The Arrows Cannot Reach the Sky With Our Huntress Watching

Sisters: Let us go with the fleet-footed huntress!
Let us fly like doves to rest among the stars.
The night sky will be a vast, domed temple
and in the bell tower of the heavens our wings
shall flutter and we shall softly mourn
the death of our sister below on the rich,
red pavement etched with whorls and
spirals of her blood; a feather lost
in her breast. Rough youths at play
in the cavernous arcades of that watery city
shall never know the beauty hidden
in the safest of all places, so far, yet
right above their curled and careless heads.

- first poem written in 5? years. What title?

The wasp had stung sweet Ariadne at her loom
Fool! Was I not to cry?

I feel like my teaching is changing, but then again, maybe it is just that I feel more self-confident. Confident enough to clear the energy in the studio just before teaching. Of course, in silence. But I feel it changes everything. No overarching, feeling of being micromanaged by anyone...just clear that out I say! So I taught class this morning after a creative bout that brought the poetry muse I haven't seen since my former stalker found me online and tried to claim ownership to all of my writing. Yay! I'm writing again! Pretty soon I'll be painting again. I can't help but think that this surge of creativity will spill over as enthusiasm for my classes and infuse itself into the gifts I am able to give to my students.

I took Sat Inder's class and he has changed so much recently in his teaching style. I love it! He integrates everything he knows...the way Saul David Raye does. I have tremendous respect for them both as teachers, and I have a lot to learn from each.

At home, I felt exhausted out of nowhere after a conversation with one of my bosses, and then crashed for two hours, before getting up in time to beat the clock again with Bound Lotus and my three Kriyas. I fell asleep relaxed and easy after clearing my meditation room, and cutting cords.

Visions of sugarplums dancing in my head...

I feel like a kid at Christmas, and want to leave out some milk and cookies for Saint Nicholas, or any saint. Guess I'll give my chocolate to Ganesha. My phone is my constant companion, my 'timer' for Bound, for cooking; the soundtrack to my life and my yoga classes (at least at one studio); and my connection to all the wonderful people I've met in the past few months. It also brings me e-mails from this girl I like. I feel all giddy. Oh well. She might not like me that way....

I think my desire for chocolate is renewed. Just a little. I feel a little lovesick. Gonna go do Bound, go to bed and read the poetry of Wang Ping and Ho Xuan Huong.

I feel like Cinderella in so many ways...

...not the least of which is trying to beat the clock to get home and finish Bound Lotus again so I don't turn into a pumpkin, or have to watch the glass slippers on my tiny feet turn into worn silk slippers with holes. 95 days and counting. Only 905 more. This means sometime in 2013, I believe, is when I'll finish. I haven't done all the math for that, but I have for how it will change and has changed my life. Yesterday I told a creepy stalker type who was pestering me inappropriately for a private yoga session to essentially fuck off. Not in so many words. I was acerbically polite. Today, I was privvy to the knowledge that, yet again, apartment employees have been judging not only my past, but trying to recreate it in the future, ignoring who I am now. With a little help from my friends, and a caring boss, I've resolved to write these high-school-minded, bored, gossipy people off as the miserable, unhappy, jealous, unfulfilled and pathetic people they are. If they want to be miserable let them be. I refuse to join them anymore just because they want to pull me down into the pot where they are boiling alive in misery and regret for lost dreams. They'll need to do more than call me crazy, or a witch, just because I used to be an alcoholic and drug addict who was seething with 100 times more bitterness than I've experienced in recent years, or because I leave the house sometimes with a turban on to do Kundalini Yoga. Their pathetic, uneducated, untraveled Midwestern, and closed-minded attitudes rival the jealousy at my happiness. If they want to be miserable can I really stop them?

Yes I know I'm a duck out of water here, and every cool person I ever meet leaves St. Louis. I plan on doing so myself one day. I'm a hippy-chick just passing through. I plan on traveling and teaching, moving nearby some large body of water such as the ocean, in a warm climate, with a kind lover or partner and enough money to live comfortably and hopefully pay back my benefactors who've literally saved my life with their help. I plan on dancing with the sunrise tomorrow to celebrate this goal. Most of all, as I sit again, I want to have a heart big enough to hold even the bastards who make me sad.

I love teaching yoga!

My students in Granite City are the most wonderful group of kind, loving, friendly people. They come EARLY to class to chat with each other, to share chocolate with each other, and stay after to talk. Yoga class is a social event, which is what it is for both Anusara and Kundalini Yoga...the two traditions I'm drawn to the most. I'm a Tantric Yogini and I love life! Yoga should be fun, and for my students it is...

