Sometimes you just might get what you need…

Soil that is dirty grows the countless things.  Water that is clear has no fish.  Thus as a mature person you properly include and retain a measure of grime.  You can’t just go along enjoying your own private purity and restraint.

Vegetable Root Sutra

On Sunday afternoon I went out to the mall to buy batteries for the electronic mousetrap a friend had lent me.  The electronic store also has headphones on sale.  A new fetish of mine. I had spent most of the day in the house, puttering and meandering and fussing.  I hadn’t gotten to bed until nearly three, having stayed up with my 15-year old domestic short hair cat Ruth for a good part of the night.  Her body has been erupting in intermittently cruel crescendos that wreak havoc on her digestive system and elimination system these past weeks.  On Saturday night, I returned from a friend’s house after midnight to witness Ruth heaving a days worth of food out of her system and then having a two-hour bout of raging incontinence.  She spent a good deal of the time in the prone position, some of the time fighting to stop the leak of urine and some of the time trying to stop her guts from contracting and swelling, searching for an equilibrium that took too long to come.  She went under the table, as though hiding, the way cats are said to do when they are sick, or when death’s cool breath sounds behind their ears.  How like humans, these creatures are, or more aptly, how like creatures we humans are, all of us wanting to hide our break-downs, our body’s deteriorations, our visible biological discomforts.  For a while, I lay under the table with her, trying to will or coo, or coerce her body back to a semblance of homeostasis.

In those moments, it’s the sheer helplessness that stings the most.  Watching someone you love, and not being able to fix what ails them; having to find a way to etch the beginnings of acceptance onto a canvass covered mostly with charred crimson and burnt orange. Chanting to her while she laid in my lap worked for a time, but bodies, they are sometimes stubborn things, which do better when surrendered to, than resisted.

Finally her body settled enough for her to lay her exhausted self down.  I covered the comforter and pillows with towels and invite her to be as comfortable as she can given the circumstances.  Several times, my own body, surged with grief as I began to recognize that my pet of 15 years is leaning more towards death than I would like.  The prognosis from Friday’s vet visit is less than favourable.  A tumor, which may or may not be benign on her liver, the early stages of kidney disease and a raging bacterial infection.  The following day, I took her into the vet for a two-week lasting dose of anti-biotics.  I am hopeful that her body will respond, that her cells will mend, that she will continue to be the most lovingly consistent version of family that I have ever known.  Truthfully, there are deeper things that I am wrestling with.  She has been, since the end of my thirteen and a half year long relationship, a salve for loneliness.  Sometimes she has been the reason to come home, a 14pound, white fur, luminous green eyed, pink-skinned heart to connect to, another soul with whom to converse with.  Often, she comes to the door to greet me as I come home, an instinctive knowing of my arrival she has.

No matter the amount of spiritual ‘work’, hours of time of spent in therapy, or hours of time spent on a rectangular rubber mat, I can not avoid the trajectory of emotions of the course of grief aptly mapped out by Dr. Kubler-Ross.  It is likely, that un-beknownst to me, I have spent the last little while steeped in the first stage of grief; denial.  A part of me casting a veil in front of my faculties of observation, in attempt to shroud me from her growing thinner body, her longer need to sleep, her semi-frequent meow-disturbances during the night, as though her soul was in tether, stretched between two worlds that call out to her.

Last week when I bought her a new scratching post, a voice inside suggested that she would not be using it for that long and, that, perhaps I should consider not getting it or at least choose the economy model.  Another voice says none-sense.  This warrior cat, who’s name means compassion, is full of vigor and longevity.  She deserves the S-curved, blue and tan striped deluxe version scratching post.  A few days ago, I stocked up on her favourite brand of wet food.  That voice came again.  This time it said, whom are you going to give all of that leftover wet food to?  I stuffed it back onto the inner shelf with the other things I cannot bring myself to negotiate or convene with, yet.

