Sex (yes, sex)

When I was in graduate school, I had the great fortune of taking a science writing course with a professor of immunology who was also a beautiful writer and poet. I learned from Gerald Callahan that the memory of the immune system--that is, the part of us that is entirely devoted to discerning, moment by moment, what is Self and what is Not Self--is more comprehensive and eternal than cognitive memory. In other words, though I may forget names, dates, and events of my life, my immune system will remember everything.

That may not strike one as something particularly fascinating at first read. But consider this: every cell in the body contains not only the memories of all those who have shared  our lives, but physical evidence of them as well. That is, if you have shared a cold with someone, you carry inside of you--forever--part of them, imprinted inside your glassy cells. Like ghosts, they continue to haunt us even long past their exits from our lives or their own.

When this system goes awry, the body will begin to attack itself as though it were the enemy. Who are we, and how do the intimate relationships in our lives expand or contract that sense of Self?

I think of this beautiful work of the immune system every time I miss my father, dead now over 7 years. We experience this haunting as a feeling--a yearning, a longing, a hunger. As though every cell is suddenly seeking the next chapter to a story that cannot be completed. It dangles, unbound. Incomplete. But here is another perspective--a vibrant, sensuous, equally confounding truth. Every lover you have ever been with is also a part of you, and this is something the yogis (and many great masters of many traditions) have known for thousands of years.

A few weeks ago, a beloved student of mine lamented a recent breakup with a man with whom she had shared an intense but brief relationship. As I listened to her regrets, confusion, frustration, and hurt, I heard echos of all my friends who have grappled with the tricky terrain of intimacy, sex, identity, and integrity. How do you open yourself fully and completely to another without losing balance? "I just wish I had never slept with him," this beautiful woman groaned. "I think I should just be celibate...things would be so much easier." "Why?" I asked, "What exactly do you think sex can or cannot do?" She shook her head and laughed, "Well the problem is now that he is all I think about."

My friend felt haunted.

According to the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, suffering arises from attachment and aversion. That is, we experience suffering when we hanker excessively for things that give us pleasure or when we push away the things we fear will cause us pain. And most of us expend the majority of our time and energy striving to accumulate more of what we want and less of what we don't want. So long as we get the good stuff and keep the bad stuff at bay, we enjoy a tenuous peace...but we never rest, and we are rendered vulnerable to the slightest shift in the balance. So, we yoga teachers talk a lot about "letting go of attachment" and "sitting with discomfort." It sounds simple enough, but apply it to your actual lived life--the stuff of bedrooms, board rooms, and highways, and it gets a little more complicated.

Yoga, in its most essential teaching, is the experience of union--the realization of the oneness of being. Most of us experience ourselves as separate, skin-bound entities and egos whose lives are made up of mini victories and losses. But according to this tradition, what we really want is to feel whole and part of a whole. Instead, we mostly wander around feeling like holes in search of something to fill us up. For some it is shopping, for others it is control. Some fill up with money and things, while others stuff themselves with the attention/affection of another. Be it food, drugs, technology, power, or self righteousness, what we binge on to feel whole is what keeps us behaving like holes. The true happiness and freedom we seek, according to the yogic scriptures, comes from the merging. Remembering. Re-membering. Bringing back into the body the memory of who you really are. Whole. Not dis-membered, fragmented, and empty. But whole, complete, and full. And to remember also suggests to once again find membership. To be a member.

Of course, it is worth noting that a more antiquated English referred to sexual relationships as "knowing" one another. Though we tend to joke about this as "knowing" another physically, the real sense of the expression runs much deeper. After all, to be fully known--seen, recognized, heard, held, and embraced--is the true power of sex. We don't just want to be adored, we want to be remembered. And when, in the embrace of another, we are ourselves reminded, there is magic. But when the embrace is hollow and you are left feeling entirely forgotten or unseen, there is despair.

What my sad student was feeling was the brokenness and fragmentation that follows in the wake of a breakup or a loss. She felt rejected because this man was no longer communicating with her. The affection and attention she had felt so filled by were now memories. Ghosts. Like the sun that once warmed and nurtured her had gone black.

In sex, ideally, two individuals share for a moment--however brief or dramatic--a complete dissolution of separateness that goes beyond the physical, whether or not we are cognizant of that power. For a moment, there is a complete merging with something beyond each individuals singularity. Perhaps this is why the ethical tenet of brahmacharya is such a charged one for yogis. Translated by some as self imposed celibacy, this yama inevitably creates a lot of questions about whether we are seeking to live as part of this world or apart from this world. When Patanjali lists the yamas, he also describes what a practitioner who is firmly established in them can expect. And in the case of brahmacharya, we are told that we will enjoy true health and vitality. Vigor. This is no surprise, as many spiritual traditions do in fact encourage celibacy as a way of harnessing the energy one may need for the rigors of spiritual practice.

But I am not sure about that, as I look around at all the universe, teeming with life that is creative, revolutionary, dynamic, fluid, and sensuous. So, I tend to sit more with the translations given to me by some of my most influential teachers. Brahmacharya is more literally understood as "the way to Brahman," which is like saying "the way to God." Or Source. Or The Divine. Or The One. Or.....

The point is, we enjoy vitality when we don't waste our energy on pursuits that have nothing to do with leading us toward yoga--union, remembering who we are. And an awful lot of people waste their powerful sexual energy in relationships that make them feel even more alone, even more separate, even more incomplete. If acharya is like a chariot--like a car, a vehicle, a way, a means--then it matters which one you choose. There is a part of you that is forever reminding you who you really are, and each time you share that kind of intimacy with another, you braid them into your physiological, emotional, and energetic fabric. Every cell knows every lover you have ever embraced. And, as my dear sad friend felt, those cells orient toward that lover like sunflowers to the sun. So devastating can it be then when that sun goes out and every cell continues to wait longingly. Because each cell knows that lover to have been a part of you at some moment, however briefly, together you made your way to Brahman. To Yoga. Union. Oneness.

It is said that what we seek is the seeker...that all the practices, techniques, disciplines, and austerities are essentially ways (means, methods) to remind us of who we have always been. Our goal then is to remember. And there is no more powerful memory than that of the system whose entire raison d'etre is to sort through what is Self and what is not. So I suspect that sex, as a method, a means, a technique, a technology, is one of the most powerful ways to reach Brahman because it circumvents the careful policing we all do every day to keep ourselves separate. But it's a powerful method, and one that can just as likely steer one more deeply into isolation, disconnection, and fragmentation if you, well, choose the wrong acharya.

In the sexual afterglow (or aftermath, depending on your situation), we have the opportunity to stay connected--against all our cultural training and insecurity and need for control. To my beautiful student whose heart is aching and hungry, I offer this humble reflection that you are already whole, unfurling cell by cell into this universe as you slowly discern all you are and all you are not. That you ache for someone whose light once fed you is neither an indication that he is the sun upon whom you now depend for happiness nor is he the blight that wiped out your vitality. Like every lover we know in this lifetime, he is helping you remember something...and it isn't about pleasure or pain.

