Last night was luminous...today a little dull

But, I still did Bound Lotus for the 119th day.

An Apple for my Teacher

The gratitude I feel toward my teacher, Sat Inder Singh, two of my students feel toward me...and yet I know it is not me who has changed their lives, nor Sat Inder who has changed mine...but the breath. The Prana. A "pranam" is a way of honoring the teacher, 'nam' being a sound or name, and 'prana' the breath behind the sound. The force which causes change is the breath behind the sound. Today I sang all day long, off and on. My voice resonates like it never has in my entire life! My lung volume is increasing. The Universe is playing me like a flute, and Sat Inder too. I laid an apple, a Pink Lady, on the CD player and pranamed to my soul. May my soul hear the request I have in my heart as I approach the 120th day of Bound Lotus: I want to take KRI Kundalini Yoga Teacher Training in Espanola, NM in August. I need $4,500 to do so...please lead me where I want to go. Help me on this path...from Mantra Yoga at my weakest when I vomited almost every day to Hatha Yoga to Kriya Yoga, which Kundalini Yoga is...I want to learn to teach this yoga that is changing my life so drastically.

Today as I spoke to my father, the room filled with light. A soft smile took the shape of my face. I am so happy, but not so I could burst...just a quiet happiness. Days like this, reading the book of yoga quotes a student bought for me, make the bad days bearable. Hearing my father's stories about Douglas Steer and Albert Schweitzer make me believe in a world made of pure love. I am walking, I am doing my yoga, because "I need time to adjust my spiritual garments".

As I did my laundry today, I found towels in the bottom of my suitcase, unwashed, from Solstice in December. The scent they gave off was sweet and filled me with bliss! I want to be in Espanola in August, learning this yoga. I want to go with Sat Inder. I need the money to come in the right way...the way of honoring my Self.

Tolstoy and "The Last Station"

Love is what it is all about. Not power. I look at Pandit Rajmani Tigunait's book: "The Pursuit of Power and Freedom", and see his eyes on the cover filled with the hunger for power and shake my head. I look at the portrayal of Tolstoy in a movie, of a man whose most important task is to ask others about themselves, and to spread love, and I know as my body twists and contorts itself it is an opening of the heart I am looking for more than anything...

"Not I, not I, but the wind...

...that blows through me."

Today is a day of pure bliss and happiness.

A Sword of Violet Flame!

When I think back to the time when I received my first Reiki attunement, I was also introduced to St. Germain and the Violet Flame. I see in my mind's eye, a sword of Violet Flame and fire. A Sword like the curved karpan of the Sikhs, who like many Pagans are not above physically defending their right to Truth. This Sword, this karpan, for me is a symbolic sword. It, along with an exercise from Amorah Quan Yin's "Pleidian Tantric Workbook" is what I will use to fight the demons in my mind, who drove me to accept ill-treatment by others. This Sword of Truth I am visualizing as I sing 'Jai Tegang', preparing for the 115th day of Bound Lotus. Next Tuesday will mark 120 days. A 'Victory of Saints'...I suppose (I say this with my tongue in my cheek).

Tonight, I'll be teaching my students to the strains of 'Jai Tegang' and a little GauraVani and their version of 'Krishna Murare' that makes me long to be in Ammachi's arms. Interesting that in a book on magickal names I find that 'Chi' is an African name for women meaning "helpful spirits". Much to my discomfort, because it affirms the Sikh name I don't like, if I succeed in forgiving the man who began our relationship with rape, it will be a victory of the saints, the helpful spirits of Ammachi and Yogi Bhajan, of St. Teresa of Avila, of Quan Yin, of St. Germain and the Angels of the Violet Flame...these beings I invoke every time I give Reiki or an attunement.

It feels wierd to own up to my intense devotion to spirit on the Bhakti singing path, that includes such New Agey concepts. Referring to works by Elizabeth Clare Prophet and Amorah Quan Yin, is, in my mind, tantamount to being a bit kooky. All I know is...their exercises work! Next thing you know, I'll be an American Sikh who ALSO loves the Hindu gods and goddesses, and meditates to align with her gallactic interconnection with the Pleiades. Well on my way to being perceived by some as extremely wierd if not crazy!

