Yoga School Drop Out

When I told my mom that the realization felt like a ton of bricks hitting me, she said something disarmingly poetic:

“Maybe it wasn’t a ton of bricks hitting you, but a door opening, and a blast of wind hitting you.”

Maybe indeed.

I’ve been really struggling with my advanced training program.  As I put it a couple posts ago: “Right now I’m just trying to find apertures where I can, and compassion for myself where I can’t.  As I learned in AA, ‘take what you want and leave the rest.’”  I’ve been thinking a lot about that saying; though it’s used to refer to the AA program itself, I realized it can have multiple meanings.  When an alcoholic wants to begin a life of sobriety, one of the most important things he or she usually does is stop going to bars, and seek out community apart from her or his drinking buddies.  You can’t “leave the rest” if The Rest is constantly in your face, if you’re too close to The Rest to see what you want to take otherwise.

So I’ve been sitting in training, tense, angry, frustrated not knowing how to find space and compassion toward a spiritual system that doesn’t resonate with me, too close to it to remember why I was there.

Then I went into four days of silent retreat with two of my favorite Buddhist teachers, Sharon Salzberg & Sylvia Boorstein.  The moment I got to the retreat center – a fantastic refuge called The Garrison Institute – I felt calmer, content, at home.  And when I sat down for the first Dharma talk, and my first meditation in months in that elegant, touching, simple Vipassana style – as embarrassingly cliche as it sounds – I felt like I was jumping into pure, cold, clear water after days in the desert. Just 12 or so hours later, when I began the first full day of silence and meditation, it hit me.

I had to drop out.

Now, I was not looking to come to this conclusion. I had hoped to find wisdom and compassion on how to deal with training, not how to leave it.  But over and over, as I sat my retreat, the answer kept coming to me: in the choice of words of my teachers, in my meditations, even on the insides of tea bag tags.  I just reread my notes right before and right after I had this insight.  Just before, Sharon had been discussing how we commonly look at strength as a herculean effort to hold on, but that in reality, strength is the ability to let go, gracefully and gently.  I remember bursting into tears when she said this, and writing the answer (as a question): Do I want to drop out of school?

We then meditated. Or rather, the rest of the 100+ participants meditated.  I cried.  I quietly sobbed.  If you ever read the blog I used to write for a certain online publication, I spoke once on my history with crying – that, in particular, I often cry when I’m hit with resonant truth.  So I cried. I cried and then I wrote a list of all the questions, issues, struggles I might have with this decision.  The very first of this kind was: “I’ve never dropped out of anything big like this.”

I come from a family mentality of “you finish what you start.”  When I was miserable as a fat little girl in a leotard getting laughed at in gymnastics, I still had to finish… when I came home crying, not ready for sleep over camp, I went back as a day student… there’s only one other major program I’ve dropped out of – Catholic confirmation class.

The mirroring of that major decision to this one was stark: the issues of spirituality, of seeking my own path, most powerfully, of the questioning that is such a huge part of my personality, my inability to take anything at face value, and the fact that at 28, I can celebrate those parts of me instead of feeling guilty, alienated, or abnormal for my lack of faith.

So. I declare proudly. I’m a yoga school drop out.  I’m going to start studying yoga on my own terms, with a focus on mindfulness and compassion and Buddhist precepts, and we’ll see where this open door and gust of wind takes me…

For Love or Alcohol

I’m beginning to think I’m terrified of men.

If you haven’t read this, I suggest you do.  This particular blogger gives words creatively and intelligently to something I think about often: that my body reacts like I’m in danger when a man is hitting on me.  On the rare occasion I even moderately allow the interaction to continue, I’m in a constant discussion and renegotiation with myself about whether or not this person wants to rape and/or kill me.  I never fully allowed myself to think about it in those terms until I read this blog.  I always chose to blame myself instead – that I’m shy, insecure, confidence-lacking – but what she had to say really resonated.  I think a part of me works on the basic assumption that men want to cause me physical harm until strong evidence proves otherwise.

As a heterosexual female, might I say, that really blows.

It’s come to the surface over the course of the last year or so in intimate situations.  As I’ve insinuated (read: declared awkwardly more times than appropriate), it’s been a very long time since I’ve slept with anyone. Well over a year. But twice in that time I’ve had the opportunity to go forth and have stopped things dead in the water, and I think a huge part of that is not the clichéd, “fear of intimacy,” but literally fear of the man himself.