When I finally did make it out of the house, it was after 4:30.  A series of brazen mice have been intruding into the kitchen over the past couple of months.  They have learned to out-smart the wooden snap traps, though not before I caught 5 of them. I consider going to a yoga class, after my visit to the mall and stuff the appropriate garments into my bag.  Another part of me suggests that the mall is having a sale on remedies for grief.  That nearly all of the stores in fact, are having a blow-out sale on analogous, amorphous, amoeba like substances which easily insert themselves into any kind of hole that needs filling.  One size fits all.

Inside the mall, I stopped at a clothing store to buy some things I do not need.  I wandered about in a grief-gripped trance amongst the other humans looking for ways to fill their sense of empty or un-requite.  A fruitless search to find things, which cannot be gathered from the external world.  Plightless, we search anyways.  The mall was packed and buzzing with the voices of Sunday evening shoppers.  On the way to the electronic store, I wandered into two more shops, fingering products I imagined myself to want.  Before going into the mall, I reminded myself to stay on track, focus on the specific task at hand.  Once inside the mall, the feelings of grief feel like a foggy brine of dirty water, rising upward from my feet, flooding my cells and blurring any sense of clarity, side-swiping any connection to the intentions I had placed.  In the sea of consumerism, my vessel wandered with virtually no aim.

I made it to the electronics store and picked up most of the items on my list (batteries included).  I decided to stop at the No Frills to buy carrots before heading home.  In the snack-food isle, I talked myself out of buying conventional potato chips, but choose  a bag of (more natural) rice chips instead.  I opened the bag and eat most of them before making it to the check out line.  They are out of carrots, but I found a bottle of ting, some sparkling mineral water and some on-sale olive oil.  I had to pry myself away from the cookie department, the taste of salty jalapeño rice chips demanding to be complemented by sugary sweet fermentable carbohydrates.  I chose a check out line which appeared to be somewhat shorter than the rest.  The brine of grief-soaked emotion was beginning to fill my lungs.  My vision sank further into shadow and a scowl wore my mouth.  In front of me, a young, slender stylish gay boy-man placed his grocery cart bounty onto the conveyer belt.  He performed each of his movements with a flamboyance that bordered on hysteria, or so my sullen self seemed to think.  Several times, he selected out groceries to remove and then has the cashier re-calculate his total. He wonders allowed about the balance in his bank account.  He made three attempts at the debit machine and began to fully immerse himself in the scene in which he stared.  I erupted then.  The liquid feeling that was my inner landscape, stinking inside my nostrils, my stock of patience completely bereft.

It’s not a performance, I say.

Pardon, he says turning towards me.

It’s not a performance.  Just get your things through and move along.

I will stand here as long as I can, and certainly longer than that disgusting face of yours.  What did you bring into the grocery store with you today?  I know that my hold up is not the reason for your cranky attitude….bitch.

He is more astute than I give him, but I do not budge, fixing myself into a stonewalled prison of non-engagement, until that last comment.

You just went too far, I say and push his grocery cart into his body.  (Yes. Really.)

He does not flinch.

I will stand here and take up as much time as I please…

He continues to talk but I have tuned him out, beginning to gather my things to go to another check out line.  But not before I sink my teeth into an especially juvenile response.

You, are the reason why the planet is going to hell in a hand-basket, I snort before leaving the checkout line.

At the next check out line, the meniscus of my emotional deluge had reached capacity.  I began to falter, tears running down my cheeks, wishing so hard to be transported out of my circumstance, excised from my grief, and dis-engaged from a body which was about to tip and already moving towards groundlessness.  I searched vehemently for  an equilibrium that took too long to come. I wiped tears away and hoped no one can see me.  I began to feel remorse for my actions and apologize inside my head to the man I have just had un-necessary conflict with.

The cashier complimented me on my earrings, totally oblivious to my erupting concoction of emotional brew.

I finished paying for my things.  More guilt seeped in, and I began to regret deeply my actions and words.

