This Moment To Be Free

About six months ago, in the midst of a powerful time of transition in my life I was riding the elevator at the yoga institute, when I noticed a flyer for a class taught by one of the more revered teachers. I do not remember the exact wording of the flyer, but it was for a class on chanting the mantras of Ganesh, and it was happening that very day about half and hour from that moment.

Now, I already liked Ganesh – I have a little Ganesh statue, and a necklace with a Ganesh charm – I find his plump, relaxed body appealing, I like his elephant head, I love that he rides on a little mouse…I love that there is a hindu deity whose special function is to remove obstacles…I decided to attend the class…and I am so glad I did!

Lovingly and with good humor the teacher broke down the syllables of the sanskrit words, explained their essential meaning, and got the class chanting right away: Om gam ganapataye namaha – a shout-out to the universe, proclaiming the greatness of Ganesh.

Over the next weeks and months,I used the beautiful and resonant tool – Om gam ganapataye namaha – to chant my way through to the next thing whatever that would be…I found myself quite often chanting “Om gam ganapataye namaha, Om gam ganapataye namaha”.

As I chanted I would hold in my heart the prayer for Ganesh to please help me find my way…asking for the removal of both inner and outer obstacles that prevented me from hearing and acting upon the wisdom of my inner voice.

Please Ganesh, I thought as I chanted, help me know the best way to stay true to myself…the best choices for me to make…

And sure enough – whether it was an external force named Ganesh, or whether it was, is, a part of myself that Ganesh represents, I learned to chant my way through.

I found a job I like and enrolled in yoga teacher training, I am investigating my next steps for education and livelihood — the specifics of what the universe and I manifested and the choices I made are not important – what is important is that while I move through this transitional time, I have sounds, ancient sounds that can buoy me up and carry me through…resonant sounds from the essence and center of the universe that are waves upon which I can travel, bringing me forward and helping me cut through obstacles in my path whether inside me or out in the world.

I have music that I can make to vibrate the part of me that awakens and becomes one with the energetic force that is Ganesh and part of me gives strength to all of me as I go forth on my journey.

om shanti.

…being authentic, real, is being and expressing who i really am and not living life as a copy according to images shaped by acceptability and tradition and expectation…or by money…it is knowing my own strengths and building and expanding upon and from these strengths, yet accepting and honoring my weaknesses…it is finding my place in this material world, my own space to plant myself and grow and thrive in harmony with others and also being able to protect my integrity and boundaries from the influence and expectations, pressures and images of external forces — being able to sort out what is of other humans and of their judgments, images and expectations…and what is mine…finding the original core of me and sincerely expressing from that essential place…well, that’s a lot…finding balance, my center, my strong points and feeling into what is real and genuine and sincere and what is just programming, imprinting from this life and maybe even past lives…

…taking what is mine and leaving the rest behind…leaving it behind, because it is not mine…

…not mine…so in the middle of my life (or what I hope is still just the middle), not in crisis and from a foundation of relative peace and some security (although that word has connotations I do not like), I am exploring what I need, what is real for me, what I can do now to spend the remaining time I have here on earth in a way that is authentic to who I am…a peaceful, easeful, useful life where my heart can shine and I can express myself from a real place…

…where I do not have to fight, but can take in and filter out…breathing as I move…taking in what life throws at me or gently gives me or abundantly showers upon me…breathe it all in like I breathe in air…let what nourishes me fill me and feed me…let what I do not need, what is not helpful or nourishing or healthy leave…breath it out…and in the same way as I breath out the old air, the toxins, from my body I can allow that which is toxic and unnecessary on all levels to depart from me…from my life, from my energy field…release it and let it go…back to where it is authentic for that energy itself to be…

…allow the glue which is holding imprinting and that which is not real…to dissolve…allow the stuck images to loosen from their moorings within me and sail away…off into the stream of life, and away back to where they came from, back to where and to whom they belong…

…as I breath in, oh god, oh beautiful life…let me take in what is nourishing and light-filled for me, acknowledging that what this is may be different for different people and may change for me as time goes on and I learn and grow even more…but let me be able to take in all my experience and keep only what feels good to me, integrate with and into myself what feels right for me to accept and have be with me and in me…

