1,000 Days of Bound Lotus!

This past Sunday, July 29th, was the actual completion of 1,000 days of Bound Lotus for me. My teachers said they count the day that I did it at 1 a.m., and I could feel in the weeks leading up to this milestone, that it WAS a milestone approaching. During these past few weeks I also began to help a student of mine commit to her own practice. So much in my life has changed. People have asked me how I feel, and I just say, "Tomorrow is another day. What's another 1,000, huh?" WAHE GURU!

Coming Home to The Siri Guru Granth Sahib

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!

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!

300 Days of Bound!

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Only 700 more to go! AND I will soon have new classes to teach!

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.

Going to the River

It's not just that in the last 4 weeks I've been busy forgiving the monster I loved from 96' to 99', but I've been ending a relationship that began after that, and spanned the last 11 years; a long, drawn-out relationship with an incorrigible womanizer that I've been trying to end for the last 5 years unsuccessfully, until three Saturdays ago...when I definitively and quietly walked away.

It's not that I was physically 'with' him during that time, but we always kept in touch, as he would say. With the exception of the day I fell on my head, November 1st, 2009, there's been no physical contact. And even then, as far as I was concerned, we only kissed. He felt bad for dropping me. He allowed that to segue into comforting me for how much I had longed and pined for him over the years. I'd even gone so far in the past 11 years as to imagine I would someday be with him as his wife, that one day he would stop his incorrigible womanizing.

But it was not to be, and I knew it on November 1st, 2009. I knew it with a certainty that was chilling, as he segued once again, this time into an attempt to transform my angst, grief, confusion and literal excruciating pain in my neck into an opportunity to extract more pleasure for himself from me. As it was, I refused to participate. I did, however, unfortunately, remain as an uncomfortable observer, while he transitioned from comforting me, to dropping his pants below his knees and disrespecting me on the very day I almost snapped my spine and died at his hands.

You might ask, dear reader, why did I wait until February 5th to walk away? Why, for instance, did I not walk away on November 1st, 2001, when he dumped me as an acknowledged girlfriend? Or in the ensuing weeks while I lay lovesick with strep, mononucleosis and chronic fatigue? Or maybe, why did I not walk away all those years during which he came to me in the interludes between his other women, even after I finally refused to sleep with him anymore? Why not have left him in August of 09' when he suckered me into going to see a play performed by his most recent ex? Why not hang up on him as he proceeded afterwards to tell me of their love and how much more beautiful it was for him than ours?

The answer partly lies within the pages of two favorite books of mine, a song, and, well, just sheer stupidity and blindness. Blindness, primarily to the fact that, though the man I dated prior to him was a monstrously cruel human being, this man was quietly cruel. Where the monster had me for 3 years, and then stalked me for the next 10, this man had my heart for 11 years. 11. What a waste.

I still have the hideously ugly set of pearls with a ridiculous ruby like a drop of blood that he gave me for Christmas 2000, in lieu of actually inviting me out with his friends. He thought then, I suspect, that he could buy a night of sex with me, the crazy girlfriend, and still go out with someone else. I found the necklace today. Odd that I've forgiven the monster I dated before him, but can't seem to forgive him...or myself. Why did I let him keep my number in his 'little black book' all these years? Why didn't I crush those pearls into dust with a mortar and pestle, literally?

Well, I was busy living the fantasy that I was Fermina Daza in Gabriel Garcia Marquez' book "Love in the Time of Cholera", a book I'd read in 1994, long before the movie "Serendipity" came out. Thank God I never gave him a copy of Marquez' book with my number scribbled inside. And while I was living this fantasy I was ignoring the fact that this womanizer was less like Florentino Ariza, and more like Tomas in Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". But Tomas, Tereza and Sabine eventually opened their hearts.

I never dated either a 'Tomas' or a 'Florentino Ariza'. No, I dated a man, who told me when I asked why I always felt exhausted after sex with him: "Because there is no love." A man who said he thought I made him out in my mind to be better than he was, who actually gave me hints that I should walk away. A man who, in reality, by the sheer quietness of his cruelty and the number of years which were allowed to hang like a string of ugly pearls attaching me to him like a marionette...did more damage to my love of men than the monster.