Who you are--becoming and unbecoming--is an eternal work in progress, shaped, in part, again and again by those whose lives are forever grafted to your own. When the path leads you toward the darkness of being alone, isolated, or forgotten, remember that there is a true and potent exchange of energy that occurs when you merge with another that you are recalibrating moment by moment. So, yes, choose the acharya wisely, but don't confuse the method for the goal. You are already whole--now go out there and merge with those who know it, too.

Lost and Found

"Children are all foreigners"

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Over the past weeks, I have returned to Emerson's wisdom again and again. I spent the month of August teaching yoga in Taipei as part of the Taipei National University of the Arts summer dance festival, TaiepeIDEA, which invites guest faculty from all over the world to work with children, high schoolers, and college/professional/adult dancers who come mostly from Taiwan and mainland China. It was an amazing adventure that reminded me of the importance of remaining open, like a child, in awe of each and every stunning moment we have in this lifetime.

When we let go of the need to be something or someone perfectly defined, we make room for the unexpected. And it is the unexpected--sometimes painful sometimes beautiful--that so often awakens us to aspects of ourselves we scarcely dreamed existed.

Sometimes we have to, quite literally, get lost in order to be found. To discover.
Or recover.

Of course, we need not travel any further than our own lives to cultivate a sense of exploration...what better landscape than the peaks and valleys of our daily experiences? I have found that each time I travel afar, I better understand "home," as a place and as an experience that begins and ends inside of me. When we take time off from the routines that normally dictate and frame our responses and understandings, we get a glimpse of what truly carries, supports, nurtures, and inspires us. 

And we also gain perspective on what binds, limits, and burdens us. 

In High Tide in Tucson, Barbara Kingsolver marvels at Buster, the Bahamian hermit crab who inadvertently immigrated from the beach to her desert home in Tucson, AZ in a shell she collected while strolling the beach. Surprise gives way to a low-grade guilt that gives way to fascination as Kingsolver and her daughter decide that, "when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and give it the best home you can." And as Buster begins to settle into his new home in the desert, so far from the Caribbean seas of his infancy, something shifts in his behavior. What Kingsolver observes is so extraordinarily poetic and mysterious in part because it echoes something so entirely ordinary and familiar and ancient.  They witness Buster's gradual shift from awkward disorientation to a mysterious conciliatory dance to a rhythm that can only be described as high tide...in Tucson. In other words, Buster, like all of us, has an innate ability to tune in and listen and hear and feel and sense and smell and know hope and Home...no matter where he is under the weight of whichever latest shell he carries upon his back.

We find our way.

My time in Taiwan was extraordinary, in part because I had never been to Asia and thus had no pre-conceptions about what to expect. I was Emerson's foreigner in the truest sense--a child completely in awe of all I saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched. I arrived raw and bare--the shell of my known life cast aside somewhere between Tokyo and my first day of teaching a relatively unknown practice to students who spoke little to no English, much less Sanskrit. I found myself stripped of all the usual tools and props that might otherwise support or dictate my teaching--they had no prior experience with yoga and wouldn't understand the most specific of cues I might give. We were all together in that space where native language and cultural context can't bridge the gaps. I couldn't just say, for example, "Down Dog" or "sit up tall" or "inhale, exhale."

I had come to Taipei as a teacher from a foreign land only to find that most of what we teach in yoga relies upon so many givens. A given context, a given motivation, a given set of cues. A given language. In a few simple syllables, I can guide my U.S. students through a myriad of shapes and experiences, from standing toes together to lying in the corpse. And somehow (sometimes) I can convey, too, the essence of the pose, can invite them to feel what it is to be a snake shedding skins, belly to the earth...or feel what it means to be the corpse, letting go of everything in complete surrender. Because we share the language and the context--we find ourselves in a class together and can safely assume an awful lot.

But when stripped of the given language (be it English or the language of yoga as a discipline), stripped of the cues and the culture of it, I began to see IT--yoga, and by extension something far less easy to label--differently. I had to distill the subject matter down to something beyond language. To something I could convey, inspire, encourage, and support.

What is it, really? What exactly was I there to teach? What, at the end of the month, did I want these incredible beings to have, to feel, to know? To remember? When you have to start from scratch, and you cannot even take for granted the underlying motivations or desires of your students, what exactly do you teach? And how?

And upon returning to the States, I found that though I was "home," everything had shifted. What I see around me--in the (how else can I say it) scene that yoga has become (the magazines, fashion lines, jewelry lines, vitamin/supplement lines, shoes, festivals, conferences, etc) no longer offers me refuge. There is something empty about it, something I once crawled into but now must follow my instincts and scuttle away in search of a more honest home.

My time as the foreigner has made me, to a certain extent, a foreigner in my own discipline. I am not sure, in other words, what it is--stripped of the merchandising, glamour, gloss, bells and whistles, cliche and commodification. So much of what I see is just another trussed up version of the same old stories...

But I am jumping ahead. Impatient. What can I say, I am from a land of impatient people.

My first few days in Taipei were as exhilarating as they were intimidating. The Taiwanese are the most gracious and friendly people I have ever met. The students were eager and quick to smile, even as we were all adjusting to the sheer awkward newness of yoga in the land of dance. Everyone calls you "Teacher," Laoshi, and even those who were not in my classes would pass by smiling shyly and waving to say "Hello, Teacher." Their questions (or later, their warm and loving responses to classes)  tingled in my ears like the gorgeous insect sounds that pulsed and surged in the mountains all around us. Familiar yet totally unfamiliar. Comforting yet foreign. I didn't necessarily know what they were saying...but I felt we were on the cusp of meeting, of truly connecting. Our words were like empty shells, lovely and scattered, passed back and forth by tides we had not yet attuned ourselves to. 

It wasn't lost upon me that the students seemingly have an innate and organic comfort with recognizing the teacher--all teachers--reverently, humbly, and with enthusiasm. In my own training and practice as a teacher of yoga, no invocation has been as powerful or influential as the Guru mantra, which honors the teacher in all things at all times. It is all the teacher. May we have the good sense to see it. May we have the humility to honor it. Even when it makes us vulnerable. Especially when it makes us vulnerable. 

Because it is here--when the hard shell falls away and we feel most exposed-- that we tend to flee...to run, hide, get compulsive, get manic. Frantic to get back to the comforts of habit, the known, the givens. The drinker drinks, the shopper buys something new, the control freak clamps down, the defeatist retreats. 

Yet the teacher--the guru-- is that force that is coaxing us one step beyond the old story, one breath beyond the resignation to who or what it is we think we are. One moment more in the unknown so we might truly meet ourselves, know ourselves. The teachers in my life have been exactly those circumstances and individuals that blew like typhoon winds until my clenched fists released whatever tenuous tether I thought so necessary, be it a man or a job or numbers on a scale or numbers in my account. In the letting go, we more surely let something in.

This is nowhere more obvious to me than in my own asana practice, where I settle into the posture--into its experience, its lesson, its challenge, and its evolution--on the exhale. When I watch students learn to breathe and make the breath primary in their practice, I also watch them more gracefully receive and more deeply express the asanas, the transitions among the asanas, and their truth of it. Their truth. Not mine. And so it is with my own practice, at that soft still hollow that concludes the exhalation, the asana and I are one story. Like the wave that pulls back to the sea folds into that space and becomes the power behind and beneath the next articulation crashing ashore.