Feeling the sangha, the kula, the group energy, I came home to do a blissful Bound Lotus, and my other Kriyas. I found a lovely e-mail from someone I have a crush on, and fell asleep wondering what that all means, and the fact that she is a she. I'm not used to being drawn to women, and so it feels strange. I find myself thinking that this to shall pass, and is part of the awakening back into life I'm having, but something about her tugs at me. She's funny, she's fiery, beautiful, probably bisexual too, and very well-read. It's strange to feel this way, cause all my life my crushes have always involved kinky fantasies, not making someone breakfast or walking on the beach together. It is finally love and not lust that is turning me on. I think staying celibate for so long broke the addiction to having a heart closed to genuine affection and love. Whatever happens I am glad she figured in my awakening.

I have a scarf of hers and some flip-flops she wore. I offered to send them but she said the flip-flops weren't hers, that she just wore them. Nice cushy Ops. Sometimes I slip my feet into them and smile because her feet are as small as mine. What if we'd been Chinese with bound feet in a past life, and had exchanged 'nu shu' letters of affection because of our mutual affection and same shoe size as Wang Ping describes in her book: "Aching for Beauty"? Whatever she is, will, may or may not be to me, she feels like home.

Praanpathi Namo Namo and Kirtan Kriya

I feel really strange. I still want chocolate, but not excessively. Yesterday, I thought I just decided to eat better in honor of my mother's birthday; now, I'm actually craving certain foods like crazy: broiled raw garlic toast with ghee; couscous with tomatoes and cucumbers; baked potatoes with crushed, raw garlic, raw ginger, salsa and ghee; more toast; an entire pot of Yogi Tea (cinnamon, clove, cardamom pods, black pepper, sliced ginger, and a tiny bit of Assam black tea); Golden Milk (turmeric, cardamom, grains of paradise, rice milk, ghee and raw acacia honey); apples, bananas, blackberries and oranges. Amazingly, I didn't think about chocolate every waking minute. What I crave the most is broiled raw garlic toast!!! If this keeps up, I'll need to buy one of those garlic braids because, all told, I ate a head of garlic spread out over the day today. I drank a quart of Yogi Tea. I pooped three times in one day, just like in Florida at Solstice! I feel radiant.

But of course, there are low points. A male student who wants a private yoga session for the wrong reasons that I'm going to have to politely say 'no' to...but without asking him why he is so manipulative, or directly accusing him of asking for photos of me for the wrong reasons. I've got a hunch about him. I've also got an old friend who did something very careless today in regards to my name, and I want to ask him: "Are you fuckin' stupid?!", but I won't. And I was all excited to get the two CDs I ordered from Spirit Voyage, but darnit, they only sent one. I don't get to start the kriya I wanted to today. Pfft. So, I'm irritated, impatient, annoyed...but my skin glows and I'm eating healthy again for the first time in 40 days.

Hm. I guess 90 days of Bound Lotus and 40 days of Moon Kriya did what they were supposed to do, huh? Kundalini Yoga is incredibly powerful. For that matter, on Sunday when I finished 90 days of Bound, I went to Guru Sandesh's class. I got dizzy from the exercises in a group, and from her palpable radiance.

Today I did Praanpathi Namo Namo Kriya, which works on opening up the energy at the juncture of C7 and T1 (right where the compression to my spine was the worst), and also T8 behind the heart. My energy has been blocked here for years. Sat Inder, wonderfully tolerant and kind friend that he is, gave me the Kriya. I felt a HUGE opening after I did it the first time! I did Kirtan Kriya for women as well, resting on my chin to release past negative sexual associations with men. Funny that when my ex dropped me it compressed the physical doorway at C7 and T1 for releasing this stuff, including my connection to him...and these kriyas are opening the door.

I'd begun my day chanting Ek Ong Kar Sat Nam Siri Wahe Guru for 3 minutes, Sat Narayan Hari Narayan Hari Narayan Hari Hari for 9, and a 3 minute meditation involving Sat Nam and Wahe Guru. Then the meditation to 'Aadays Tisai Aadays'. I felt fabulous! My fatigue after getting up to teach my 6:15 am was gone! I did the two new Kriyas and then rested with ice on my neck while listening to Yogi Bhajans Gong CD for 20 minutes. I felt buzzy and seriously energized. In Bound Lotus my lifted more than two inches from their normally crunched position around my heart. If I wasn't before, I'm convinced that Kundalini works! The last month has sucked with days of gasping for air, a practically tubercular and painful cough at times, low energy, food cravings and intense bouts of seething rage and anger for long past bullshit. Today, with it's healthy food cravings, new kriyas, and minor frustrations was like a cakewalk. Yeah, I'll keep goin'.