I should crush those pearls under my feet. Drop those fetters completely too...

This man followed 'the rule of threes', described early on in Kundera's book. And I know that he'll never want to see me traipsing into his apartment with a copy of Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" under my arm like Tereza from the Kundera book. He'll never make a life with me. And I really haven't wanted a life with him for years really. Now I see, I was just holding onto misery because it felt familiar.

I should crush those pearls under my feet.

Three books, actually, have deeply touched me. And three others have defined my understanding of life. The first three I don't mention here. The last are the two mentioned above, and also Margaret Atwood's "Cat's Eye". What's so special about a marble? Another story for another time.

It is Kundera's book which is gripping me again now. I see, for other reasons, than this idiot I dated, how in the intervening years since I read it at the age of 26, why I could not have read it without weeping and getting sick. It reminds me of my mother's death. It reminds me also of a happiness and a joy that I keep touching upon, if only for moments.

But it also reminds me of how much this book, more than any other, even books by Marguerite Duras whom I dearly love, defined how I wanted to write myself. "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" was the format of philosophical exposition and narrative that I crafted my first manuscript around. The one my boss at the strip club in 1996 said was incredibly beautiful and should be published. That man with a heart big enough to leave a dozen roses on the table as he left his own girlfriend in his bedroom with another man. That blessed soul encouraged me to write, but I did not do it. And so that memory is with this book also.

More than all of this though, is a new memory that I will forever associate with this book: that of getting sicker than I have been in years, literally, it seems, at the very thought that my heart has fallen in love with a man who exists in my life right now, and whom I cannot, for the sake of propriety, and possibly also because he may not love me back in that way, be with now. I say that, but I feel his love. The way his hand will reach out sometimes to lightly touch my back. The way he calls my name out. My birth name. I have not heard anyone say my name like that in years. And what little I know of him, his love of music, his sense of humor, his awkwardness, his kindness to others, the hugeness of his heart, makes me love him all the more. I long to rest my hand in his, and walk with him.

I tried, unsuccessfully, to turn my love for him into lust, but thankfully it didn't work for long. Not that I don't want to make love to him, but it's more that I want sleep with him. More accurately, I want to sleep next to him, with my hand in his, or his hand on my hip or belly, holding me lightly, with that unbearable lightness and love. Then to feel the weight of his body above mine. Then to just quietly putter around the house with him. Maybe ruffle his hair a bit as I think of spending a lifetime with him until he and I are so old and gray that all we can do is smile at each other while the sun sets, knowing we've eaten the apple and loved every minute of it!

I know that I love him. But my fear of loving him is making me sick.

How do I transform that fear into a deeper love? A love for myself and for the world so rich and unshakeable that I never pin all my hopes and desires on a man again and can just share the beauty of life with him? How do I do that? I know what I must do. Keep living and growing and loving myself and everyone else. Walk away forever from holding onto the pain of those awful relationships I had before. Even the minor ones along the way...but especially the monster and the womanizer. The monster I no longer hate. The womanizer...

When will that go? I need to crush those pearls under my feet...

Then I am free! Free to be sick until my fear of loving subsides like a fever. But oh, how I wish that I were like Tereza, arriving with a book under my arm, on the doorstep of the house of the man I love, and sleeping beside him as I get well.

Every night since last Sunday when I cried myself to sleep because I knew I no longer wanted to cheapen my love for him with lust, I've since then lulled myself to sleep imagining his body curled around mine, his right hand on my hip, and the other in my hair. His lips saying "Thank you", and whispering my name. His thoughts wishing me well. I want to know that he loves sleeping next to me, resting with me, cradling me in his arms, as the deeper world cradles us both. Just resting in the lightness.

I read these words when I first cracked open Kundera's book to read it again after 17 years:

"Tomas came to this conclusion: Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman)."

I differ from this view only in that I want to both make love to him and sleep next to him in his arms.

But were that to never happen, I will love him anyway, even if he loves another besides me or instead of me, because he has, by his very presence and love and kindness, renewed my love for men, my interest in men as both human beings and lovers. He has renewed my faith in men to be good men, and in God, and this whole wide beautiful world made of love. In that sense, he represents a manifestation of the divine to me, exalting me to the level of a woman in love with how beautiful, though also ugly, our world is...that beauty exists in spite of the pain, maybe, even, because of it.