But it's also true that when I hold a bit of the last inhale in--as though clinging to that breath with fear I will not receive more breath with untold new messages ferried upon it--my posture is crippled and static. It becomes a stilted performance hiding a deep fissure, a cellular or molecular disconnection between what I am expressing and what is actually happening. To merge with what is requires surrendering what has been. As Utah Phillips says, "The past didn't go anywhere."

And the future? Well, we know the trite admonishments around that. It doesn't exist.

But it's more than that, isn't it? The future doesn't just not exist...it is also always envisioned upon what has happened before, what we expect it to look like. And that vision, as limited and limiting as it is, changes when the earth beneath you shifts and the scenery and the customs and familiar all change; then there are new possibilities. The future shifts course.

In Taiwan, the challenges of the language barrier were amplified by the greater complexity of introducing Yoga--a practice and experience of wholeness and union--to dancers: a culture-within-a-culture, where the sense of self and body are so often steeped in harsh and dispiriting beliefs, traditions, aesthetics, and ideals. By no means do I wish to suggest that this is necessarily so. In fact, dance should and can be a glorious revolutionary celebration of the body, of the individual, of the creative sensual unbridled pulse of life. But there is an underbelly of the dance culture that often leads to corrosive self image and obsession with perfection and performance--two things from which, I believe yoga is meant to liberate us.

And yet today I wonder, as I see the latest Facebook posts and photos and flip through pages of magazines and sift through email after email and countless advertisements and realize it's all reproducing the same old story under a different name. As if huddling under the umbrella of "Yoga" can somehow give substance to ideas and products and behaviors that would otherwise be exposed as empty facades--pretty packages that offer no real sense of home. Maybe I am wrong, but yoga, the real deal experience of who we are, should feel like home. But I look around at the marketing of this experience and realize that but for a few well-rehearsed and overused words, I might as well be reading Glamour magazine or attending aerobics.

Call it "yoga" and you can sell it. And lots of people are all in the market for whatever "yoga" is peddling these days--glorification of certain body types or attributes, glamorization of fanaticism and compulsiveness, homogenizing tendencies that make desperate teens of us all, and the disingenuous ploys that unapologetically conflate spirituality with self righteousness. Or, more disappointing still, with business.

Because this is yet another multi billion-dollar industry selling yoga to you--and the interest of any business is to keep you dependent. Slap on the right label and market it as "yoga" and people come in droves to be filled up. As though they were empty in the first place.We are a nation of well-trained and insecure consumers of identity, taught to scuttle through our lives like beggars, hands stretched out pleading, "Tell me who I am and how to be, and tell me if it's good/smart/sexy/funny/strong/bold/ accomplished enough." The American yoga machine reinforces this outward gaze, this need for studios, the new clothes, the yoga music, the recognition, the validation, the performance to a standing ovation. Standing in Mountain, maybe, but clapping those hands and feeding every insecure needy drive that prevents us from really experiencing yoga, the naked now.

"We shall not cease from exploration," wrote TS Eliot. "And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." After all, how long will we circle around ourselves, chasing our own tails and previous trails, pushing and looking and efforting our way to something, some place, someone that was always right there, whole and perfect?

I stood in a classroom, the foreigner and yet the teacher, the one with no sense of direction and culturally in the dark asked to illuminate.  How do you introduce and share the message and embodiment and experience of yoga--as liberation, freedom, love supreme? When the language, the culture, and the context are so completely alien? 

One thing I learned: you start from scratch. In the dirt and sands of all that has been passed to you. You sift through it and let fall away everything that can't be conveyed authentically. You recover the elemental, and find that you don't focus on the forms as much as you linger in the in-betweens. You teach the emergence and the dissolution, because you teach the discovery of something entirely belonging to the student. Road signs are all you offer. You find meaning between the words, in what is unsaid as much as what is said. And somehow you navigate and guide the way home.  

I am not just talking about yoga, here.
And I am always talking about yoga. Here.

The initial challenge seemed to be how to offer anything of value, of substance, without relying on the means and techniques I have been trained to use. I had to tap into something more, something deeper.

Something that didn't rely on the newest Lululemon fashion, an impressive posture (try impressing a Taiwanese-trained dancer), rote or cliche sayings.
Something that didn't rely on being clever or articulate or beautiful (try being beautiful in extreme heat and humidity) or smart or funny or entertaining.
Something, in other words, NOT about me.
Something I can only call yoga.

Like, without the bells and whistles, without the glamour or seduction or exploitation of our inner wounds and scars.

My teachers Sharon and David tell Jivamukti teachers to teach with 150% of our attention on our students--on holding space for them, on providing them the experience and opportunity to go deeply inward and explore, discover. Recover. Remember. "You cannot do yoga," they say over and over. "You are yoga." So what we are doing in any given practice is exploring where and how and why we are resisting that state that is our natural state, our birth right. Our home. All you need then is a sense of adventure as you explore the voices and habits and beliefs that you carry on your journey until one day, as Eliot wrote, you arrive at the start, ready for the first time to be there and know it as home. David and Sharon taught me that my job as a teacher of yoga is to shine light on them, not on myself. If students are being asked to look at the teacher all the time, how is that any different than the magazine ads and the tv shows whose incessant message is to look outside of oneself for validation, approval, or direction? "Stop looking at me," David corrected us years ago in CA. "Stop looking away from what is happening." Be in it and don't get distracted, seduced, lured, or scared out of this moment.

Buster the hermit crab withdrew deeply into his shell and remained so completely still in his experience that Kingsolver believed him to be dead. This displaced crab, an Arizona refugee, withdrew from everything outside that would normally give him a sense of where and who he was. The props and decorations faded away so he could tap into that mysterious tidal rhythm that brought him home.

I've had the exquisite opportunity to travel a lot these past years, but what is new (place, students, region, culture, custom) or alien is usually buffered a bit by some comfortable known. Something I can wrap up in and feel safe, confident, protected.

Hidden.

It seems we all go there sometimes, to a place where you feel laid bare by the absence of what you took for granted (once, or for a time, or for a lifetime), and you struggle to connect with another, with yourself,  across the unknown territory as you yearn to crawl beneath and take cover in something, anything, familiar. Maybe it's a trip to a land where nothing--not the sounds, the sights, the tastes, the smells or the surroundings are familiar. Nothing anchors you into a former sense of stability. So you discover where and how (and maybe why) you hung your center of gravity on something outside of your own life. Whatever we hanker for or grasp at in the moments we feel most lost are the teachers, too. But the teacher wants nothing more than for you to be free. 

Maybe Kris Kristofferson was right when he penned the famous lyric, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Nothing left to lose. 