But as Ammachi responded once: "When you are drunk on God you do not know what you are doing!" Excuse me while I go enchant myself with some 'ecstatic dancing', some Ananda Tandava, a la ancient Hindu practices, hippie dancing styles, Gothic club moves, and Gabrielle Roth's 'Dancing Path'. While I'm dancing the dance of destruction too, I'll wave my metaphorical sword to slash the demons in my mind like Durga, Kali and St. Germain. My whole apartment will be ablaze with astral Violet Flame to erase negativity and guilt, to cut down the demons of the mind and body.

Healing Old Wounds

This morning was wonderful! I taught class to new music: GauraVani's "Ten Million Moons", and Nirinjan Kaur's "adhara", which has a version of 'Jai Tegang', a Sikh prayer which I love, I think, more than the Reman Shabd. It was what I heard coming from Sat Sunderta's car on the last day of Solstice, while her friends were packing to leave as she lay sleeping in the back. Everyone, including myself, wanted to know what that beautiful song was...it turns out it wasn't Simrat Kaur like everyone thought! It was Nirinjan. The same voice that sang the 'So Purkh' I heard at Saul David Raye's. The 'So Purkh' that maybe I should be singing for someone to make them a saint, and to heal them, for it is said to have that power if chanted by a woman for a man...But 'Jai Tegang' is different. It is healing me. It is, apparently, very healing for those that were present in my class this morning.This music, the warmth of the studio, and my students made for a most beautiful class!

Last night, I'd taught my first Power Vinyasa in the same studio. I had the chance to show my versatility as an instructor, and was still buzzing from the gift. I'd been asking the Universe why no one ever asked me to sub Power Vinyasa, and the response came as a phone call to sub a class. What is that about 'ask and ye shall receive?'

But by doing Kirtan Kriya to heal past sexual attachments, I've asked for some pain and grief too. After teaching this morning, and then doing my own practice with some ecstatic dancing and vinyasa with poses I haven't done in a while...I came home to gradually feel exhausted, confused and very tired. I lay down to do Reiki, awoke 24 minutes later with a start, thinking it was already Thursday, and that 24 hours had gone by. I felt sick. I checked my e-mail and my facebook page to calm myself, and found an abstract sent to me on an NPR broadcast about rape on college campuses.

The story told about a woman who was taken back to a house from a frat party by two male friends she trusted, was raped by both of them as she went in and out of consciousness. There was no struggling, because she was too drunk. She just kept waking up to find them having sex with her. She'd pass out again, and they were still at it. A great wave of recognition passed through me. Rape does not necessarily involve penetration. Rape can be oral.

People in relationships sometimes fantasize about having their lover awaken them from sleep by lovemaking, but to awaken on the sofa of someone you've never had sex with, and find that they have removed your clothes and are performing oral sex on you while you've been passed out in a drunken and drug-induced haze is...well, it IS rape. This happened to me in March of 2000. I'd been invited to a Bar-B-Q by someone whom I had a crush on, but who was dating and practically living with someone else. So I would have liked eventually to be with him, but not in that way.

I had passed out from too much Grand Marnier, beer AND wine coupled with a lot of really good weed. Everyone had left, including his girlfriend. I remember having wedged myself into the corner of the sofa as people chatted, only to awaken in a pitch dark room with my lower body now completely nude, and hanging off the sofa, which means he'd positioned it this way. Only a necrophiliac could possibly enjoy doing such a thing. When I awoke, I instinctively pulled away. I said, "What are you doing?" I remember his words: "Well you can come, can't you?" A taunt. A challenge to a very drunk and confused woman who had awoken to find her body violated by someone she trusted.

I remember now, I had wished in the months and years following when I went on to imagine I had fallen in love with this man, dated him and carried on a friendship that the first time had not been this way. I convinced myself it was okay, but inside I hated him for it. I hated his philandering too, but I did choose to put up with it. Often, over the years I've thought back to that night, wishing it were different, and telling myself what I know he'd say, that I wanted to be with him. Yes. But not that way. Not that way...

No wonder I've had a harder time forgiving him than my stalker, whom I'd dated prior to him. My stalker had coerced me into performing his lurid sexual fantasies in places such as abandoned buildings, the side of freeways, outside churches and over tombstones in cemeteries. But I was conscious each time. I allowed it. I was lonely. I chose to do what he asked so I wouldn't lose him...and when I finally left him, he stalked me. Then I met this new guy, and got invited to a Bar-B-Q, and got raped.