I turned to the left considering the doorway furthest from his checkout line in an attempt to avoid any more confrontation.  I prayed that he had already left the store.  I walked right remembering that my bike is closer to the main entrance.  I began to see him packing up his groceries as I walk in his direction.

I hope you have an excellent day, he says with ultra emphasis.

I’m sorry, I say.

He stops, looking a little bit stunned.

Pardon?

I apologize.  I’m sorry for acting that way.

He takes my hand and says I’m sorry too.

I turn away beginning to really cry.

Are you ok, he says?

Yes, no.

Do you want to go for coffee, I’ll take you for coffee, he says.

I turn back towards him, my craving for human connection, for someone to witness me, superseding the shame that I am wearing and over-riding the embarrassment that grips my guts.

Ok, I say.

What’s going on he says?

My cat is dying I say.  It is ridiculous in many ways.  This I know. I have such a deep need to say it to someone, to acknowledge in some fledging way the shitty reality of my present circumstance.  I am in that moment desperate for someone to witness my self-consumed suffering.

I’m so sorry he says.

Thank you

What’s wrong with her?

She has a tumor, and kidney disease and a bacterial infection.

The foul smelling concoction begins to leave my cells.  Lightness replaces some of the shadow that had comprised the whole of my lens.  I arrive back into my body, with a kind of comfortable surprise.

Where should we go for coffee?

We can walk to North, towards the subway.

We walk along the sidewalk, I left my jacket open, letting the last of the hot anger escape into the winter air.

I work two jobs he says.

Where do you work?

He names a Toronto restaurant and an up-scale retail chain.

All I do is work.

Do you mind if I smoke, would you like one?

No thanks.

I’m twenty-one.  I’ve been in the city for 7 years.  The first two years of my life, my parents were in a crystal-meth haze.

I soften even more now.  Perspective levying my grip on the grief I felt so entitled to.

I’m sorry.

Its, OK.  My grandmother raised me.

I do perform.  You nailed me.  I’m trying to change it, but I grew up performing for my grandmother and all of her sisters.  I was the perfect cupie doll.

Maybe its better to run with it, work it into your life creatively.

He shrugs.

I have no friends.

None?

No.  Sometimes I pay for companionship.

I didn’t flinch here, just held space.

There’s a Tim Horton’s East of here.

Inside, I go to the check-out line.

He negotiated space at a table in the fully packed café.  He came back to the line and offered to carry my bag to the table.

Careful, there’s a hole in it.

What would you like, I’d like to buy for you.

Are you sure?

Yes, I am.

A coffee, with two creams and two sweeteners.

I ordered his coffee; add a tea and an assortment of timbits.

As I sat down, the man at the table beside us got up to leave.

I’m so sorry he says again.

Me too.

That wasn’t my best self.

Me neither.

Both of us laughing.

Sometimes all it takes is that little nudge and bam, full-on drama bellows in.

I try so hard, but once in a while I tip.

It’s hard to live…

With intention and integrity?

Yes.

It is difficult sometimes.

So, who are you?  Where are you from?

I grew up North of here.  I am a mutt, my parents from Eastern Europe and Eastern Canada.

You’re so European!
I’m a blend.

What do you do?

I pause, considering framing the response differently and bow my head.

I’m a yoga teacher.

He does not flinch, holding space gracefully, mimicking my response to his remark about paying for companionship.

What’s your name?

Solomon.

Good name. Solid.

Yours?

Melinda.

Beautiful name.

If you don’t mind my asking…

I’m 38.

Ohh, I wouldn’t give you a day over 32.  It must be all of that yoga!

I am blessed with good genes I guess.

I went to a high school for the arts studying ballet, modern, jazz.  I never finished high school though.

You can get your GED if you want.

Yes, but I need to learn some social skills, all of the ones I did not learn when I was younger.  Also, I need to study English and math, go back to the very basics.  I plan on going to school when I am 25.

What about you?  What else do you do?

I write, go to contact dance sometimes.  I trained as an aromatherapist.  I’m a lapsed dental hygienist.  I’ve been off for a couple of years, having had to nurse a back injury.

