I had been so hurt and bitter by what transpired on New Year's Day after arriving home from Summer Solstice, and from having to recently quit a studio I was teaching at because my boss there and one of her employees (who had been a cause of the grief at the beginning of the year), were making it miserable to work there. It felt like walking the gauntlet. The last two months have been a walking of the gauntlet. I'd had a most blissful experience with The Guru on New Year's Day, and then all hell broke loose.
Now, after coming home to a wonderful class with GuruSandesh last night, and wonderful news about my teaching prospects, and many other beautiful things including a lovely poem about Bound Lotus that my friend Premjeet wrote, and an opportunity to spend time with someone I am deeply smitten by, I have risen early to do Sadhana, then, as KartaPurkh says, "retire to the Gurdwara for a Hukam."
That 'Hukam' turned into a full-on reading for an hour. Where I stopped was when a certain passage began to make me first cry, then sob, then laugh hysterically, then laugh while crying, then long for the Lord to wrap his arms around me (or hers as it may be, but I like thinking of God as a 'Him' right now...), and for someone else to wrap their arms around me and hold me like the divine manifestation of God he is. As everyone is...and I found myself not hating anyone anymore. Maybe it will last. Maybe it's just a glimpse of what is to come, but the Hukam was beautiful:
Sri Rag First Guru 72? (p. 245 in English version)
"Ambrosia is Thy Word, O Master! it has permeated the mind of Thy slaves.
In Thine service, Thou hast placed eternal peace. By showing Thy mercy Thou emancipatest the mortals. True is known to be the meeting with the True Guru, if by this meeting the Name of the Lord may be repeated. Without the True Guru, none has found the Lord. All have grown weary of performing religious rites.
I am a sacrifice unto the True Guru, who has put me, going amiss in error, on the right path.
If the Lord casts His merciful glance, He unites man with Himself. Thou, O Lord! art contained in all. That Creator keeps Himself concealed. Nanak, the Maker reveals Himself unto the Guruward, within whom He has installed His light.
Giving him soul and body, the Master did create His attendant and Himself blessed him with honor. God preserves the honor of His servant, by placing both His hands on His forehead.
All the contrivances and clevernesses avail not. My Master knows everything. The Lord has made manifest the glory and all the people acclaim His servant. The Lord minds not my merits and demerits. The Master has honored His creed of protecting His slave.
By embracing me to His bosom the Lord has preserved me, and noe even the hot wind brushes me not. With my soul and body I have reflected over the Lord. I have obtained the fruit my mind desired. Thou art the Lord over the head of kings and emperors. Nanak lives by repeating Thy Name."
May I be guided to keep this gift like a treasure in my heart, to be shared someday with the man I love. May that man be an embodiment of the love of The Lord. May being with him be just another way of being with Him, with God and with The Guru. My beloved book. The Siri Guru Granth Sahib. I fall at Thy feet in tears and laughter!
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Re-capping the benefits of 'Bound'
I began the practice three days after falling on my head from an acrobatic backbend...my head a foot in the air above the floor. My spine could have snapped. The pain became excruciating, and through the practice of Bound Lotus, I was able to avoid taking any pain killers. Early on, I knew my pain would lessen as soon as the practice was done for the day... I've watched my confidence grow from where it was practically buried alive to where I believe in myself and my capacity to give...
Bound Lotus has shown me that if I can get through severe anxiety attacks, nausea, dry heaving, gut-wrenching coughs, bronchitis, and so many tears I could barely breathe while doing it ~ then my body, mind and Spirit are stronger and vaster than I once believed.
Bound Lotus is like offering myself up as a present wrapped in the bow if Infinity, only to have the energy if the Cosmos, or God say: "Thanks for the gift, I give it back to you."
Bound Lotus every day fills me with the strength and the compassion to persevere against what seem to others to be insurmountable obstacles. If I can do Bound, I can be whole. If I am whole, I can help others become whole too. When my confidence flounders, just doing Bound brings it back!
Bound Lotus has shown me that if I can get through severe anxiety attacks, nausea, dry heaving, gut-wrenching coughs, bronchitis, and so many tears I could barely breathe while doing it ~ then my body, mind and Spirit are stronger and vaster than I once believed.