Quietly, with no struggling, by someone I trusted...just like the woman in the story. And it is interesting that just like the day I remembered how my grandfather violated me, the realization of this rape was precipitated by a wonderful morning filled with love and light, that helped to offset the painful realizations.

After I cried.. ALOT.. I found my way into my meditation room, skipping my day of laundry and cleaning, to sit in meditation with tears streaming down my face, trying to forgive him. As of yet, I have not. It is too soon, after coming to honor the truth of what happened. Right now, I hate the bastard for raping me, though he would never call it that. It was rape. That is exactly what it was. True, I'd dreamed of being with him, but I actually wanted to be present for it. Not awaken to find him chewing on me in the dark like a vampire.

Interesting that since we broke up in 2001, and until I became celibate in 2006, he would show up pretending there was some chance of a renewed relationship, only to drain me sexually and then make it implicitly understood each time afterwards that he didn't want me for more than sex, and was with someone else. He'd invite me places so I could hope we'd be getting back together, only so I could see him with someone else. I believe I'd convinced myself I was in love with him, so that I could turn the blame for all his cruelty onto myself, not wanting to demonize this man I thought I loved.

But in many ways, his antics and cruelty did more damage than my stalker ever did. If I was under anyone's spell for the last decade, it was a spell cast by this man who violated my trust, my innocent desire for him, and who raped me. I keep hearing it over and over in my head: our relationship began with rape. Violation. Vampirism of energy. And then it continued. And I got sick with mono, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, constant respiratory problems worse than before I met him. No wonder that in past months I've felt ambivalent about talking to him or running into him. And in recent weeks I had developed an inexplicable (to me) distaste and outright dislike of him. Now it all makes sense.

Now, I just have to forgive him. It was easier to forgive my stalker. Easier to forgive my grandfather. And I've got to forgive myself for wasting almost ten years of my life pining after someone who raped me even before our first date. Someone who does not know how to love, and never loved me. Like the Zeppelin song: "Ten Years Gone". The day after he violated me, I saw him at work and tried to avoid him. He asked me if everything was okay, if I was upset by what happened...so he knew. The bastard. He knew in his heart of hearts he'd been wrong.

The whole relationship was tinged with violation of trust from the very start. Tinged with lies and manipulation for sex for all these years...I hope I won't forever, but right now I hate him, and I see why I've been chanting the 'Aakhan Jor'...to protect him from my hatred. The honest truth is I would like him to suffer, for all his twisting of the truth, manipulation, condescension, and attempts to keep from getting over alcohol, weed, and him. He was worse than my stalker. It was like sleeping with the enemy, never knowing that he was...

I had been very kind to him recently, trying to help him find his way out of the darkness, and eventually I will get back there. I will care again. But right now...right now I just want to listen to Nirinjan's 'Jai Tegang' and cry:

Jai Tegang

Khag khand bihandan khal dal khandan at ran mandan bar bandan

'The sword breaks through and cuts down the demons of the mind and body. This beautiful and powerful weapon adorns the battlefield of life.'

Bhuj dandh akhandan tej parchadan jot amandan bhaan prabhan

'It is an extension of the arm, unbreakable, terribly fast. It's awesome splendor overshadows even the sun.'

Sukh santaa kamang durmat damang kilbikh hamang as samang

'It protects the peace and happiness of the saints and destroys any powerful negative energy. It has erased the negativity and guilt that I carry. I seek it's refuge.'

Jai jai jag kaaran srist ubaaran mam pratipaaran jai tegang

'Praise, praise be to the great doer of the world, savior of the creation, my great protector, praise be to the sword!'
-words and trans.

"And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars."

The words from Dante's long poem, both in Italian and English, are drumming on my mind like the rain has drummed outside on the windows. But not only his uplifting words...the words as well of The Cure's lyrics to the song 'Lullaby", which a former lover freakishly played while requiring that I succumb yet again to his sexual addictions. I hear the strains of 'Lara's Theme' from "Dr. Zhivago" interspersed between The Cure's melody. It is like a very wierd movie in my mind. Only when I go to look up the lyrics to 'Lullaby' do I find myself leaving the state of curiosity and moving toward a black rage:

"On candystripe legs the spiderman comes
softly through the shadows of the evening sun
stealing past the windows of the blissful dead
looking for the victim shivering in bed
searching out fear in the gathering gloom and suddenly
a movement in the corner of the room!