I write a lot about death and loss. There is a reason I do so, and it isn't because I am macabre or depressive or even Scotch Irish. It's because I have witnessed and known great beauty and, yes freedom, in the places where my own small life has dissolved at some seam I once thought central to my fabric. And what I can say with some certainty at this moment is that the experience of being lost in translation was not altogether that different from the experience of being lost in loss...whether I felt unmoored by the sudden death of my father or by an inability to buy a mango at an outdoor market where no words worked, it was the loss that something was found. Something that cannot be lost. 

I'm learning to find my sea legs. I'm learning to trust the tide. I'm learning to be home with who and what I am.

Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit into a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittlebush in a dry wind. (High Tide in Tucson)

Sometimes we are lucky enough--and I mean this--lucky enough to find ourselves entirely lost in a moment, a circumstance, a situation, a place, an encounter. To be at a loss. Lost to who we are and who we were and who we are becoming. And all we have to work with is who we are in this moment, in this context, in this relationship, in this breath. Now. 

In fact, the past and the future are really just variations, riffs really, on now. How we experience or remember ourselves is more than recollecting or retrieving mere facts. Memory creates us--to remember ourselves is to manifest ourselves. Memories are not stored in us like computer files. Each retrieval of a memory--a feeling, a song, a conversation--actively initiates a molecular-electrical-chemical dance. Different each time. The memory is not stored, it's created, it's felt. It is a posture. An asana. And the practices of yoga are, theoretically, meant to help us remember. As the White Queen says to Alice in Lewis Caroll's Through the Looking Glass, "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards." 

Teaching in Taipei changed what and who I am now (as a teacher, a practitioner, a woman) in part because it so irrevocably changed my perspective on who I have been and what direction I am headed. The challenge and beauty and magic of teaching (a job that suggests knowing) where I was unknown and knew so little revealed more to me about yoga, about myself, and about my so-called direction than anything known could have yielded. What is yoga, really? 

One afternoon a student, a woman in her late 40s, came up to me, tentatively. She had tears in her eyes and a smile. "Teacher," she said softly "Today my body feels like friend for first time." I wanted to cry. I wanted to hug her--and did. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, "Hallelujah, this stuff really works, I did my job!"In successive days I was blessed by more revelations and confessions from students who were able--sometimes on their own, sometimes through a translator or fellow student--to tell me they had found yoga. From the former beauty queen and ballerina who was facing increasing pressure to lose weight so she could do more to sell her book to the Beijing choreographer who did wheel for the first time in years when she made it a dedication to forgiveness. "Your words touch me," she said through Kady, my beloved ad-hoc translator. "Even though I don't know your words, I know what you are saying and it touches me." Something crumpled and fell to the floor at my feet when I heard that from Mai. She had made me the teacher, she had called it forth as they all had, allowing me to transmit something pure and authentic. No bells, no whistles. Nothing fancy. Just yoga.

By the end of our weeks together, my students were to give a "final showing" alongside the ballet, contemporary, aerial, and capoeira teachers. I decided that though it was almost antithetical to perform yoga for an audience, these students had yoga in their cells and could move through a complex sequence without any thought about who was watching--or why (and in a festival where Cirque de Soleil scouts popped up, that was no small thing). For 10 blessed magical minutes, we watched them move together in sun salutations and then into an advanced standing sequence that included twists and an arm balance. Resourced with modifications and variations, they unfurled and blossomed in waves, following their own inner rhythms and breath--all moving into postures and out of postures with their own timing and with unbelievable grace. Though they were all moving through the same general sequence, they were distinctly their own expressions--joyous, radiant, embodied yoga.

"Now you have yoga," I said. "You no longer need me. You never needed me." Ah, but I was so incredibly honored to have been there.

My Taiwanese students were not any different from my U.S. students in many respects. Almost all of us have had times we felt like foreigners in our own bodies, our own lives. This disconnection is woefully exploited by an industry that uses "yoga" the word to sell us images and ideas that make tourists of us in our own lives.

From all I understand (which is admittedly so very little, a grain of sand in Buster's home stretch), the job of the yoga teacher is to do all you can to encourage students to go inward and marvel at what they find. My task then is to say, "look at you," NOT "look at me."

But in order to teach the Taiwanese students, students who couldn't understand my usual verbal cues, I was in the position of juggling how to show/demonstrate without reinforcing or encouraging a habit of mere mimicry, of looking to others for a sense of self. I didn't want them to imitate me. I wanted them to find their own expression of yoga. To feel, from the inside, how Warrior energy surges up and opens the heart or how plugging into the earth helps conduct the fear and hurt that so often arises in full wheel. To guide them just far enough that they could, for even a moment, forget about me. Because it seems to me that in order to empower a student, the goal has to include rendering oneself obsolete. The teacher's job, really, is to remind students they are already whole. To support their independence, and not seek from them greater dependence on you. Even if that means going broke, having no one show up for your classes or never being praised.

Teachers and studios who cultivate dependent students are not teaching liberation and wholeness. They are themselves dependent, bound up and looking to be filled by those who have graced them with the opportunity to embody and support yoga.

Dependence on the students for money, on gaining popularity, on achieving success or fame...preying upon students to be fed is not yoga. It's marketing. 

As hard as it is for those of us who teach as our careers, the teacher is not called to sit before her students so that she can keep them coming back. Her job is to help them set themselves free. Love them enough to let them move beyond you. Not to think so little of them that you foster neediness or allegiance or loyalty. There should be a marked and obvious distinction between a teacher and a pusher...but I can tell you that there are those who interact with their yoga practice as an addiction just the same. Just because you call it "yoga," and just because it is "a healthier addiction," doesn't make it any less crippling--any less unconscious. If the imbalance is already swinging in the direction of compulsive, the teacher's job is not to indulge, much less exploit it. And if the imbalance is already a tendency to keep seeking approval and validation, the teacher's job is not to indulge, much less exploit it. The teacher isn't given the supreme honor of sharing what has been shared with him so that he gets rich or famous. He is there to do one thing: see them as whole--insist on it--and not seek to fill them like holes.

The best teachers I know are the people and forces in my life that eventually render themselves obsolete. "When you touch someone in an assist," David taught us, "you should be invisible, like an angel. You come in and hold that space so that they can experience where they are headed. Then go away." Don't seek recognition, attention, or even gratitude. Just do your job and get out of the way.

And yet, all around us are messages--from teachers, teachers of "yoga"--encouraging us to look outward. At them. At their practice. Their product, their brand, their prowess, their progress. Call it "inspirational" and it hides what is, essentially, performativity and a need to be recognized. The small self is always on stage, needing an audience. A spotlight. The gaze of others. Like models on the pages of the glossy magazines.

But our lives are to be lived, as subjects, not objects--not mere backdrops to the lives and gazes and needs and desires and pocketbooks of others, whose own subjectivity is imposed and elevated to somehow determine our value or place. Or home.

So many magnificent women and men have washed up on my humble shores looking to be found, to be enveloped in something sturdy and safe. Some arrive with the shocked look of the newly vulnerable, raw and mistrusting and wide-eyed in the wake of what has been suddenly or violently ripped away. Others arrive quiet and carved out and brittle, hollow enough to hold to my ear to hear the sharp whisper of every cruelty that emptied them out for the sake of such fragile beauty. And whether they are yearning to be held or to be filled, I know they have long stopped hearing the call of Home.