Bound Lotus is like offering myself up as a present wrapped in the bow if Infinity, only to have the energy if the Cosmos, or God say: "Thanks for the gift, I give it back to you."
Bound Lotus every day fills me with the strength and the compassion to persevere against what seem to others to be insurmountable obstacles. If I can do Bound, I can be whole. If I am whole, I can help others become whole too. When my confidence flounders, just doing Bound brings it back!
Sunday, March 6, 2011
300 Days of Bound!
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Only 700 more to go! AND I will soon have new classes to teach!
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Riding the Waves
I quit working at the highest paying studio I teach for because the woman who owns it is a cruel bitch. I felt euphoric the first day. Everyday since has been up and down. I've thought how much I long to succumb to what the author Milan Kundera calls 'vertigo', a longing to fall...
Yet I don't. I have riffled through the pages of books I read before my mother died, before my mind went a little crazy for a while, because the man I met soon after tried to twist it into an awkward shape, and broke my wings. My wings are healing, but this woman, I let her slow the process down. The chiropractor I saw when I first fell on my head, two days before I began this practice, said I had a broken wing. She showed me how my scapula winged out.
It does not do that now. But my 'wing' is still healing. I found an old Senior Seminar essay on why I make art. I found an English essay on "Tess of the D'Urbervilles". I found a short, but exquisite manuscript of my own, much reworked. These things are treasures from a life I am only just now getting back to 15 years later. But oddly, it wasn't the psychopath who did the most damage, with his decade of stalking me after I left...it was the man who I met later, who left me, then continued to come and see me for sex for years, until I opted for celibacy to break his spell over me. Finally, two weeks ago, I disappeared from his life. For five years no sex, but he called and tortured me in little ways nonetheless.
Reading Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" again after 15 years, not only is a new experience since I am older, but it is helping me to get over the last of my illusions about that man, who really did not love me..
Reading Virginia Woolf's "The Waves", and watching "The Red Violin", "Like Water for Chocolate" and "The Lover" (my very favorite movie), makes me see what I denied to myself and my father as we spoke last night:
I love a man. A man younger than me. A man who is single and unmarried, but whom I cannot see. He thinks I am ignoring him when I look away, but I cannot meet his gaze very often. It burns me like fire, those blue eyes like the center of a candleflame haloed by his golden hair. When he reaches out a proferred hand to me, I feel a ripple like a wave. I take it lightly, as one would hesitate to touch mercury, so toxic is it. Once, last week, I let myself, I allowed myself to feel the texture of his palm, and I was devastated. The very scent of him makes me dizzy and faint, though I have lied to myself and to him...that the dizziness is due to other causes. It isn't.
I swoon for him, like a Victorian lover, who upon seeing a bit of ankle goes wild. I want him so badly I am screaming with the agony of waiting inside. I want his hand across my neck to flutter like a butterfly. I want to turn and kiss his fingertips. To fall backward into his arms. To let him catch me, hold me, make love to me...then hold my hand and let me lean into him. I want press my lips against his neck, and feel them swell with blood before I bite his and draw blood, then lick the wound. And yes, I am angry. Angry that I cannot touch him. Angry that there is no way to ask if he feels the same or if it is my imagination.
I am angry that I love him this much, that I will wait in agony for months to find out, knowing I could be devastated. He may not love me. Yet I think he does. This is forbidden. He'll never say anything. And he shouldn't. And I shouldn't. And he won't. And that makes me yearn like a dog for it's master even more. My practice is sometimes able to assuage the grief and tears of frustration for this and other reasons, but mostly I lie twisted in Bound Lotus, imagining his hands upon my back, his fingertips massaging the ribs where the back of my heart is...opening it. I love him. And the only way I can love him is to see him in everyone, and to just try to love the world.
I have the breath of the wind, the cascading light of the moon, and words from "The Waves" to keep me company:
"The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move."