…and as I breath out, oh blessed mother, oh beautiful world…let me let go of what I do not need with me…of what does not belong to me and what does not serve me…let me not carry with me what is not authentic to me…let me not express words which are not truly my words…let me not think thoughts which are not truly my thoughts…let me not harbor as my flesh food which does not nourish me…let me shed the unreal as if it were air I breath out and let me become real with the air I take in…

…with each breath and each cycle of breath may I become stronger and more real and more genuine so that finally each cell in my body will be filled with your light and vibrate only with the realness of the essence of who I really am, and who I came here originally to be

…and may I find a away to express myself, authentically, here on earth…may I enter fully into the stream — the flowing river of your light…and may my livelihood be real and may there be a use for me…

as I breath in, I take in all, as I breath out I keep what I truly need and can use…

as I breath in I accept all of my experience as valuable and real and needed

…and as I breath out let me move on…

I realized this morning – became aware of the stirring that has been wanting me to hear – it is I who have abandoned me…I am the one I need to reconcile with and connect to and rejoin and make peace with and listen to and who needs to hear me and I am the love I have been missing…

I have been feeling for awhile, that while it is true that I feel hurt around my parents every time I have contact with them, and while it is true that they over-rode me and did not listen to me, and while it is true that I went through another round of this feeling with each of them lately…what is also true, and more meaningful for me right now is the layer beneath that and I have been asking to get to that layer.

Which is that after I came of age, I was the one who did not listen to me – in many ways, I abandoned myself. Although, much like my parents, I believed I was making good decisions for myself and I was trying to find a wholesome, healing path…much of what hurts now, of what I am disappointed and regretful about now emanates from my own choices, not things that were imposed upon me.

During all my years of fertility, I chose not to have a child – because the timing was not right, or I was not with the right person, or I did not have the income to afford a child, or I did not feel capable, or I listened to the voices around me telling me not to. So I chose that. And I chose to leave my first college, and I chose to have sex without protection and I chose to have an abortion, and I chose to stay in my second college even when I did not really want to be there, and I chose to study ancient languages, and I chose to stay in New York, and I chose to marry J, and I chose to leave NY and study art, and I chose to come back. And I chose to give myself to D. as a teacher, and I chose to stay with her for over ten years, and I chose to do that even after she became abusive. And I chose to work for Dr R and I chose to stay there for over ten years also. And I chose to try to start a business with D and I chose to get help in therapy and I chose to stop trying to make a living at art, and I chose to leave D, and cease contact with her, and I chose to pursue a graduate degree in public health administration, and I chose to marry R, and I chose to take time off to study yoga and re-connect with myself and I chose to start this blog, and I chose to take the job at the apothecary and I chose to start yoga teacher training and I chose to stay home yesterday and take care of my body and I am choosing to write this now and I am about to choose to leave the house n a few minutes and go to class, and then to work…

Some of my choices have been great, and some have been terrible and some have resulted in pleasure and some in pain. I cannot know what the result of each of my choices will be, but as I grow I can learn to listen to myself better than I maybe have in the past, and to make choices that are more in line with my soul.

I do feel sad at some of the choices I have made…probably saddest, so far, that I have not had a child, and I feel that most of what I am doing now is to try to fill my life in all the places where I would really prefer that a child be…all the time, the devotion, the resources and nurturing and energy that I am giving to myself and to R and our cats and to trying to work out my dharma/lifepath/career choices what have you is energy that I would prefer to be giving to a baby born of my body and of R’s…but this is not happening and it is not happening as a result of choices I and we have made in our adult lives.

And maybe one day soon we will turn to each other and say that we are ready to adopt a child – that we feel the abundance and are ready to give the extra we have to a little being who has already come onto this earth through the body of another. It is a huge choice and risk to do that and we are not at that place yet, if we ever will be.

But now I need to go – out into the September world, into the world of constant choice and constant hurt and sadness and love and devotion and creation and destruction…I have a quotation on my fridge by Sri Aurobino: By your stumbling the world is made whole.