And Taiwan was no different.

But neither is my own history, and my guess is neither is yours. I suppose that is what became so poignant to me on my travels. In being a complete stranger in a strange land, where I was forced to communicate and express and connect in new ways without any of the old crutches or strategies or even talents, I was simultaneously laid bare to new and alien elements. I was emptied of all I had once sheltered as my substance as a teacher, a practitioner, a woman. A human. An animal. And so I came to know, a bit better, who and what I am.

There isn't a word for that, or even a precise way to communicate it. Language fails.
No, language isn't necessary.

So these past few weeks I have been curled up in a shell, listening for that rhythm while around me so many voices echo the same old bullshit. I'm trusting the crazy tide that is dancing inside me, even if it isn't lining up with precise measurements of an industry or a culture. It's ok to unfurl and blossom in ways that make no sense to the world around us on its surface. We are all in synch even if we are moving so very differently into and out of things.

I refuse to scuttle around and play a part in something that won't hold up in the typhoon winds or the high tide of my life. I will not ignore my instincts and the call of Home.

There comes a time when we must travel lightly, with nothing but an open heart and mind to guide us through unknown and mysterious lands. And there comes a time when our desire to see and taste and hear and feel something true and beyond language outweighs the compulsion to fit in or be filled up...and in that openness we find we are and have always been fluent in the language that counts and will be offered shelter, comfort, and warmth wherever we go.

We find our way home.

Extinction

On my wedding day, my father said, "I wish for you an extinction, so you may know what it means to lose something forever."

I lost my father on Oct 21, 2004. And my marriage, too, ended three years ago. Both my beloved dogs, Great Danes named Peanut and Lucy, died within a year of one another, on the heels of our separation. Still, I don't think these losses are what he meant. Not exactly. My father always struck me as a brooding man. I always knew that beneath his full throttle laughter and impish ways he was a pensive, contemplative man to whom words were more than mere information currency. I suspect he meant something more unruly when he wished extinction my way.

Our wedding guests were no doubt taken aback, since extinction-as-blessing is not exactly champagne and cake conversation. What ever happened to "May the road rise to meet you, may the wind be at your back" and other light Celtic blessings? Ah, but we are the black Irish, the dark and moody ones who bless marriages not with rote and flowery passages...but with extinctions (the glass was still raised, of course).

Losing oneself in the midst of growth is in fact extinction. It is a permanent, irretrievable loss of something we once took for granted. "I AM this, I AM NOT this," is nothing more than the fluctuating mind stuff (or chitta vritti for you yogis in the house). The tighter we cling to something, the more insecure we become, the less anchored we are. Ungrounded, floating, fearful, needy, dependent, we clutch and grip and try to wring from some experience an explanation--no, a definition of what we are. Of who we are.

And then one day it just dies. It simply passes into time and space like a dusty fossil, lying down with the weight of all the neediness, all those expectations, all those hopes and dreams (the glass raises again). So, it folds into the layers and layers of time until its simple imprint--a memory, a taste, a touch--is all that is left.

Then we know, in one moment, extinction of the self. Total obliteration of the identity we have labored so hard to protect, to defend, to define, to project, to perform.

Gone.

Blip.

May the road rise to greet you, may the wind be at your back…

Letting go of who you (think) you are and have been is a lot like any other death, really. Not at all dissimilar to the death of a parent, in my experience. There was a being that gave shape and direction to my every thought and action, and that being is no more. And whether my father died or I died, I know not. Whether my marriage failed or I failed, I know not. Whether my dog (my child, my friend) was devoured by cancer or I was, I know not. Because in each instance of loss, I have let go of some part of myself. I have offered up and released some heretofore "essential" part of who I "am."

Sometimes I feel as though nothing remains, as though the extinction has been final. As though the species has been wiped out, off the map, without hope of return.

Maybe that sounds macabre, but in fact I feel a giddy release in acknowledging that small extinction. I feel joy and liberation even as I feel grief and insecurity (we broody types happily embrace the simultaneity in all things, comfortable with seemingly disparate emotions flooding in at once--this explains whiskey).

The truth is (in this moment, and only now), I quite agree with my father that to lose something forever is the only way to know the limitlessness of ones own heart. To lose irretrievably someone or something you love, is to learn what love was in the first place. And it isn't the soft puffy cloud kind of love you meet here. It is the raw, in your face, peel back your skin, and dilate kind of love you find splitting the seams of your heart. Heart meaning core, meaning center, meaning self. 
Love is being broken open into infinite scattered illogical pieces that equip you to keep rebuilding an even larger, more vulnerable space to keep holding love.

If you keep insisting on rebuilding the same small shape, carefully cupping yourself around the same tired edges, you just end up with ever greater pressure building and building. You must break open, die, and expand.

And that's just a black Irish fact.

I keep a watchful eye on the silverback gorillas, the blue whales, and the polar bear. I watch ice caps melt and wonder how many fish will be left in the sea by the time I turn 40. But tonight is my own steady, certain extinction that captivates and scares me. It is the irreversible moments, the actions or words I can't take back that haunt me. It is the face in the mirror that looks less and less familiar, and more and more independent of me.

Somewhere along the way, I let go of something, and she is running wild in my life like she is the last of her kind. she keeps breaking my heart and patching it back in ever larger contorted shapes, and she keeps leading me to water I can't drink.

If Einstein was right, this moment too will fold back on itself, and I should as likely remember the future as the past. And in that case, a true extinction would in fact become a birth--a temporary thing that cannot sustain itself through time and space. I strain my memory searching for the future, but so far all I see is the same old image--reproducing herself into each and every moment. But I suspect the future requires someone different than the woman sitting and writing tonight, or the bride whose father wished upon her an extinction.

I imagine the time and space, the ecstatic and harrowing experiences ahead, don't make sense anymore for this particular limited me. I guess that means it's time to die.

Again.

Yet there is also a kind of presence that has more to do with the dissolution of the boundaries. I could call it a merging with the fabric all around in the vibrations of sound, the elixir of scent, the feel of the air around one’s skin and the earth beneath one’s hands and feet the feel of my heart beating into the earth as I lie on my belly in cobra (and where does the air leave off and my body begin, where does the earth leave off and my body begin…there is no exact point of separation…one is always already the other).

It is in dissolving the boundaries of self and other, of skin and breath and time that we allow for a presence denied to the living. In this letting go of the form that is tied to a time and place, there is freedom, liberation. Perhaps this is, in part, the lesson of the corpse. The lesson of death and dying. Beyond all the hackneyed hallmark gibberish about death teaching us the value of life is the underlying message that in death, in the many, mini deaths of each moment and each transition, life is freed from the prison of a moment, a job, a relationship, an illness, a time, a body.

The grief of loss is not really for an individual, or even the singular loss. The real power of grief is that the individual loss serves as a doorway that ushers us into the transformational brutal, raw, liberating, sacred experience of GRIEF, wherein we remember our connectedness. Though it feels like separation from the one we love, the actual feeling, in my humble experience, is the raw memory of our connection, our union. Perhaps this helps to explain why loss can be so transformative and renewing even as it seems to break us into a million irreparable pieces.

