of the aforementioned techniques.

Phil Hine goes further.

"The initiatory cycle can be likened to a snake sloughing off its skin."

Or a butterfly's cocoon.

"As we reach the initiatory stage of descent into the underworld, so we are descending into the Deep Mind, learning to rely on our own intuition about what is right for us, rather than what we have been told is correct."

I think of David Lynch and his interviews about the creative process and 'true' enlightenment. A kind, gentle old man, whose films are exceedingly dark. He owns both his demons and his angels. Would Christ have been murdered or Osiris dismembered if we could all own our demons? Is it all a metaphor? Metaphorical questions. Paradoxical even.

And then there is Natalie Goldberg in "Writing Down the Bones":

"Yet it is good to know about our terrible selves, not laud them or criticize them, just acknowledge them. Then, out of this knowledge, we are better equipped to make a choice for beauty, kind consideration, and clear truth. We make this choice with our feet firmly on the ground. We are not running wildly after beauty with fear at our backs."

After a while every child has the choice to grow up, and let go of a need for father figures or mother figures...the New Age makes that harder to do. We are always looking for wisdom in someone else's words...what about listening internally, stilling the mind, and hearing the tortured voices within as well as the lightness? Inanna and Erishkegal are one woman, not seperate sisters in the Sumerian myth. They are symbolic of the one who has pretended to have no darkness within them, who goes back to hold their own hand in the darkness, while radiating the intense light they have developed in the upper world. When you are healed enough, you must go back for those abandoned selves in their tortured cells. Without them you are neither whole nor human. I have no wish to be a cartoon or cute pink characature of myself. I wish to be REaL! So I delve into the darkness...where it is sometimes dangerous...but I have selves to care for there. They are worthy of love as well.

Monday, May 31, 2010

The Pleiadian Tantric Workbook and Renaissance Fairs...

On p. 49 of Amorah Quan Yin's workbook, she gives a description of remembering the creation of her soul, through a journey in her merkabah and a spiraling tunnel of light that is almost identical to the experience I had in 1999 of seeing the outlines of my merkabah and traveling in it through a similar tunnel. I know that merkabah was real, and then in 2003 I saw it drawn in Drunvalo Melchizidek's 'Flower of Life' books that Wendy on netalive told me about! The shape of the merkabah also includes Aleister Crowley's hexagrams.

So, in Amorah's book there are two exercises that I need to do: the 'Sacred Geometry Chamber of Light for Your Perineum Center' and 'The Planetary/Stellar Alignment Chamber of Light'. Plus, possibly, the 'Temples of the Sun'. What I don't understand is why, back in February when I bought this book and was directed to it, why I didn't get directed to "The Pleidian Workbook" as well. I mean shouldn't I be awakening my Ka before my Ba?

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Birthdays and Sundays

Yesterday, by accident, I saw a clip from "Blue Velvet", after watching Michael Caine in "Harry Brown". I could really resonate with the old man getting fed up with the murderous young punks and opening up a can a' wup ass on them! Then "Blue Velvet" brought back memories of my own personal Frank Booth. I did not sleep well, to say the least. But I do see that darkness lies within all of us, and we can choose to align with it, or align with the light and then bask in it's glow.

Joe called to ask if I was going to Sat Inder's birthday party, and while we were talking about head coverings, I realized that my big purple hat with the antennae, which I wore one Halloween when I dressed up as a 'Social Butterfly', would be perfect! So off I went, and had a fabulous time! The people were awesome, the food was great! So many cool people...chatting with Hugh and Jackie and Ben on the porch under the Catawba trees with their white orchid-like blossoms. I love talking with gay men who just love life and how beautiful it is...no issues.

Then sitting around eating cupcakes with Jackie, and seeing the light in Sat Inder's eyes on his 40th. That card of him, or what looks like him, was hysterical! With the beard, the hair, the coconut bra! Ha ha! Good times! And Bound, well, I did it earlier, so no worries...

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Long Days and Nights

I've been sleeping a little fitfully, and waking up tired but happy. Last night's class was fun to teach, and it is my favorite class, but this one student makes me uncomfortable with his annoying crush on me. I keep thinking he is done with it, and then he gets right up in my personal space again...so close I can smell his bad breath. He has to know on some level that he does this...for he only gets that close when no one else is around. He is, quite frankly, being a little energy vampire. And I don't care how kind he is otherwise, if he gets in my personal space bubble again, I will energetically slap his hand.