Your cat is lucky to have lived with you for all of these years.

Thank you.

The authenticity of his care and insight bring such beautiful relief and healing.  That loneliness, I had convinced myself to own dissolving into the joyful easy banter between us.

I have to get back home.  I have frozen food in my grocery bags.

Take extra good care, you’ve been through a lot.

You too I say.

We hug good-bye, the gusto of his hug nearly lifting my feet from the ground.

I returned home to find Ruth resting in what appears to be comfort.

I look up the meaning of Solomon’s name, my penchant for signs, symbols and communication from the universe being a favourite milieu of research.

His name means Peace King, atonement and wise man.

Bang on universe, bang on…

The Yoga teacher, the Shaman and The Magician…

At the end of a yoga practice, just as folks are settling into final resting pose, or savasana as it is referred to, there occurs several moments in time where I have witnessed magic to enter. I’m not talking about the kind of magic that involves deliberate and colourful conjuring or spectacle. I’m talking about that expression of consciousness that hovers and entwines with the dream-state. That place in time and space that connects more to the metaphysical than the material. Historically, yogis have referred to this state of being as the parting of the auspicious veil. At this time the mind is pliable, suggestible and receptive. Some traditions involving the conjuring of this altered state refer to this period as trance. For a time the mind behaves more like a trusting child and less like a sedentary intellectual. Possibility and potential take up more space than our fixed ideas about what is and is not available to us. This charged space is much like the dream state that many Shamans have worked with through the ages and continue to work with today. In its most simple explanation, a Shaman is one who acts as conduit between the spirit world and the material world. Shamans conducting ceremony may hold a space for people to enter into this doorway of the mind for a time. These rituals are often referred to as journeys. Sweat lodge, drum journeying, fasting and chanting are some of the ways that these spiritual explorations may occur.

A Shaman acting with integrity and pure intention endeavors to maintain this bridge-like space with a sense of loving duty and mindfulness to sound and safe boundaries. For a time, a Shaman acts as metaphysical orchestrator to the communication that occurs between the spirit world, the material realm and those involved in the ceremony. S/he acts as a super-charged, high integrity container facilitating this multi-layered communication. This is what your yoga teacher does at the end of practice as you merge into savasana.

I’ve been practicing yoga for just over fifteen years. For the first half of those fifteen years, my practice was spotty and erratic (much like the communication twixt my mind, body and spirit.) A pivotal turning point in my commitment to yoga arrived about seven years ago when I was studying to become a dental hygienist. On Wednesdays, I attended what was called a ‘full clinic’ day during which student dental hygienists received and treated clients. Clinic day was a day of dread for many, myself included. The stress in the room was palpable, turgid and all encompassing. It was not unusual for one of my fellow students to burst into tears or visibly break down during clinic. One instructor in particular, seemed to target a few students with a harsh and destructive style of criticism. Many of us remarked after class that it felt like being set up on a wall in straightjackets while a posse of trigger-happy gun-slinging yahoos took drunken random aim at our sitting duck selves.

After clinic Wednesdays, I attended a one and a half hour kripalu yoga class. The class was fairly physically demanding. By the end of class, I found myself exhausted, and easily surrendered into that beloved final resting pose, savasana. Afterwards, I would notice a marked change in my psychology. At that time, I did not have the language or the contact to be able to make sense of what had happened during that final pose in class, but it was a powerful experience that lingered significantly. The barrage of contracting clatter and spin that comprised my pre-practice mind seemed further away and much less noisy. A kind of welcome softness slid into the interstitial fluid of my psyche. Some part of me was beginning to hook itself into an ether of pleasant other-ness, a space and time, not so stitched into the fixtures of (my perception of) material reality.