No, it isn’t the individual loss, which we certainly mourn. The death of one dear individual also triggers past losses. We hear this all the time. Grief is like a spiral, we revisit the losses again and again on anniversaries, in meaningful locations, in the smells and sounds that recall our loved ones back to us.

But grief is also remembered each time we go there. Grief is a place, like the underworld where Persephone must go for a time each year. The body itself retains the memory of those other cut threads, and when we are faced with the death of another relation, the experience itself, which is stored deeply in the cells, renews and dredges up that past. We FEEL the similar feelings and our minds recollect those past losses.

Still, I think I mean something other than that even. There is something on the tip of my tongue, and I suspect that is precisely the point for which I am grasping--it is beyond language, description, and even intellect. Because grief undoes them all, leaves us without words, or without adequate words. Leaves us broken and shattered, formless.

Yet grief also transcends time and space, freeing us from the limitations of who and what we happen to be at the most recent moment. Lifted up out of the mundane perspective, for even a moment, we realize and remember that simultaneity of all experience, feeling everything at once...or at times, devoid of feeling or sensation as though one has been pulled deeply into pratyahara, senses withdrawn and still like the cold quiet of a new moon.

Individual losses take us there, into that experience where anything and everything is possible, real, and alive. But to actually feel that oneness, that union, that sense of absolute infinite possibility, there is also an unraveling of who and what it is we think we are.

I used to think the transformation that seems to follow loss was merely the result/effect of one’s life being turned inside out and upside down, being thrown into the air when the ground beneath crumbled or the rug was pulled up--when what felt stable and secure is suddenly (or in some cases, slowly) removed. In that uncertainty and instability, we not only feel the fear, anxiety, and despair of having “lost” someone we love and what that relationship meant to us...but we are also afforded an opportunity to lose old perspectives, seeing our lives (our countless habits, hang-ups, expectations, and projections) in a fresh way, from a new (albeit wounded) angle. So for years I have understood the “gift” (an admittedly hackneyed spiritual term) made available by loss and grief; it seemed to me that the rug being pulled out from underneath me not only made me adept at recognizing there are no rugs, but I also began to see how these experiences gave me a completely new perspective on what was happening and whether or not that life was aligned with a deeper sense of Self.

So my own grief and loss has propelled me into new identities with staggering speed and depth. I have gone from college English comp instructor with a house and a husband to a wandering gypsy of sorts, teaching yoga and writing these words, to...what exactly? The point is, it doesn’t matter what I am constantly becoming and unbecoming, it isn’t so much about the roles or shapes or forms I take, but what those forms, shapes, and roles allow me to access and remember.

I guess what I am getting at is that I realize that grief is not just an emotional state or a process, but a continuous experience of consciousness that is characterized not so much by sadness as by transformation.

Yes, the sadness is tremendous in the wake of loss, but I don’t feel that grief is about sadness alone, or reconciling oneself to sadness. I don’t think grief or the grief process is solely about letting go or honoring or making peace or moving on. Grief can sometimes serve as the fire that burns away everything false and limiting. And much as we grieve and miss the individual, there is also a recognition that something persists long after their form, and ours, has been changed and dissolved.

There is a recognition, in other words, that the relationship was never contained by the interactions and exchanges between two forms, as though our love for another is merely an exchange of currency. Because in order to harness that connection, we would be dependent on the forms, which means we would be dependent on separation...and in death that separation is not actually furthered.

In death, that separation ends. Dissolves.

Blip.

And then, we remember.

And we access that ancient memory.

And there is the possibility of a freedom that feels like pain, ecstasy, destruction, and birth.

Each individual loss undoes us as individuals. We lose footing, we struggle to maintain the mundane routines and roles that quite frankly “make us who we are,” whatever that means.

But the individual who dies does not in fact leave us or become more distinctly separate from us. The individual loss ignites a deep awareness (so deep in fact we may not even register much less name the felt sensation) that there was never ever any separation. Grief for that one being, that one loss, compels us to merge and go beyond separation.

The individual loss undoes a sense of individuality and draws us into the felt experience of union.

My father is in the sand and currents and brush of a Rocky Mountain river. He is extinct, lost forever into something larger and intangible. In the trout scales and river eddies and dusty trails, the sage smell that fills me with an ache, the fading wildflowers whose spines begin to break, and the rustling feathers of crows in the trees...that is where my father has gone.

Never, ever to return to me again as anything more, or less, than that. And lately I see shards of myself in such places. I catch glimpses of my own life, scattered like so much afterthought. I find myself dangling like a question mark.

To cease, to stop, to let go, to surrender. To grow silent, to grow still, but still to grow. And grow and grow and grow, beyond what I am or who I was or what I think I ought to be. To grow beyond bride or wife or lover or daughter or sister or teacher or friend.

Expand beyond until that shell is dead, dust, an imprint in memory I hold like the desert holds the memory of the sea. Knowing the sea, too, will always remember the body of the desert.

And extinction is losing something forever...but what is forever to the desert and the sea?

The road doesn't always rise to meet me, and the wind has as often blown in my face as been to my back. Perhaps my father was simply being practical, wishing for me something certain at a time when irrational or naive wishes are tossed like so much wasted rice. To wish a death for someone is in fact a very pragmatic thing. It's to wish for someone the most authentic and predictable experience we can have.

But to wish an extinction, ah, well that's different.

That's wishing complete surrender.

That's wishing you the ability to let go of something forever when its time is done.

Glass raised, that's wishing the desert could bid farewell to the sea.

And that just makes me want to fold into myself and grieve because you know it could never be any other way. But the beauty is knowing the sea and the desert were once one body, one word, one place. Like he was here once, and once I was him. And now it's just me, and I’ll keep splintering into pieces, deserts upon deserts of fossilized memories. Just waiting for the tide to roll in and wash it all away. Waiting the way the desert waits for the sea.

Patiently.

Because extinction makes one patient.

opening to presence

One of the most crystalline of memories I have from childhood is my 4-year old self in bed as my babysitter was about to close the door and turn out the light. My Jungle Book soundtrack was on the record player, and she had let us stay up late watching a show on orcas (which, I was convinced, were big magpies). As she went to close the door to a crack, I called her back in and asked, "What will happen when my mother dies?"

Now, I don't know about you, but these are not easy thoughts to sift through with a 4-year old on a Friday night to the tune of "Trust in Me." I have tried my best to remember the identity of the unfortunate witness to my early existential crisis, but so far she hasn't been tracked. Nor do I remember what her response was aside from an initial "Oh, honey, that won't happen for a long time" that was quickly trumped by my "But what WILL happen?" Suffice to say, I am sorry to have unloaded that on you...if it helps, I still grapple with it all the time. Especially in the wake of having lost one parent already and too suddenly.

Last week I was hiking along listening to the NPR podcast of the always satisfying show, On Being. The guest was Kate Braestrup, a Maine chaplain to game wardens who go on search and rescue missions that end in tragedy as often as in recovery. She refers to her work as a "ministry of presence," at the "hinges of human experience when lives alter unexpectedly — where loss, disaster, decency, and beauty intertwine." This woman kind of rocked my world.