That being said, I am enjoying the rest of the lettuce another student gave me, with a little seasoned rice vinegar, black truffle oil, and grains of paradise. Bound Lotus seems to be deepening not from being all sweetness and light right now, but from standing up for myself.

I subbed two classes this morning, and met a wonderful woman from Puerto Rico. She is funny, forthcoming, and full of kindness. She was so excited about getting up into Crow for the first time in my class! I asked the students in the first class what they wanted to work on, and she piped up: "Crow!" Another lady said 'hips' and they compliment each other so we did both. I talked them through working Moola Bhanda and Uddiyana Bhanda to float up into Crow. It worked!

I am tired but happy, and ready to sit for Bound Lotus again.

Friday, May 28, 2010

I Love the Trees

Outside D's there are trees that drench the studio with wonderful energy. I love the studio. It is hard work teaching to one student for almost every class, but I love the students and I love the studio. It has a good feel...then I love the students in Granite City, just not Granite City itself. Tonight's 'Kundalini Rising' class I have planned as a Heart Kriya for rebuilding the nervous system. 11 minutes of kissing your palms, 5 of rocking in and out of plow pose, then 10 of shavsana, and 3 11 minute long Heart Meditations. I've done it already and feel fabulous!

I've been finishing up my knitted beanies for Solstice, and have bought some more clothes for Solstice. Even Target is expensive! I am a little anxious about going, and hoping that it will all work out in the end. I need a tent and sleeping bag so badly... But I also have bills to pay. This new car payment takes a bite out.

Bound is done again and I am ready to teach and also make it clear to my one student that his fantasies are not innocent, and he'd best stop them. Opening one's heart also includes learning to love yourself enough to say to others: "Hey, get out of my energy bubble!"

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Bittersweet YinYang

I've been skimming through Phil Hine's primer on Chaos Magick, which is really eclecticism in magick. If one process works from a different tradition, you blend it with what you are doing, or you change it. So I consider Kundalini Yoga to be a sort of 'magic' in how it heals specific issues so deeply through the most bizarre exercises that make me giggle sometimes. And I love it, but sometimes doing that work only raises my energy and doesn't protect me from being drained by the bugs at the lamp like the ritual Banishings of The Golden Dawn. So I still do them. It's faster than Sat Kriya even, and more effective. I speculate that is because it is a balance of dark and light, of many things...

It is a 'Western Yoga'. In reading, as well, Peter Carroll's "Liber Null", I can see the workings, conscious or subconscious of all of us when we seek to expand our consciousness, and when we seek control. I think it is better to be informed about it all. I see what might have been perpetrated against me in the past through the darkness, and I see how it can be counteracted through the work I am doing. Both in lifting up my consciousness and protecting myself.

After all, Yogi Bhajan said: "The basic purpose of life is just to be human and deal with life as a human being. Don't become so bitter that somebody will throw you away or so sweet that someone can eat you up." I am bittersweet.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

It's been a very long day...

...but it is done, and so is Bound Lotus. Oddly enough, after telling that asshole where to go, and getting someone else to help me with the iPod, my hips and shoulders just keep opening up even more every day. I can sit in Full Lotus, as part of the practice, for 4 minutes of the 15 on each side!

My last 6:15 am is done, and my Yin class now has another student. I am psyched!

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Lunch and Goodbyes to Katie and her kitty!

I had a wonderful lunch with my friend Katie before she takes off for home! We shopped at Target for stuff we both need, dined at Little Saigon, which is my favorite restaurant, and where I met her. We shared crispy Vegetarian spring rolls, Vietnamese coffee sips and Mango smoothie. We chatted and people-watched. We hung out in my crystal room and I loaned her the pair of moldavite and green tourmaline earrings that Ashley gave me so many years ago to start me on my journey back. We stopped at AAA where they made her itinerary into a book! We ate chocolate and I met her friends and said goodbye to her cat and her...but I'll still chat with her, and I'd love to go visit sometime.

Hugs. Then goodbye again.

I left to teach to 1 person, but all this teaching to 1 is making me a better teacher. I did Bound and went to bed. I got up and re-did the Banishings just to be safe...then back to a peaceful sleep unmarred by visions of that ridiculous giraffe of an ex. I could feel the good energy in the apartment. I've come so far to be able to stand up to the abusive men in my life and smile!