And I have Chopin's Waltz in B Minor, Opus 69, No. 2. The music, and the waves. I imagine the muscles on his back rippling like those of a great horse, or the waves on the lake or ocean, as just like the waves he withdraws and falls back again, pounding away at the shoreline. I want to take him in like the earth takes in the sky on the surface of the ocean. I want his arms to wrap around me, and mine around him, like the tributaries of the great rivers and oceans, as if we were a great woven Celtic knot. I do not want to see the end or beginning of him or me, but to see us as continuous, without end, like the infinity loop of eternity. I want to love him eternally, and if not him, then the essence of all that exists within each of us. I'd like to love both. To have my love for him be an honoring of the beauty of Truth.
Yet I don't. I have riffled through the pages of books I read before my mother died, before my mind went a little crazy for a while, because the man I met soon after tried to twist it into an awkward shape, and broke my wings. My wings are healing, but this woman, I let her slow the process down. The chiropractor I saw when I first fell on my head, two days before I began this practice, said I had a broken wing. She showed me how my scapula winged out.
It does not do that now. But my 'wing' is still healing. I found an old Senior Seminar essay on why I make art. I found an English essay on "Tess of the D'Urbervilles". I found a short, but exquisite manuscript of my own, much reworked. These things are treasures from a life I am only just now getting back to 15 years later. But oddly, it wasn't the psychopath who did the most damage, with his decade of stalking me after I left...it was the man who I met later, who left me, then continued to come and see me for sex for years, until I opted for celibacy to break his spell over me. Finally, two weeks ago, I disappeared from his life. For five years no sex, but he called and tortured me in little ways nonetheless.
Reading Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" again after 15 years, not only is a new experience since I am older, but it is helping me to get over the last of my illusions about that man, who really did not love me..
Reading Virginia Woolf's "The Waves", and watching "The Red Violin", "Like Water for Chocolate" and "The Lover" (my very favorite movie), makes me see what I denied to myself and my father as we spoke last night:
I love a man. A man younger than me. A man who is single and unmarried, but whom I cannot see. He thinks I am ignoring him when I look away, but I cannot meet his gaze very often. It burns me like fire, those blue eyes like the center of a candleflame haloed by his golden hair. When he reaches out a proferred hand to me, I feel a ripple like a wave. I take it lightly, as one would hesitate to touch mercury, so toxic is it. Once, last week, I let myself, I allowed myself to feel the texture of his palm, and I was devastated. The very scent of him makes me dizzy and faint, though I have lied to myself and to him...that the dizziness is due to other causes. It isn't.
I swoon for him, like a Victorian lover, who upon seeing a bit of ankle goes wild. I want him so badly I am screaming with the agony of waiting inside. I want his hand across my neck to flutter like a butterfly. I want to turn and kiss his fingertips. To fall backward into his arms. To let him catch me, hold me, make love to me...then hold my hand and let me lean into him. I want press my lips against his neck, and feel them swell with blood before I bite his and draw blood, then lick the wound. And yes, I am angry. Angry that I cannot touch him. Angry that there is no way to ask if he feels the same or if it is my imagination.
I am angry that I love him this much, that I will wait in agony for months to find out, knowing I could be devastated. He may not love me. Yet I think he does. This is forbidden. He'll never say anything. And he shouldn't. And I shouldn't. And he won't. And that makes me yearn like a dog for it's master even more. My practice is sometimes able to assuage the grief and tears of frustration for this and other reasons, but mostly I lie twisted in Bound Lotus, imagining his hands upon my back, his fingertips massaging the ribs where the back of my heart is...opening it. I love him. And the only way I can love him is to see him in everyone, and to just try to love the world.
I have the breath of the wind, the cascading light of the moon, and words from "The Waves" to keep me company:
"The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move."
And I have Chopin's Waltz in B Minor, Opus 69, No. 2. The music, and the waves. I imagine the muscles on his back rippling like those of a great horse, or the waves on the lake or ocean, as just like the waves he withdraws and falls back again, pounding away at the shoreline. I want to take him in like the earth takes in the sky on the surface of the ocean. I want his arms to wrap around me, and mine around him, like the tributaries of the great rivers and oceans, as if we were a great woven Celtic knot. I do not want to see the end or beginning of him or me, but to see us as continuous, without end, like the infinity loop of eternity. I want to love him eternally, and if not him, then the essence of all that exists within each of us. I'd like to love both. To have my love for him be an honoring of the beauty of Truth.
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