I returned to Toronto and began my first year of devotional, daily practice, attending class with various teachers at a studio that had recently opened in my neighbourhood. It was the trance-like experience of savasana, this elusive milieu that drew me back to class again and again. There was something profoundly nourishing, in that hover-like dreamy state that I did not find in my running practice, a most vigorous gym workout or any other exhaustion producing physical practice. This was the edge upon where my mind would perch for the better part of the lead classes that I attended. As a yoga student and ardent perfectionist, I would practice the yoga poses with a fevered and desirous gusto, often wholly disembodying myself in order to achieve and render a body fixed on precision, acquisition and perfection. My type A drive scrutinized the movement of the teacher, wandered jealously onto the mats of the other students and set her sights on being the highest-achieving yoga student in the class. Convinced that accurate alignment and perfect posturing were the only way to enter this delicious mind melt, I chased and craved, sought and grasped. Very rarely did I afford myself the actuality of present embodied experience of the poses. The majority of my practice was like a wrestling match, between my frenetic mind, stealthy will and stubborn body.

It’s no surprise also, that my initial relationship to yoga was via the doorway of its physical practice through the postulates of ashtanga yoga, one of the most physically demanding expressions of this ancient philosophy and practice. Living in a frenetically busy, urban landscape that valorizes production and acquisition logically supports a physically demanding and challenging style of yoga, such as ashtanga. Achievement junkies and over-achievers can find satisfaction making their way up the three-tiered ascension grid known as primary series one, two and three.

Towards the end of practice, my body appropriately stretched and shaped, I would begin to see the sweet end to the practice nearing. It was like I had been swimming up stream wearing a leaded vest, and finally realized for that brief window of time, that I could choose to remove the vest and surrender into the flow of the water’s movement. It felt as though I was temporarily occupying a place outside my visceral sense of being. Frequently, I would be startled when the teacher would ‘call’ students back into the room. In these glimpses of stillness, it was as if my body, mind and spirit had slowed effortlessly into the river of time. The pores of my skin ignited with aliveness, my body settled into a state of being instead of becoming. I felt myself to lean and merge instead of resisting and flailing. Sometimes there were whole nuggets of time where I forgot where skin ended and the environment started. My perception of what constituted self and other fractured into blessed splendor. This was that surreal shift that arrived time and again as the fruit of the movement practice. Most definitely, I became for a time addicted to this dreamy altered-state of experience of otherness.

The yoga teacher, guiding the class would often lead students into a deeper place of relaxation through guided imagery, soulful sound and sometimes intentionally chosen poetry/text. When done well, these tools can act as supportive facilitators of the savasana journey. The yoga instructor’s voice can feel like lucid honey churning the students’ subconscious towards permissive wander and exploration. The body finally surrenders into a place of rest and ‘groundedness’. The mind too, begins to loosen its need to narrate and control. It is then that the mind is ‘ripe’ enough to consider letting go into the deeper textures and layers that have been present all along. Many teachers call this transition a return to the ‘authentic’ self, or true self. There is an opportunity to ‘let go’ of thoughts and ideas about self and experience and just become the essence that lies beneath the surface of all of that narrated detritus.
Trust and integrity are fundamental cohorts in the creation of this gateway to other. The yoga practitioner needs to feel a sense of trust-worthiness in the teacher who acts as doorway into the experience of ‘altered’ consciousness. In these pre-savasana forays, the yoga teacher is most like the Shaman, guiding and leading the students through the gateway of thought via the field of felt experience to cross the bridge into possibility and expanded consciousness. Like a most benevolent shepherd, s/he holds this space with compassion, awareness and clear and present attention. Integrity, commitment, and experience are the cartographers of the teacher’s guidance.