Peace.

Now that I am working again – just 3 times a week, but very physical and intense work, and in school, I am starting to feel a bit stressed and I am feeling a few aches and pains and my breathing is not as deep.

I am aware of the irony of waking up and feeling pressured to get to that yoga mat and meditate and move my body – because it is homework! Because Patanjali said you must practice every day, with earnest, sincere devotion, over time…but Patanjali did not have to take the subway to school and I assume he was not worried about income and taxes and government bailouts…

I am not meaning to complain – I feel blessed to have the opportunity to study – I am just kind of floored that even this kind of study becomes pressured and stressful…I have an anatomy and physiology quiz on Saturday. I have not done the reading yet, I am nervous about it…my back hurts, my neck hurts…I do need to learn this information to help my body and those of the people I may teach some day soon and I want to approach this with joy and devotion and not worry about the exam!

But in two hours I will have to get on the train and be jostled about – i only have 2 hours now to study…I could go and get my nails done – and study while I am getting a pedicure…that might feel nice – and then I would have my pretty nails to admire while doing yoga later…

I wish I were more devoted…I wish I were able to stop worrying about any of this and just enjoy it! I will try now: just read the information as if it were a book I just picked up that is informative and will help me…no strings attached, just a nice book…just relaxing here on the couch reading about the body and her needs…it is silly to stress out about…yoga!

peace.

This planet is a cell, a living cell and we are all parts of her and we are all parts of the vast phenomenal body of which this cell is a part and we do not know how big it is, any of it, or how small its parts can be, how deep down this goes and how far up and which direction is which anyway? God and the fabric of god…the sutras, the holy books of all religions…the threads of god…

The babel of many languages, the susurus of the hum of the buzz of the voices, the hum of the minds, the beating of the hearts and beyond that and inside that and through it…the sound of om.

I want to find it…I want to hear that and the only way to hear that sound is to listen, listen …shhhhh….om.

om…

I keep thinking that I have not found my dharma yet – dharma being purpose in life – my work – the reason why I am here, and to my mind, the source/wellspring of my livelihood…maybe i have found it, and do not recognize it as such. maybe this is it – maybe i am writing my dharmic first book. Maybe not. My dearest friends like to read what I write and they love what I express, say I have written what they feel but did not know it until I wrote it…what is ego and what is love in this experience? i love the process of writing and I get excited by positive comment, sad when I email a post and there is no response.

We are reading the sutras of Patanjali in the yoga teacher training course I started last week – sutras means threads. The threads of yoga – the warp and weft that explain what the cloth of yoga is – what we can enfold around ourselves and the fiber that can become our structure…

The second sutra explains it all, apparently one can read only that and understand the essence of yoga – so it is the golden thread; the one that you pull when you want to unravel everything. It is “yogas chitta vritti nirodhah”, or to Swami Satchidananda who wrote the version of the book we are reading, “yoga is the restraint of the modifications of the mindstuff”. Our teacher, Beth, compared the mind with the heart — as the heart pumps blood, so the mind pumps thoughts.

The heart pumps blood in a regular pulse that keeps us alive, it is the blessed rhythm, the underpinning of life itself – the regular beating of the heart. But we don’t listen to it all day. That muscle simply lives and beats inside us, keeping us going, allowing us to move and breath and grow and go…

The mind beats too – it pumps thoughts that it thinks keep us alive, that it believes are vital, that it, especially the reptillian part, believes will protect us, help us, let us survive here on the earth…maybe these thoughts, or ones like them, did once help and the reptillian brain then goes on autopilot, feeding them to us again and again…

And we need yoga – the physical and then the more subtle forms – meditation, repetition, breathing – to restrain, to calm all those thoughts that are pumped in … so that we can discern which are really going to help us live, and which are not…which arise from the heart, the soul, the inner guru prompting us toward our dharma…and which are remnants – old impressions, reactions, images, false beliefs arising from the lizard brain, the little reptillian creature curled inside us where the head meets the neck…calling out “survive this way, survive that way, protect yourself, be angry now, be fearful now”…

I do a lot of nothing, still – I did not go to yoga this morning, but staye din bed with the cats and ate eggs and drank tea and watched a bio-movie about daphne du maurier. It was a pretty movie, full of the seashore, and lovely clothes and interesting dramatic lighting… I watched actors protraying famous people experience and suffer and think their many thoughts…

I don’t know why I feel the need a couple of times a week to climb into bed and watch a movie for two or three hours, I just do. I always have, since I was a kid… is this compatible with yoga? Will this help me find my dharma? Shouldn’t I be out in the world attending yoga class or n the living room on my mat doing yoga?