Interestingly, there’s something else these two occasions had in common that all other previous sexual interactions had not: I was sober.  I’ve made a couple of regrettable and/or potentially dangerous sexual decisions in my life – slept with someone in a relationship, taken a man home I barely knew, etc. – but I was never hindered by any driving fear on those occasions.  I didn’t feel great about the decisions in the morning, or when they didn’t call, or when their Myspace profiles (yes, Myspace… it was a while ago) informed me they were in a relationship just weeks after I got “I’m not ready for a relationship…” but at least I wasn’t laden in fear in the moment.

But then again, I had STD scares and even a cervical cancer scare after many of the “one-nights” I’ve had, and have sat sobbing in my therapist’s arm chair about whether the test would come back positive or negative… so perhaps that fear just gets transmuted, postponed.  But at least in the moment, with alcohol in my body, when sex became available I didn’t suddenly break away, frozen in terror of that destructive thing they carry around in their pants, afraid of their advances and aggression, of the sheer maleness of them.

I realize it’s a good thing to be able to listen to my body clearly and cogently, to know when I don’t feel ready, but at the same time, I’m a pretty, 28 year old, single woman with no sex life to speak of, and feel like I should be able to just enjoy the experience when it arises… so to speak.  It makes me feel inadequate, hyper sensitive, immature, child-like… like I still haven’t learned how to play the game, and I’m still afraid of the stadium.

My only hope is that should I finally find myself dating someone, and if he can manage to wait until I’ve garnered enough evidence in his favor, that “love” – whatever that means – will allay my terror.  For love or alcohol, I think it’s a far more rosy ideal to choose love… if it ever manages to find me.

Why Teach?

Before I began training my belief in yoga and my practice was so clear.   I did yoga, it made me feel better. Good, better, whatever. In a way it just made me feel at all; struggling with anxiety and depression for years prior there were a number of barriers I had erected to keep myself from the apparent physiological danger of emotion. Once you start to open the lines of the body that hold tension, you can’t really help but feel.

I bought it all. I bought chakras, I bought energy lines, I bought the existence of a subtle body. I was all up on yoga.  Upon REALLY studying the subject with the intent to teach, though, is where my openness began to hit a brick wall.

Part of it was beginning to see hypocrisy in the system – in what it preaches versus how it’s manifested in the west – with teachers’ words versus deeds, with guru focus and quiet misogyny. In general, the idols had clay feet and were beginning to crumble.

Having recently seen the new release of Where The Wild Things are, my best friend made an astute point about things which purport to be “magical” and transporting: they never quite live up to what the experience of magic is in our heads.  The movie’s never quite as good as the trailer.

I guess in a way  my 2+ years of practice which lead to my initial teacher training last June was the trailer.  Now I’m in the movie theater and I’m not sure I buy the narrative framework.  In particular, I’ve discovered I’m not a big fan of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika – an ancient text formative to the physical practice of Asana we know today.  I won’t go into my specific struggles with the text here, but in general, its insistence on “the divine,” its claims of absolute “scientific” knowledge of the benefits of and requirements for yoga (including but not limited to swallowing 20 feet of gauze, or distending the rectum out of the body to cleanse….) and its overriding dogma just don’t fly with me.

So if I don’t buy the basis of the system, and I shirk from the spiritual elements, why exactly do I want to teach this particular form of movement?  At the moment, I’m not convinced I have an answer. I know these things to be true: yoga makes me feel good, better than any other form of exercise; I am a good teacher; I take to teaching naturally; I believe everyone would benefit from yoga.  But why, I’m not sure I know just yet.

A larger issue has stemmed from this investigation, though.  I’ve realized in my enthusiasm for the Buddhist world view – which believes we ultimately don’t know anything, that no “fact” is ever perceived objectively – that I’ve become certain about uncertainty.  I’ve become attached to the idea of unattachment, leaving my heart and mind closed to that which purports anything other than uncertainty.  It’s an interesting Koan to struggle with – how do you become unattached so much so that you’re not even attached to unattachment?

Figure that one out.

Right now I’m just trying to find apertures where I can, and compassion for myself where I can’t.  As I learned in AA, ‘take what you want and leave the rest.’

“Why I Teach” could very well become a journey that never ends; I guess I’ll just cash the (small and infrequent) pay checks in the meantime…

Forgiveness

I’m not sure when exactly it happened. I always think of an experience like forgiveness as something that occurs at a notable place and time, when you suddenly feel a weight release.  But it’s really never like that, is it?  The awareness of it may be sudden, but the actual act of forgiving happens so subtly you never really experience it.  Or, maybe it’s that you just don’t care any more; other experiences have crowded into your brain and you just don’t have the neural space and energy to waste.