As a teacher of this discipline, I can tell you that there is nothing more rich and humbling than seeing a room full of students lying in savasana. It’s like stepping into naptime at pre-school, but the children have been replaced by adults. There is a serenity and innocence that enters into the space. The texture of the room is languid, etheric and charged. The furrowed eyebrows that arrived to class give way to smooth skin. Fingers uncurl, lying in receptivity beside bodies surrendered to gravity. Breath becomes the omniscient narrator of collective experience. It is here that the magic shows up and transformation can occur. Magic, after all, is merely a shift in consciousness. In these moments of release, we are reminded that being is omnipotent, breathing; the most valuable currency, our innate nature; ever-present. Here, we temporarily suspend/dissolve the illusions we hold about delineated separateness, to transform into presence itself. Many times, I have wished for the opportunity to lengthen this scape of time, not wanting to draw students’ awareness back into the practice room. I would like to gift them a longer journey into the truthful and profound simplicity of their authentic selves.
“Inhale deeply, feel the body receive the breath,” I say speaking softly, not wanting to jar that dreamscape from which the students are returning. They re-embody themselves through gentle movement, re-connecting to the material aspects of their bodies, the practice room, the environment itself. They look like emergent, underwater versions of themselves having just discovered a new set of webbing that grew between their fingers. A new awareness accompanies them in this transition. Sometimes I will catch a flicker of surprise, as though that sense of deep peace, of connection to authentic self (some would call this source), arrived like an unexpected expression of cosmic delight.

Time,

space

&

essence in

this is how it feels...

crystalline harmony.

I am a rock, I am an “I”-sland

~when the seas are rougher than you planned. You hail yourself a life-raft and get down to the business of finding yourself an island. In this case a rock island on the shore of Lake of Bays on a Sunday afternoon on a November day warmed by Chinook-like swirl and drenched in sunlight too-bright-for mid November. You walk along the shore, trespassing if you need to, making your way through brambles and branches. You step your agile feet upon rust coloured leaf strewn ground, intuitively scurry around any gnarled roots and find a place of solidity upon which to perch. There you sit in worship, thankful for the gift of this warm november day, thankful for the wisdom from you Sisters and thankful for the opportunity to really test your practice. Your head a cacophony of swirly theories about him and you, about love and almost love, about deliberate absence and the clever ways your imagination weaves.
So you sit and you chant, you call upon something bigger than what it might feel like to imagine a wounded heart. You give it up to a force outside the landmine(d) laden landscape of your drama-hungry mind. Above you blue sky, is curtained by striations of white clouds that weave a canopy in front of the vastness. You close your eyes and chant, singing loud enough for the boaters across the water to hear, baying loud enough for the straggling Canadian Geese to notice and with enough intention to will a smooth canvas into reality.
The fruit of your practice arrives as silky clarity that has distilled itself into stillness. You open your eyes and tip back to look above. Blue sky, a breadth as wide as it is infinite stretches itself from tree-topped edge to tree-topped edge. Back in your body, you hear her call to movement, and so you do. You bend and preen, swoon and morph, reminding yourself again and again of this constant that is impermanence. Tree pose turns into standing splits and then rises into warrior three and back to downward dog. This home, your body, a flexible inspiration to a mind which seeks the illusion of un-changeable. Change only is, you remind your Self, the constant upon which to rest. You look out into the water, from the safe-seeming perch of your mini-rock island and watch as the wake of the boat’s waves makes it way closer to your tiny shore-line. You follow the wake’s ebb towards your boots on the beach, telling yourself arrogantly, no need to move them, it won’t come in that far. But it does and you have to come down off your perch and move your boots away from the incoming furrows of the water’s stir. You finish your moving practice and fold your scarf into a purple square upon where you’ll sit. You cozy up to “in-breath”, form a root-ful connection with “out-breath” and make friends with the pause who inserts herself in between the two. You keep doing this, feeling a bit of the chill that lands as sunlight pulls herself Westward. When you open your eyes again, the sky looks like finger-painted rills of amber, rouge and terra-cotta. Briefly, you remember what you felt like when you first stepped out the door.   Not long ago, you would have re-created that drama-driven heat, re-fashioned the licks of flames, wound up a few fire-balls to launch toward some imagined place of blame. Today though, you went to that island, who’s shore-line is bordered only by refuge. The hot of your craving lulled into liquid by the sweet fuel of practice.