Monday, May 24, 2010

It is getting easier to teach...

...and not have to do everything along with the students. Subbing tonight was fun, and I taught preps for hanstand, headstand and forearm balance. I also got my new traction device to help get my cervical curve back. I also got a slew of 'abusive' text messages from various businesses that I had to text 'STOP' to, and a certain someone denies being the mastermind. He also sent me another condscending and patronizing e-mail at "exactly" the moment I began my Banishings to clear space, Invocations and Middle Pillar to raise energy, and Liber Vel Reguli to sever the connection between us. I burned Tetragrammaton incense, and personal effects, then closed the ritual to find this new message. I fired back and let rip on all the things I wanted to say three years ago about sexual addictions, manipulations, hospital visits, hypocricy and lies. I told him that I thought it funny how he was re-using my exact words from three years ago to get back at me. I said I definitely don't have to listen to his bullshit if he doesn't want to talk to me, and to get off his high horse.

I guess he thought I'd apologize for his bad behaviour like I have in the past. I guess he thought he could manipulate me again like he did when he broke up with me in '07 just before my 40th, because I wouldn't have sex with him when he wanted it, only to try to entice me back with promises of changed behaviour and offers to finish setting up my website...none of which materialized. I guess he thought, like he did at New Year's '08 when he broke up with me again because I wouldn't have sex right then, that he could just make me feel like shit for askng him to be a decent human being. He's wrong.

I verbally ripped his throat out with that e-mail I sent back, and I burned all of his pictures in my ritual banishing. I watched as the sky at dusk lit up with two clouds: one shaped strangely like the dragon-headed incense burner his photo's ashes were smoldering in, the other like my carved goddess from Oaxaca, Mexico. They are opposite each other in my meditation room, and they were opposite each other in the sky. The goddess cloud had a bunch of little fluffy dinosaur figures behind her, and I watched as her cloud seemed to lunge at the dragon and then lightning flashed behind the dragon and burnt a hole in his middle!

I was honestly psyched. I was so angry at him back in '08 after my ER for bleeding abrasions internally that I wished he would reap what he sowed, literally. He kinda did back then...he fell and badly scraped his hand. I relish the thought that he's had his hand slapped this time too. I've had enough. Tired of being compassionate. Kali and Durga are behind me, I'm sure, and I feel righteous in defending my energy because his bull was draining me AGAIN, and guess what? After Banishing him so brutally, my hips and shoulders are MORE open in Bound. Must not have been a bad thing. Must have been a much needed release from him. If he were actually smart, he'd be as dangerous as the man who stalked me, but he isn't. He's just a pathetic jerk I said goodbye to...

Sunday, May 23, 2010

What a lovely day!

I am still miffed at my ex, and ocassionally wondering why I ever gave him another chance to grind me under his thumb, big overgrown manipulative giraffe that he is...but I did. I seem to attract jackasses who love nothing better than to excuse their own faults away just because I happen to have some too.

But no matter. Teaching this morning was renewing. I had to search for music, because I realized I'd passed on everything I use to one of my students to put onto my iPod replacement. What a wonderful thing for her to do! I gave her a Kundalini Yoga book and a hand-knitted beanie as a 'thank you'! I am so appreciative, and class this morning was a joy to teach. Then Sat Inder's class. He was in rare form. I loved the poses. He seemed at one point to be subconsciously taking his aggressions out on me by digging his thumb into my piriformis, but then he softened. He hasn't assisted me in a long time, but today he did, and he showed me his new Kirpan pendant.

I felt he'd forgiven me and himself for both our bad behaviour. He's good that way, unlike some other people who are 'faky' spiritual...ersatz sattvic. Sat Inder is real. He's not perfect, neither am I, and we both know it. No projection. Just the truth. A good man, even when he is annoying. He makes me want to be a better person. My ex does not. He is too petty and childish. Always has been. But today negated most of that, and then I had the double joy of gifts of homegrown lettuce and chives from my Sunday evening student. Yum! So much love goes into growing and picking vegetables and fruits. I feel blessed. Still a little put out, but blessed nonetheless...

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Heart Chakra Kriya!

I feel really worn out from dealing with my ex energetically, and my heart strings need a tune up. So I'm planning on doing the Heart Chakra Kriya, the one where you kiss your own palms for 11 minutes...and thus it begins...