Her "ministry of presence" embodies, so sublimely, what "the divine" means to me. What yoga means to me. What sitting with discomfort means, what showing up means. THE miracle, as Braestrup sees it, isn't in the inexplicable events or the tragedies. THE miracle is that we continue to show up, to be present, even as we know the way the story--all our stories--will end.

"The question," said Braestrup, "isn't whether we are going to have to do hard awful things, because we are. And we all are. The question is whether we have to do them alone." In her years as a chaplain, and having lost her own young husband in an accident, Braestrup recognizes that "god" is the force that shows up, is present. "What we are less apt to be aware of and reconciled to," she explained, "is that we will lose everyone we love as well...the loss is going to be real, and there is no anesthesia."

And the power of this is, we know it. We already know it. We have always known it.

And yet, we continue to show up.

What I DO remember about the night of my crisis, however, is a feeling that kept me up that night. In spite of early signs of a brooding personality, I was still relatively untouched by any suffering...so I cannot project onto the little me what the older me would call it now. It wasn't anxiety or fear, though there was an element of urgency to my question. It was like I HAD to know, and I wasn't worried about what would become of her, per se (like, is there life after death or do we just dissolve into dirt or is there a god and is he/she/it nice?)...no, I wanted to know what would happen to me.

That seems reasonable, as I read it. Kids think about themselves, people tend to worry about their own lot. But that wasn't the obsession that night. It was this: somehow I felt that when she dies, so would I.

And I was too young to be feeling that as a metaphor or thinking symbolically about the ways we are grafted and shaped by our lives. I was a literalist. Snakes could sing, orcas were magpie mothers, and life was intimately bound to my mother.

To my father as well. Which I learned on a Thursday night in late October, 2004 when I said over and over to my brother on the phone, "No no no no no." As though I could revise the moment. Backspace, edit. In that moment, I felt something we might as well call a root, go cold and hollow. And in the days and weeks that followed, I felt the hunger of a dead root. Felt it seeking a sap that would never again whet its thirst. Uprooted. The world rocked.

There was who I was before. And then there was who I was from that point forward. Death is a tough teacher, especially a death that you know in your own bones and feel in the cells is a death of you, too. The raw material, the quickening, the sprout, the emergence, and then the felling. Who you were and who you are. Ne'er the two shall meet.

When someone you love dies, no matter how much warning you have or how prepared you may be, something fundamental shifts. Grief happens at a molecular level. Grief happens at the invisible vibratory level. Which is why grief, as an experience, is a lamentation. It's a song.

Braestrup noted that amidst a world of natural disasters, wars, unspeakable and even evil acts of violence, these catastrophes are almost always followed by courage, care, love, and generosity. We tend to treat the BIG EVENT as the thing--the place to look for god (or awaty from god) and we learn to treat our stunning capacity to care for one another as "unusual." But really, love and care--in the face of the loss and the suffering--this is the ongoing narrative of who we always have been and will be. Though there are those horrific stories of suffering where no one shows up and no one speaks up and no one helps, the usual way is to be present for those who need us to live on.

I have come to see that the reason people turn away, turn a blind eye, go into denial, or "don't want to know" is NOT because they are shallow, uncaring, or ignorant. I believe what they fear the most is their capacity to feel--to feel love break you open and make fragments of all you once thought you were. To feel loss empty you out and leave you with nothing more than the ache that is itself an undying love that must remain beating while the corpse continues on its journey.

We are afraid to feel, because the power of our feeling doesn't fit into the neat and tidy categories of our language, our logic, or our limitations.

Bearing witness is a part of many spiritual traditions and practices--learning to sit with and be present for what IS happening instead of checking out and running toward what we prefer, remember, or want. Braestrup' s ministry of presence reminded me of this witness consciousness--sakshi. As she explains, suffering alone is the worst. The stories that leave us feeling most helpless and powerless are the most tragic. When we know there is pain and despair, it is our innate response to want to hold one another.

And so it makes perfect sense, really, that sometimes people cannot "go there." They may be fine with CSI or the local news or a remote and uplifting tale of struggle that ends happily. It's a lot tougher to face the suffering that calls upon our own capacity to feel--even when feeling doesn't mean we can change a damn thing. Especially when what we feel doesn't mean we can change a damn thing.

Our capacity to feel, and to feel so deeply and profoundly that it can literally restructure our very being, is terrifying. In the great epic, The Bhagavad Gita, the warrior Arjuna begs to see Krishna (the lord) as he really is. After Krishna essentially gives Arjuna god-glasses, and reveals himself in his full manifestation (AS manifestation itself), Arjuna is overcome and cannot bear it. Glasses off. It is too much, too beautiful, too terrifying, too everything. It is everything at once. It is his own divinity, his own limitless beauty and power, too. All of it, unbearable to witness. To behold.

Before I lost both of my beloved great danes to their respective deaths (both hideous and painful), I used to remark on how teary-eyed I felt when they would look at me so longingly and adoringly. It's like I was somehow preemptively feeling the loss that would inevitably come. One winter day on a long hike through knee-high snow, Peanut (a cow-spotted Harlequin dane with unfettered enthusiasm) bounded up to me and just plopped down, pink tongue lolling out the side of what could only be described as a smile. I looked straight into his eyes, and he just stared at me, panting joyfully.

I burst into tears.

Right there on the trail, in my red snow hat and ill-matched mittens. And it was cold enough to freeze those tears to my cheeks so that they tickled and itched and distracted me enough to pull myself back into self-mockery and some silent comment about PMS.

But here is what I have learned. In those mahogany eyes, I saw my own divinity--my own capacity to love and be loved, unconditionally. And it was too much. It was ecstasy and pain--a momentary sense of really being SEEN. Seen and loved. And not loved in spite of what was seen, but because of it.

Unbearable.

And yet we DO bear it. And yet we do survive, continue on, live, however haunted, in, among and within the ghosts.

Among the many beautifully simple things Kate Braestrup said in the interview was this: "God is love. If nothing else...god is that force that drives us to really see each other and to really behold each other and care for each other and respond to each other."

I stood on the snowy battlefield somewhere between who I had been and who I was becoming, moment by moment, and I was given the sight to see that force, god, the divine....and it was too much. Glasses off.

Lately I have been doing my morning practice outside, on the grass overlooking the woods. I like to be on the ground, close to the wet earth before the sun fully rises. It's a still time, punctuated here and there by the first hummingbirds of the day and the occasional dismissive caw of a nearby sentry crow. There is one in particular who seems to recognize me...perched each morning in the same tree branch. I start with bakasana for him. Hawks circle overhead, and deep in the threads of the grass I watch ants climbing and descending like little black beads. It's lovely.

Except the cows.

And here is what I mean by that: I am living on the land where I was raised, which means 80 acres of serene pine forests and wildflower-dotted fields. It means solitude and sanctuary, and for a woman who was trying to navigate too many sudden losses and a health crises that sent me spinning, solitude and sanctuary are good medicine.