I lost my virginity to a guy who was raised a Jehovah’s Witness.  I note this not because it matters, but because the list of the first 3 men I slept with always makes me laugh, like the set up to a bad joke: “So a Jehovah’s Witness, a black guy and a bisexual walk into my vagina…”

We were coworkers and friends for over a year before our attraction to one another became apparent.  Once it did, it wasn’t long until one drunken night, I made a decision, and he trekked down 6 flights of stairs into a cold rain to buy condoms.

In retrospect, the issue was never that we slept together, but rather ill-communication between a naïve late-bloomer craving her first taste of physical intimacy, and a male unable to resist sexual opportunity when presented to him.

The hurt came from subsequent weeks of thinking something was “happening” between us, working together with frustrating vacillation between awkwardness and affection, ultimately culminating in him, instead, bringing his new girlfriend to my house for a small party I was hosting.

To my house.

There was a lot of emailing that happened after that: from me calculated and biting; from him, defensive and confused.  And then silence. I stopped speaking to him for about 6 months, until we had to start working together again the following season, and my manager insisted we get together to make sure we could still function as coworkers.

We could. It wasn’t fun, per say, and the total lack of flirtation and affection felt uncomfortable, but at least neither of us lost our jobs.  But I was still bullshit.  I was bullshit at his insensitivity to flaunt this woman in my territory, hurt at my perceived rejection, and, probably more than anything, mad at myself for expecting this situation with this particular guy would turn out any way other than it had.  I managed to not regret losing my virginity – I was 24, it was high time – but, upon looking back, I was angry with myself that I had wasted my time and energy on a non-functional situation.

Years went by once we finished that particular job, where I had little to no contact with him, until one day I realized I missed him.  Not in that want-to-sleep-with-an-ex sort of way, I just missed him.  I guess that meant I forgave him, and myself.

Forgiveness, I guess, is a slow, barely perceptible process of letting go of our beliefs.  To grasp on to a feeling of right-ness – of having been wronged – is to believe that any action is ever actually about us.  It isn’t.  Nothing is about one person. It’s about millions of events which have occurred over years of time, and at some point two lives intersect, along with those millions of events.  To forgive a particular event is to acknowledge that nothing is static, that everything changes constantly and nothing happens in a vacuum.

In the movie Shortbus, an NC-17 rated art film about the sexual lives of a handful of New Yorkers, one particular sage-like character expounds, “People come to New York to seek forgiveness.”  The first time (and the next 10 times…) I heard this line, I began weeping.  I’m not exactly sure why – I don’t know precisely for what it is I still feel I need forgiveness – but it obviously had a huge impact on me.  I came to New York to perform; I can’t say when I moved into my first apartment I ever dreamed of teaching yoga or being a Buddhist, but where the emphasis in both schools of thought is of a constantly renewed effort of letting go, I’d say the quote has some serious merit…

Chasing Time

It’s been a couple years since I flew through time zones. I forgot what a surreal experience it is to fly from west to east, watching as the hours slip away from you. The most impressive experience of this, of course, is when you are flying in to or away from a sunset or sunrise, which I’m currently doing. It’s like you’re literally cheating time – in your favor to the west, against to the east.

Years ago, a friend related to me what her father told her upon our college graduation: from here on out, time accelerates. I think about this especially at the beginnings of months – I never quite know how we got here. I know it’s a cliche to say, “I don’t know what happened to [insert recently completed month here] but I genuinely feel it. Though particular events in the moment may seem to be arduous and long, I can’t remember the last time I looked back in retrospect on a period of my life and thought, “well that dragged on.”

I like that this dad said specifically time “accelerates,” and not just “speeds up.” If you recall back to your days of high school physics, we can’t feel speed or movement. What we actually feel when we say we’re “moving fast or slow” is differentials. We feel acceleration, because it is a change in speed – and direction. I think the same is true of life.

We don’t feel the passage of time per say, but rather how time’s passage has shifted relative to our experience. But it’s not just the shift in speed (“we were screwing for 2 hours, I don’t know where the time went…” or, “the 45 seconds of my rectal exam felt like a lifetime…”) I think we are also feeling the shift in direction our lives are taking.