That was wonderful! I felt so drained from my ex's passive-agressive attack on me through the e-mail, that I was weak, coughing and developing a bladder infection. After this Kriya, while listening to Sat Kartar's 'Laya Yoga' from "Listen", I felt whole, and then vibrating with energy. Her music, which samples "The Nutcracker Suite" 'Dance of the Sugarplum Faeries', made me feel like the five-year-old I used to be, who would sleep under the grand piano while Mom played Tchaikovsky and Edvard Grieg. Magickal! It used to take days to get back onto an even keel after an interaction with him - But today I am once again hale enough to do Bound again. I think it partly might have been Akal Sahai's suggestion of Sat Kriya as well. Kundalini Yoga is powerful stuff!

Subbing is frustrating...

...so is applying for a loan and not getting it. Ditto having one's iPod not work, and realizing that you were incredibly stupid to ask the ex-boyfriend to help, and you have no one but yourself to blame if he behaves like a passive-agressive old giraffe! But I did Bound, and then taught a wonderful class for 'Intuition'. It was fun, the students were glowing, and we sat to talk afterwards and enjoy Yogi Tea and one of the students made bruschetta. Fabulous!

I went home to find an incredibly horrid, self-serving and bullshit e-mail from said ex...behaving like the condescending thumb-crusher he was when I dated him. Is it any wonder that every woman leaves him? He complains of being 'used', in a passive-agressive sort of way, but used the last girlfriend after me for sex, and the one after that too. Everything is calculated by him as to what he is owed. Nothing every given freely. And all asked him to do was simply not to be mean to me. Instead, I get a fatherly lecture from a mental midget about how I always misconstrue his words, and he'll deign to help me with the iPod one last time, but he can't take the misinterpretations of his actions anymore. What he truly can't take is someone calling him on his bull. And his request that I sever all contact with him sounds strangely retaliatory and redundant, because I made a similar request of him two years ago after allowing him to manipulate me back into an abusive relationship way too many times. In time, I relented and tried to be friends with him, listening to him whine about not being able to get what he "needs" from girlfriends, passing on some networking to him, and occasionally asking for assistance electronically. He implied that all I ever did was ask for favors, denied it when I called him on it, reprimanded me for misinterpretation, and then proceeded to say that he would no longer do any "favors" for me...effectively proving where his petty focus really was, and proving my point.

When we dated, nothing was ever given as a kindness without the expectation of sex in return. Not breakfast, not a book, not Christmas presents, not an ear to listen, nor help with electronics. The price of everything was sex. Sometimes expected of me several times a day. So reminiscent of past relationships that, after him, I firmly resolved to be celibate until I stopped being attracted to men who use women for sex. I'd had enough.

After going to the ER because of his sex addiction when we dated, and letting him do things like reduce me to tears because I simply piped up and told the pizza guy what else I wanted on the pizza, instead of letting the male chauvinist pig do it...I should truly have known better than to ask his help with iPod. For some reason I thought that 2 1/2 years would have wrought change in him. Not so...

So, I composed a polite but truthful response, probably killing all possibility of retrieving my iTunes. But who needs an overgrown child in their life anyway? I spent the rest of the evening talking to my Dad, and Akal Sahai. People who have taken the time to learn from their mistakes and grow. People I can resonate with and try to trust.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

I Love to Teach Yoga...

...because of days like this! This morning's class was fun and challenging, with lots of students willing to try new things. Bird of Paradise, Crow to Tripod Headstand, Dolphin, Warrior III to Standing Splits...yeah! Then this evening was much fun against the wall practising inversions while everyone was still fresh, then on to twists and backbends. What a neat group to teach. They are awesome! My all-time favorite studio! Home to bask, because Bound is already done!

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Tying a Knot in my Rope

I am not sure if I am on Day 198 of Bound Lotus, or back at Day 9. If it is Day 198, it is sheerly by Grace. If it is Day 9, then the arbitrary numbers I laid out in the preface to this blog are uncanny. If I'm starting all over again (dammit) and on Day 9, then Day 12 is the first day of a seminar I teach. I've been saying I want to be one if those yoga instructors who travel and teach seminars...if that ends up happening, this Saturday would be the beginning. Day 235 would be New Year's Eve of this year, Day 872 would be my birthday in 2012! And day 1'000 would be the anniversary of my mother's birthday in 2013! Groundhog's Day! Candlemas! The day that Kabbalists begin their meditations anew...(arbitrary numbers I picked?) Maybe. Maybe not. But for these dates to be significant, I'd have to be on Day 9. Again. I don't know... I really don't know... Was I given Grace in this matter, and in ways I don't understand? Or was the Grace in not 'knowing' for sure that I had to start all over again from scratch? It would have made my heart sink to have known that last Monday, and know that the aspiring philanderer who posed as a spiritual friend was some sort of wierd idea of Grace to mak me miss 90 Days of Praanpathi Namo Namo four days before finishing, and then, potentially, Day 188 of Bound Lotus.