But it also means living on land my stepfather uses to raise cattle...and for a woman who has advocated for non-human animals (and farm animals in particular), this presents some challenges.

For years, as a vegan and animal rights advocate, I operated from the position that my way was the right way. And even as I did my best not to outwardly judge or collapse into proselytizing, I still harbored the belief that I was right--which means my stepfather is, well, wrong.

Wrong for raising sentient beings, no matter how humanely or free-ranging and grass-feeding and lovingly tended to (all named, all roaming the fields and forests). Because at the end of the proverbial day, they go to slaughter. No matter how you dress it up, slaughter is a messy business. No being wants to die. And even the most skilled, small-scale operations (like the one my pop uses) are ending a life in a violent way. "Humane slaughter" is a euphemism that can only comfort those who profit from and feed upon the suffering of those whose voices are literally snuffed out in the act.

This is usually when people turn away. This is where they don't want "to go" and don't want "to know." I don't have the choice, as I spent over two years researching animal exploitation as it relates to identity construction. Simply put, I have subjected myself to daunting hours of the worst kinds of footage, reports, and frontline narratives detailing the most atrocious and institutionalized forms of brutality and cruelty inflicted upon those beings who have no voice, no choice, and absolutely no power. The gentlest among us are the ones we brutalize and literally dismember into objects, pieces parts, according to our own tastes and preferences.

Like cows.

Who are gentle, maternal, playful, easily scared.

Easily subdued.

Kate Braestrup works at that place where "loss, disaster, decency, and beauty intertwine." The heart of her ministry is being present to it all--even as it may feel unbearable, bearing witness and opening oneself up to the true miracle that emerges in that presence, that willingness to be there EVEN AS WE KNOW the end of the story. And it is ALL there--the tragic and the beautiful.

Whilst I have been healing parts of my ever-shifting self, something in me had hardened in order to remain on these 80 acres during this sojourn. Something in me had numbed out so that I could deal with the fact that one side of a fence romped 4 spoiled, overweight, infinitely happy dogs...and on the other side romped newborn calves and lowing mothers whose lives will all eventually culminate in the garage freezer. In spite of all my years of practice and knowing better and leaning into the void...blah blah blah...there was right and there was wrong. Deep down that was how I felt. To be fair, at this point I value peace far more than I value being right, but I cannot deny there is a shrill and condemning voice inside me that has a very difficult time with all this. So, instead, I watched the voice, felt the feelings, and applauded myself for embodying peace over conflict. But the battle was not over, because I was the conflict.

Each time a calf was born and named, I would just go quiet, erring on the side of silence when the judgment and anger and frustration wanted to scream. Proselytizing and lecturing and so forth were, thankfully, no longer my methods. Still, those feelings have value and my response to them was, "don't go there." I turned off, I turned away. Because the pain is too much when you know there will be suffering, and nothing you feel will change a damn thing.

I recently attended...wait, scratch that, suffered through? Endured? Survived? (you get the idea) a workshop with Ana Forrest--a world-renowned teacher known for her intensity, abdominal work, and fierce honesty. It wasn't my first time with Ana, but this was the first time I had done heart opening with her. What remains with me long after the muscle fatigue wore off is Ana calling upon us to breathe into the heart, to feel the heart, to open the heart. "Practice one thing a day that brings your awareness into the space of your heart," she said. "Let the heart remain open, and if you can't do that, remain open to an experience, and if you can't do that, just breathe into your heart, and if you can't do that, just remember that it is there."

The heart is the bridge for the yogi, yoking together the more earthly regions of consciousness with those more elevated and esoteric. It's where the roots find flower. The heart center is the center of unconditional love and the willingness to see ourselves in all others. To keep the heart open, spacious, breathing, and feeling is no small feat in a world that so consistently asks us to be small, armored, defensive, and limited. It's hard to feel when what you want to feel is merely safe.

It's unbearable to feel broken apart and undone and shredded.

To feel it all.

Yesterday morning I was reminded of Kate and Ana and their words. I was reminded of Arjuna and Krishna, of my father, my mother, and my babysitter. In that mystical early morning hour, halfway through my sun salutes, one of the steer had wandered to the fence to watch me. Within a few minutes, the rest of his companions had joined him. I know they are males, because the western pasture is where they all go until they go to slaughter. These are the long-lashed, velveteen beauties whose eyes and swishing tails and obsidian hooves I have been avoiding. Looking away. Because I know the way the story ends, and after a lifetime of developing affections and attachments to the boys out back, I have learned that the storyline does not deviate.

But something happened yesterday. I got really honest with myself about some of the stuff that had been stirred up and eventually shaken out of my gut in Ana's class: "To open the heart, you have to open the gut," she had said to us as we panted with fat rolled-up mats plunging into our bellys as we lifted up into our 4th or 5th bow pose. "And when you open the gut, you stir up all your shit, literally...and metaphorically."

The gut is 3rd chakra--Ego, power, sense of self. Who it is we think we are, and who it is we think others think we are. And to open the heart, truly and fully, we gotta let go of some of that shit.

As I stopped and let myself gaze back at that boys yesterday, I knew exactly why I had been avoiding it for so long.

It felt just like looking into Peanut's eyes that cold winter day. These were the same eyes. The gaze was not judging me, it was simply holding me, exactly as I am. Seeing me. And the painful realization was that I had denied him, this doomed and lovely being, the same care. The same attention. As though knowing the pain and loss was ahead, and that I was powerless to change his fate, somehow excused me from showing up.

Kate Braestrup said that, "once you kind of accept that death is a given, that (the love and care) becomes the thing to look for and to mark."

This isn't just the tale of bearing witness to those who are made so completely invisible and unseen. This is also the tale of my love for my parents, for my roots. For all that is simultaneously loss, disaster, tragedy, fear, beauty, courage, and hope. It is an unfurling tale of how to reconcile all of it happening all at once as what IS. Just as surely as I hope to open my eyes and look into the eyes of the slaughtered, I hope too to look deeply into the eyes of my stepfather and my mother. To look deeply while I still have that opportunity--and instead of insisting on seeing me in their gaze (being like me, thinking like me), I hope I have the heart and care and god (or whatever I wanna call it) to see them. To really SEE them, hold them, and love them because I know how the story will end.

We are, each of us, held, however tenuously and awkwardly, by one another in our suffering--moment by moment, and from lifetime to deathtime. That suggests, to me anyway, that it is our nature to hold others in their suffering. Even as we know we will lose them, feel pain, and possibly be in the sad state of powerlessness to do anything about it. We can show up. And we can love and care and respond to and attend to it all--however glorious or terrible it feels. Because keeping the heart open to feel is what we are here to do.

And I suspect that I am not the only one who has a way of building up diligently-patrolled fortresses to protect myself from feeling the big feelings. It's so much easier to turn away from what we don't want to feel, and our culture is tailored to indulge that tendency.

So here is my promise to myself: One thing a day that keeps your heart open--just one thing. Whatever that thing is, let it in. Even when it hurts--because it hurts. Even when you are afraid. Most especially because you are afraid. Let it unmake you, let it break you. And let it take you more deeply into who and what you have always been.