And there is nothing I can do
when I realize with fright
that the spiderman is having me
for dinner tonight!

Quietly he laughs and shaking his head
creeps closer now
closer to the foot of the bed.
And softer than shadow and quicker than flies
his arms are all around me and his tongue in my eyes.
'Be still be calm be quiet now my precious boy
don't struggle like that or I will only love you more
for it's much too late to get away or turn on the light
the spiderman is having you for dinner tonight.'

And I feel like I'm being eaten by a 1'000 million shivering furry holes
and I know that in the morning I will wake up in the shivering cold
and the spiderman is always hungry."

I think of stories in Konstantino's "Gothic Grimoire", of spells to control the thoughts of others, of Black Tantra, of Raven Digitalis' tongue-in-cheek depiction of the musical taste of MopeyGoths, and of William Styron yet again:

"Near the end of an early film of Ingmar Bergman's, 'Through a Glass Darkly', a young woman experiencing the embrace of what appears to be profound psychotic depression, has a terrifying hallucination. Anticipating the arrival of some transcendental and saving glimpse of God, she sees instead the quivering shape of a monstrous spider that is attempting to violate her sexually. It is an instant of horror and scalding truth. Yet even in this vision of Bergman. (who has suffered cruelly from depression) there is a sense that all of his accomplished artistry has somehow fallen short of a true rendition of the drowned mind's appalling phantasmagoria. Since antiquity - in the tortured lament of Job, in the choruses of Sophocles and Aeschylus - chroniclers of the human spirit have been wrestling with a vocabulary that might give proper expression to the desolation of melancholia. Through the course of literature and art the theme of depression has run like a durable thread if woe - from Hamlet's soliloquy to the verses of Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, from John Donne to Hawthorne and Dostoevski and Poe, Camus and Conrad and Virginia Woolf. In many of Albrecht Durer's engravings there are harrowing depictions of his own melancholia; the manic wheeling stars of Van Gogh are the precursor's of the artist's plunge into dementia and the extinction of self. It is a suffering that often tinged the music of Beethoven, of Schumann and Mahler, and permeates the darker cantatas of Bach. The vast metaphor which most faithfully represents this fathomless ordeal, however, is that of Dante, and his all-too-familiar lines still arrest the imagination with their augury of the unknowable, the black struggle to come:

'Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovari per una selva oscura,
Che la diritta via era smarrita.

'In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For I had lost the right path.'

"One can be sure that these words have been more than once employed to conjure the ravages of melancholia, but their somber foreboding has often overshadowed the last lines of the best-known part of that poem, with their evocation of hope. To most of those who have experienced it, the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression, hence the frustrated sense of inadequacy found in the work of even the greatest artists. But in science and art the search will doubtless go on for a clear representation of it's meaning, which sometimes, for those who have known it, is a simulacrum of all the evil of our world: of our everyday discord and chaos, our irrationality, warfare and crime, torture and violence, our impulse toward death and our flight from it held in the intolerable equipoise of history. If our lives had no ther configuration but this, we should want, and perhaps deserve, to perish; if depression had no termination, then suicide would, indeed, be the only remedy. But one need not sound the false or inspirational note to stress the truth that depression is not the soul's annihilation; men and women who have recovered from the disease - and they are countless - bear witness to what is probably it's only saving grace: it is conquerable.

"For those who have dwelt in depression's dark wood, and known it's inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward out of hell's black depths and at last emerging into what he saw as 'the shining world.' There, whoever has been restored to health has almost always been restored to the capacity for serenity and joy, and this may be indemnity enough for having endured the despair beyond despair.

"' E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
'And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.'"

Like the storyteller in Wim Wender's "Wings of Desire", I am listening to my mother's music box, hoping that if I let my personal demons have their say, that they won't drag me like Persephone into Hades' realm again. But if they do, the breadcrumbs I will leave on the path back for myself will be this music box playing 'Lara's Theme' and Yogi Bhajan's Apple Kriya. I have so many apples in my refrigerator. In case the dark winds blow and the monsoon comes, I am prepared. And I know all too well how to smile through the pain, but this time, if a Dark Night of the Soul comes, I will do all I can to stay as light as possible as I embrace it and dance with it like dancing with David Bowie in "Labyrinth", like dancing with death and making friends with it. In Nachiketa's pose after Bound Lotus, I know the boons I will ask from Yama, the God of Death in the Katha Upanishad.