I need to watch the last 10 minutes of this film and then get dressed and go to work…

peace.

It occurred to me yesterday that every time, in the spiral cycle of life experiencing, that I encounter my own primal wound and begin to feel exposed and vulnerable I also begin to experience the sensation of feeling awkward around people, needy and wishing to be accepted, and feeling the trepidation that ‘I will die alone’.

And I realized that this fear that I will die alone is simply the next layer in exploring my own wounded self…naturally an infant or young child who feels rejected, unseen and unheard will feel alone and fear death. So that is where I go when I begin to really separate and feel my own self, take my own space…remove the defenses and be more open and real in the world. “The mask is down, I will be judged, I will be hurt…I will always be alone and will die”. As a child that place is the place from which I began to not be wholly me.

So clearly that aloneness is the place I need to be right now. Alone is where I find myself much of the time these days, and it is where I feel most comfortable in my skin when I can drop beneath the layer of fear that I have “done something wrong, have been rejected and this feeling of being left out and forgotten about will last for always”…

It has just happened that recently no one is really around – I am married, so each morning and night I am with my husband, and when I am home I am with my cats – but the friend who has been with me all summer has disappeared into her work and other friends are into their lives and work. I really began to understand what was going on the other day when the woman I was scheduled to meet for lunch forgot about it…

I sat for a couple of days with the feeling of having been rejected and then I felt the hand of god, felt that the universe was putting me into this alone place…that I need to be alone right now to feel beneath the fear that I will die alone. I need to relax into aloneness and truly separate myself and feel free. I need to be alone right now to explore the space within me and around me and know that if I am not seen and not heard it is fine now, because I am an adult and not a little child…that if no one remembers to play with me, spend time with me, include me in the conversation, include me in the group…I will not die.

When I feel left out I can remind myself that I need to be alone and that I can choose to pull back and separate myself into experiencing my own world on many levels – that I can toddle off with confidence that I am safe and I can explore the things of life that call out to me and interest me and consume me — the expansion and unfoldment of who I really am — the part of me that needs to unfold apart from the approval and acceptance of other people, apart from company and friendship and family — filling the well, so that I can emerge with more to give and with something to serve up — so that I can know my dharma and find my right livelihood in this world.

So the next thing to explore is this layer – this fresh layer underneath the rage that was covering my primal wound…this layer that says I will die alone if i am not accepted and seen all the time and that to feel left out is to be in danger…I need to allow myself to move back from people when I feel left out around them, to move away and into myself but without cutting off, without judgment and without fear… just into my own space and into my journey deeper, into peace.

amen. om shanti om.

…saying om just now — opening my mouth and letting the sound aah come out followed by ooh at first feels like saying “oww” – the expression of the wound, of pain — “oww!” Then there is Mmmm. Mmmm, means “feels good, tastes good — mmmm”

So saying om is to say ow, followed by mmm — to express pain, followed by pleasure and then “shanti” peace. I hurt I hurt..ow…then mmm….I feel good, I feel peaceful…mmmm….shanti…

then later after chanting om for awhile I felt “ahhhhh…” ah, feels goood….ahh, release, relaxation….ahhh, letting go…into mmmmm….nice, relaxed, peaceful ….ahhhh, mmmmm….shanti….

aum shanti.

I have been feeling lonely lately when I am alone. This is unusual for me and I have been wondering why this is so. I realized that I have not been feeling angry in recent days – and this, after feeling enraged to one degree or another for months.