Finishing 40 Days of "Moon Kriya"

It's Groundhog's Day!!!! My mother's birthday!!!!!! Big day. Huge! Usually...I am morbidly depressed on this day. Not today! Hm. I'm drinking Yogi Tea, eating garlic and ghee toast to cleanse my system, and I don't crave chocolate anymore. I think the craving was part of the cleansing.

Ah. Sunlight makes it easy to be happy, chat with my friend Katie and laugh at Bill Murray in 'Groundhog's Day'! Darkness brings some grief and rage...though not what it used to be every year on this day. I see her body floating like an angel above the cement, and I miss her. I feel rage still for the arresting of my grief so long ago...for the lack of compassion from teachers and lovers as her body lay warm in the ground. And I see the importance of continuing to practice Bound Lotus. I miss her so much. I want her to know I have not forgotten the message from the Ouija board I will never use again. She said: "I am with you in your yoga". And she is. And that is sometimes why I sit when I want to quit. That blinding light...

It's 40 days since finishing White Tantric Yoga!

All in all today was really beautiful...a wonderful morning class with Carson and Krissy, practising variations on Dhanurasana; doing some Pigeon variations on my own, and falling asleep on the studio floor in time to get up and go to Sat Inder's class - which was so beautiful; later getting into a funk, while a crow sat down and cawed on my 11th story windowsill ( birds don't come up here normally); narrowly missing five accidents on the way to my chiropractic appointment; then teaching class. One of my favorite students, Kristen, brought me the entire Led Zeppelin collection! I was so excited!!!!!!!!!!!! She said she would if I finished 90 days of Bound Lotus, and she did. So nice to be around people who love and support you.

I love my job teaching. I love the students. I love watching them grow and change, and the fact that they allow me to grow and change as a teacher...they said they loved my classes because everytime I teach it is always something new, and the enthusiasm is contagious. They complimented me and said that I give so much personal attention, that the adjustments made them feel as if I really cared about aligning their spines, and I quote, "even if I have to personally get every vertebra in the right place myself." I was just blown away...

In Illinois, the students are truly a community. In St. Louis it is getting that way. My students in Illinois have seen me doing Bound Lotus and commented that if it brings as much peace upon finishing as they saw it brought me, then maybe they would do it too... Yoga is such a special gift.

Bound Lotus got done late today, and I was really tight and sore. It was hard to get myself to do it, oddly on Day 91. I want to rest, but as Yogi Bhajan said: "Keep up and you will be kept up." I feel that there are 'angels' looking after me...like the sniper Arrow in "The Cellist of Sarajevo", looking out for me, and rooting for me as I keep my commitment to do 1'000 days of Bound. I find myself asking if it is coincidental that the day I first thought about reading "The Cellist of Sarajevo" and listening again to Jacqueline du Pre playing Camille Saint-Saens 'The Swan' was the day one of my students, Natasha Rubenstein died. The day on which services were held for her at a church around the corner from me, I began the book. She'd told me a few months ago, that she played cello. She said she loved the Rasa piece I played that featured a cello...I found myself all this time hoping to see her and talk about the book, and about Steve Lopez' "The Soloist", and how much I love string instruments, particularly cellos and harps. Until the 30th when I heard she had died.

I think there is what Tibetan Buddhists call a Bardo state, between absorption into Oneness and consciousness of this earthplane school. I think my mother is still there. I think Natasha, or Ruth (another woman with a 'professional name') just arrived there. There's my mother in my mind's eye, at the gateway to the hall of Akashic records, like a cosmic librarian, filing demon that she was...looking at Natasha's fading bodily form and thinking: 'Did you see my daughter? What news do you have from that far off land? Is the world changing? Are people learning to love each other?' My mother is still in the Bardo, I know she is...not willing to leave her post as a sniper shooting down the attempts of dangerous people trying to screw up her daughter's path. And Natasha is there too, getting ready to be absorbed into the light and the sound. Being welcomed into the cosmic symphony that created the Universe. The Om. The Aum. The Amen.