I’m going through a lot of time acceleration in the year 2009. I think in the years in which major developmental markers occur, time feels more palpable: we remember dates of lasts (drinks, April 22), firsts (log scrambling, August 31), endings (yoga school, June 26), beginnings (next yoga school, September 15). Or maybe it’s just that I’m getting older, and with every passing year we gain new insight into the rapid – and rapidly changing – nature of time.

The remarkable thing I have to remember is that shifts in time’s speed and direction are created entirely within me. Time as a fixed entity doesn’t exist, as my buddy Albert proved: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT’S relativity.” The perfect example is the plane I’m currently on: thanks to the American Airlines mileage program, I’m in first class flying from Dallas/Fort Worth to LaGuardia. The 3 hours I spend in my seat, will move much faster than the 3 hours everyone sitting four rows behind me will experience. But tomorrow, when I return to work, I’m pretty sure my day will move slower than my friend currently vacationing in Argentina…

The question that amazes (terrifies) me is how fast will time be moving 28 years from now?? And in what direction…

(Internet) Dating

There’s gotta be a better way.

Internet dating, to me, has been like job searching or apartment hunting. It sucks. You set up interview after interview after
interview, at first looking for the perfect fit, only to lower and lower and lower your standards to find just something that’ll eek by.
And then, even when you find the Eeker, they don’t respond to emails - despite the fact that damn it I’m over qualified for the position!

(Is it obvious I’m bitter?)

This time around I gave it two months.  In 2008 when I tried I gave it a month, and prior to that I think my grand total was 2 weeks.  Why do I keep coming back? Why do I return to what I know is hell, what I know hasn’t worked for me, for what I know I frankly don’t have time?

Because I can’t seem to find anything else that works to meet single, straight men.

And it’s not for lack of trying. I tried the bar scene for a long time, which resulted in a handful of one-night-stands, guys with substance abuse problems, becoming the “other woman” (truly unpleasant, I don’t suggest it) and enough hang overs to last me a lifetime.

I also tried something drastic.  Sometime in early spring, I finally decided I needed to ask for help in a big way. So I sheepishly sent an email out to well over 50 people – mostly women and gay men but with a smattering of straight men I trust more than most – asking for assistance: I obviously was not successful left to my own devices, so I needed suggestions/set ups with friends, friends of friends, coworkers, particularly intelligent and good looking cafe baristas, whomever. I had a couple qualifications: no assholes, no serious potheads or non-recovering alcoholics, must be intelligent and funny, and must take care of themselves physically. I’m not saying they had to be Zeus, but I exercise 5-7 days a week and my physical practice is an enormous part of who I am, so they should probably have something physical they love as well.  Oh, and straight.  Also a must.

My result from 50+ people from all around the United States?  Nothing. No, sorry, not nothing: one guy who responded to one Facebook email then disappeared, and one invitation to come to a concert with a friend where some of the band members “might be single.”

After a couple more months of frustration, I signed back up for internet dating, and lost another $80+ to a waste of time.  The stress added to my life from trying to answer emails, trying to find time to set up dates and trying to find someone interesting colossally outweighed any “fun” I may have had.  Not to mention reading the same damn things on every profile (“laid back!” “comfortable going out or staying in!” “loyal and I love my mom!” “looking for someone cute and smart with a great sense of humor!”…) frightened me for the state of originality and uniqueness in the world’s population.

There has to be a better way.  Other people are dating. Other people have significant others. Other people have sex on a regular basis - with the same person more than once!! It sounds like a fairy tale to me but I hear people do it. But somehow the secret has evaded me.

And please, I implore you, People-In-Relationships, do not say to your single friends, “It’ll happen when you’re not looking.” While there may be truth to this cliche, it is probably the most irritating sentence I hear on a regular basis. I don’t stop looking. When you’ve been alone as long as I have (and that length depends on whether you believe in past lives) you’re never not looking.  Sometimes I pretend I’m not looking, but really I’m only pretending not to look in hopes that my “not looking” makes him manifest. I think of it as the dating equivalent to a child covering their face and peeking through their fingers to watch a scary movie.

My therapist has funny opinions on the subject, most notable of which is she regularly tells me to take a class in auto repair. “You’ll definitely meet some straight men there.” I can’t tell how much she’s joking.  She shares my distaste in the patterns in New York men, however – that their noncommittal, non email-answering, non phone-call-returning, total lack of chivalry or, hell, plain old respect is greatly disheartening.