Now that the rage has subsided I feel lonely. Maybe the rage has been keeping me company and beneath it is this layer – loneliness. I am like an onion; the process of knowing my self and getting to my true center, peace, is like peeling the layers of an onion. The layer I am at now feels vulnerable and exposed, this new layer.I feel lonely with out my rage to keep me company, to talk to me constantly to tell me I am right about everything. Underneath that was -is – a feeling of being wrong about many things. Or, a feeling of not knowing, of uncertainty about many things…

It is a beautiful day – wind blowing through the trees, blue sky, not too hot or humid. Sunlight speckling the leaves outside the window… feels like the day after a storm – everything clear and open and washed clean. I feel that way inside too. Cleaner and washed. On a feeling level this open new place also feels unprotected and accessible, assailable, defenseless, exposed, insecure, susceptible, unguarded, unprotected, unsafe, weak…vulnerable.

It makes sense – when skin is open because of a wound, it needs to heal into a scab and be protected until a new skin forms. This is true for the inner wound – the primal wound – when exposed it needs to heal, to be protected, until a new skin forms… a new skin made of something else besides anger. So the old protection for the wound in me was anger, rage, defensiveness and the new protection will be – what? Martha Beck wrote something I have been reading over and over the past few days: You get to decide whether your toughness will look like unreachable bitterness or unstoppable resilience; your tenderness the raw vulnerability of a never-healing wound, or a kindness so deep it heals every wound it touches.

I have been practicing resilience and kindness… and I feel lonely. The rage kept me company. I felt right and I felt full. Now it is just me, deciding I want to be strong and I want to be kind, and also dismayed at my own faults while trying to accept myself as I am with faults and all…

Faults — fissures — holes — wounds — cracks — depths — entry points into the center…maybe faults are good (and not something to be ashamed of) because they can become portals, entryways to go deeper in to the self, in through the veneer, the presentation I cooked up around my true self and let me get in, navigate down, in, through to the center of who I really am…and yoga says that place is peace.

Deep in the center of our being is the place that joins the eternal om, and in that place we join everything and the universe and we are one. The center is beyond bliss, beyond anything, and is a place of oneness. The place where the sound om came from, the place where om goes…aum.

So maybe I am aum-sick…I am lonely for aum. I want to go aum.

I can go aum now – sit on my mat, vulnerable, and from that wounded place, from my faults, from the desire to connect with peace, breath deeply, open my mouth, let out a sound, and go aum…

Om.

amen.

How very strange it is that the hardest thing to do is to just accept myself and be myself. You would think it would be the easiest, simplest thing to do – I am me, I just be me, accept myself where and how and who I am, notice things that need to shift or change, work on changing them with out judgment or shame, and move lightly through life growing and experiencing and having lovely new adventures…even the hard lessons would be exciting moments where I see room for growth and take the challenge with enthusiasm and heart…

But it is just the opposite — I am most uncomfortable when “exposed” – I feel sticky and trapped in roles and images that have set my body into uncomfortable positions…I fight change, I blame and feel guilty and feel depressed and sad and angry and remorseful and regretful…I enjoy much of my experience but do not love to be confronted with places thatneed to grow – do not feel blissfully welcoming of each new challenge…the hardest thing there is to to just be free, and be wholly myself, “warts” and all…

Everywhere in me I bump up against places I have been told are bad and wrong – places, traits — things I feel I must hide, or when they do get revealed, of which I feel ashamed and want to hide…

And then there is the raging blame against parents, and god for “making” me this way — that is, ways I am ashamed of…

I wish I could be free and could accept myself totally and enjoy movement and growth and really be happy with myself exactly as I am, as I worte in my long poem/prayer yesterday…

And I need to accept this…this place, this state of struggle… all i can do is be my own best mother and best friend and best sister and accept myself in exactly this place…

Even though I am struggling and fighting with accepting myself just as I am, I love and accept myself in this struggle. I love and accept myself just in this moment in my life, exactly as I am.

Please god, help me to move through this place to embrace myself and my journey and my own personal path through life with love and compassion and strength.

amen.

svaha, so let it be.