Whatever the Truth is, no mere mortal, or man, will ever get in the way of my completing Bound Lotus again. I'll do it first thing in the morning to keep up my end, and ask that they leave me alone for their part. I think I've dug through another layer of anger towards men. I'm working on it. Right now, I'm pretty angry with men. The inability to forgive men for having a penis IS the ultimate source of my anger. And I have myself to forgive too, for spending years in a strip club mocking men's inability to use their equipment wisely. I secretly ridiculed them and laughed at them for their silliness and kowtowing to their little brains. It's safe to say I am spitting mad. What is interesting is that, unlike in the past, I can also put on a genuine face and smile about other things, such as how beautiful the day is, how pretty the birds sound outside, and how much I love blackberries, miso soup, and pizza. Not in that order, nor all at once.

I am a wierd combination of being very, very angry at men, and exquisitely happy that I don't have to share my home or day with a man if I don't want to...something a woman in centuries past could not likely have experienced.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

I just got done saying...

...to my father that it is nice that the one fellow in one of my classes who had a crush on me is letting it go, and that my Tuesday night class is full of men who say they enjoy my class, AND behave themselves. Now, famous last words, there's an idiot with a crush on me. Trying to flatter me, acting giddy, blah, blah, blah. I do not return the interest. I am not interested. The idea of dealing with a man on a day to day basis in a relationship does not appeal. Much less sex. That makes me feel like puking! No more!!!! If I fix my hair, or dress nicely, or wear a little make-up, or earrings, it is because I enjoy my own body. I like seducing myself in the mirror. I WILL not give that option to a man. They'd best get over it. I am sick of men and their damn penises needing to be anywhere and everywhere. They can be friends with me, and that's it. If I even think they are 'waiting in the wings', they are gone.

I want to be with Amma. I want to leave. I want to become a bramacharyin. I've had these phases before... But this time... I don't know. I feel about sex and attraction and desire now the way I finally began to feel about alcohol. It no longer has an attraction. At least not with another human. And with myself, hardly ever. I've never been happier than without all that bullshit. Not that sex is bad, I just don't want it, and I don't like the games and manipulations for it.

What does it mean that I feel strongly about this today, when I've just finished 90 Days of 'Aakhan Jor' meditation? Or, I think, 90 Days of 'Heart of Gold'? It doesn't feel golden, just bitter. Quietly bitter, though, without the bite. Ammachi, whom I appear to be named after, says it takes a long time for us to get to the bottom of our anger. I think it is safe to say I am very, very, very angry with men as a whole gender. They could try harder to respect women and their boundaries, instead of assuming that because there is no ring that a woman is available. Much less the kind who is attracted even more when there is a ring. The only marriage ring I want is for the soul inside. I plan never to get married and never, ever, ever, ever to have a physical relationship with a man again. And this idiot better get a clue.

Monday, May 17, 2010

Reading "The Moonflower Vine"

I felt yucky all day after teaching my 6:15 am, and getting another phone call from an annoying man who is fooling himself thinking he's cultivating a friendship. He is only draining me with his not so private fantasies, and I am not interested in him or any man. I told him in no uncertain terms to back off, not to ever call again, and to vamoose! He was so draining! He's the reason why on two seperate Mondays, I missed and narrowly missed some of my Kundalini practices, including Bound Lotus! Ix-nay! You don't get to fuck up close to 200 days of Bound Lotus practice for me...whatever I have now that men think they want, is by virtue of this practice. NOTHING whatsoever will come between me and doing it. If you get in my way of healing myself, you're gone! That said, I did Bound, my other meditations, and laid around reading "The Moonflower Vine", reminiscing over summer camping trips with my family, moonlit nights, fireflies, and berry pies over the campfire in campsites all up and down the eastern seaboard. What a nice day! Being alone restirred my juices. I recharge alone best. It was nice to just chill.