When he touched my shoulder a week ago to wake me from my musical trance of listening to Yael Naïm singing "Go to the River", and pretended to be talking without sound as I fumbled to remove my iPod earbuds, he made me want to jump up, link arms with him and skip out the door, and just kidnap him away from all the world's rules and regulations. My fantasy included a big umbrella to protect us from the rain. Last week there was no rain. As it rains now, I wish that he and I were walking in the park, jumping into puddles and laughing. Going home to my place or his for a pot of carrot and roasted red pepper soup made by me. Going to sleep in each other's arms. Waking up and going to the river to bathe in the golden healing water, like Amrit, like Amrita, my spiritual name. Does it matter if that river is one near the holy Golden Temple of Amritsar, or any other river? All rivers flow into one, whether physically, or through the raindrops that fall on our faces.

I see myself now as the child I was once, face upturned to catch the raindrops on her tongue. Hailstones falling all around, or just the rain that I have always loved so dearly. I want to love indiscriminately like the rain. Love like the water loves the city of Venice. Float on a boat like the owl and the pussycat, maybe, into a tomorrow that may or not be filled with memories of this man who says my name Heather so sweetly, as if it were dripping with the honey of Amrita, as if he were the bee buzzing around my lotus flower, laughing about my last name, Beebe, which means beekeeper. Maybe he is the flower and I am the bee?

Does it really matter? I need to just Go to the River and let it flow...wherever it goes from here........

On The Feast of Lupercalia

In 1868, Cadbury had perfected the art of chocolate-making. Back in the day, in 496 AD, there was no chocolate, but there were lover's lotteries, until Pope Gelasius banned them. Instead of chivalrous knights and young bachelors and maidens pairing up as lovers in the more carnal sense of the word, or lovers in the ways of chivalrous devotion to a lady, people were then required to give up the pagan ways and draw the name of a saint from a hat. Instead of walking around devoted to a lady wearing your heart, and her name on your sleeve, you were to emulate this random saint.

Kinda takes all the fun out of it. And what is more, the gerrymandered festival was moved from the end of the celebration on the 15th to the 14th. And the ancient Roman month of February, named for an older Spring fertility ritual, the Februa, was much later in the year than it is now. Christianity ruined all the fun, and we now have conflicting stories of a 'Saint Valentine' who variously does things like marrying couples in secret, or curing prison guard's daughters of blindness, falling in love with them, sending them notes, and getting executed.

I digress momentarily to thoughts of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' "Of Love And Other Demons" and the girl's long red freakin' ass hair. I also digress to thinking about what the real point of living is, which is, I think, truly to live and love, and not make notches on your wallpost about how much you've grown spiritually. The point of living isn't to wallow in misery either because you don't have someone to play with your hair on this God-forsaken occasion. But, of course, I am digressing.

Ah...where was I? The original festival upon which St. Valentine's Day was founded was for purification, and the ancient idea of purifying by 'getting something out of your system'.

So this nasty cold bug I have isn't quite out of my system. Nor is my anguish for the old physical memories of pain coming up, the resentment at years spent caring about people who just objectified me, or my general malaise with the idea of love.

Ironically, another side of me really likes the idea of love. Love for the earth, for friends and family, for people as human beings, just not romantic love and sappy, fake Valentine's Day sentiments. Give me a copy of Paul Bowles' "The Sheltering Sky", Neil Gaiman's "Harlequin Valentine" serving his heart up on a plate with a knife and some catsup/ ketchup (tomāto/ tomäto), and an empty Gondola in Venice...and I'll give you a bottle of Shiraz wine, and sit on the floor after reading those books and cry so hard that I can almost touch my toes again in Bound Lotus. Today, the Feast of Lupercalia, does not look to be one of my happiest, but maybe that's just because I haven't done Bound yet. 281 days and counting. Yesterday I wanted to quit. Today I want to quit. But I do it anyway.

And my appetite is now back. I am hungry like a wolf.