The fact is I’m in a complicated position. When you’re looking down the door of 30 and still searching for Boyfriend #1, you’re in a prickly situation.  It gets way more complicated when you’re an old soul, would probably be matched best with a man in their late 30s-early 40s, who himself is probably knocking down the door of long term commitment. Oh and then there’s the fact that I need to meet him, engage in a relationship with him, and sleep with him for a while without any alcohol. Have I mentioned that self-rule? Yeah.  It’s prickly.

I’m not really sure what my thesis for this post is other than, damn it, the internet is less than 20 years old and this species has
partnered for millennia.  There has to be a better way.

Well Tickle Me Injured

The fellow who gives me Marma Therapy – we will call him Marma Man – recently offered a fascinating definition of what it means to feel tickled: the experience of an extremely minute degree of pain. The theory is that the body feels a sensation in a particularly sensitive area of the body, and fears the touch will increase to the pain threshold, so it causes us to clench in response, as if we are about to feel something more advanced. It makes sense when you think of what areas tend to be most ticklish: those around the soft tissue of organs, or surrounding major lymphatic intersections – the abdomen, the armpits, the inner thighs and hip joint. Also of note are areas where many major nerve sensors end: though we generally desensitize in our hands over time, you can certainly tickle a baby in their palm, and I know few people who aren’t ticklish in their feet.

I’m interested in this because I’m pretty ticklish, but only in certain areas. I’ve started wondering if these areas, not just physiologically, but emotionally, are where I am most fearful of experiencing pain, or where the memory of painful experiences have centered themselves in my body.

Take my stomach, for instance. (As a yoga teacher I know I should say “belly” because the “stomach” is a small organ to the left of center in my abdominal cavity… but something about the word belly makes me uncomfortable, so stomach it is).  I’ve always had distaste for my stomach. No, I hated my stomach. Now I’ve upgraded to distaste. With more meditation and therapy maybe in like 20 years I’ll upgrade to love.  Anyway. It was a serious source of emotional pain for me growing up. I remember in my most self hating times – probably around early puberty – going to bed and praying when I woke up the rolls of fat around my mid-section would be gone. I remember sobbing as I somewhat violently gripped at the flesh, willing it away through tears. (Meanwhile, was I exercising or changing my eating habits? Yeah not so much…self hate is pretty stellar at setting up the conditions to allow it to thrive).

Unless the touch is from someone with whom I am already intimately involved, I tend to shirk away quickly from any hands headed there.  I’ve certainly gotten better over the years – abdominal palpation used to be practically out of the question at my annual physical – but it’s still a weak spot.

Similarly, I can’t stand to be touched on my knees.  My legs were also a source of struggle through my childhood.  Though I was less disgusted with them visually as I was my core, because I have bone structure problems from my pelvis down to my ankles, I was unable to participate in sports with any impact, had to wear specially made hard orthopedic insoles, and suffered from chronic shin splints and joint pain.  In addition to memories of plain old physical pain, I think ticklish contact with my legs brings up old, stored memories of inadequacy: the feeling of being the fat kid sitting at the side of the gym doing her homework while everyone else played kick ball.

I do wonder if there will ever come a person in my life whose touch doesn’t “hurt” no matter where it is.  Or maybe it’s not a person, it’s just a matter of time and healing.

Something I Forgot

Before I left the city for a yoga retreat a couple weeks ago, I did what I do best: I updated my Facebook status. I generally don’t think of my updates as deeply prophetic in any way; I assume those who read them would agree.  But it struck me later on that day that my subconscious may have declared my fate on the ubiquitous social networking site.

“Looking forward to getting on vacation and discovering what I forgot.”

Innocuously enough, I intended to mean the items I neglected to bring in my shit-storm of packing that morning. Once the double meaning occurred to me, however, it gave me chills. And immediately after reading my weekend schedule upon arrival I knew to what the prescience referred: 12:00-1:00 Saturday: YogaDance.

I had a sad realization a few weekends ago at a party in my neighborhood – without alcohol, I seemed to have forgotten how to dance. Dancing at parties was an enormous part of my life in high school and college.  As a former drummer (ok, until I was 13), I love rhythm, I love moving with rhythm, and I love that feeling of releasing to an experience, at least when I can capture it.

Now, I should note, I didn’t drink in high school or most of my freshman year in college – a time when I was spending two to three nights a week dancing at the campus bar/club.  But as soon as alcohol became a major force in my social life, I think dance became neurally cemented to it.  Emerging from the distilling vat in 2009, out on the dance floor with my buzzed friends at this party, it seemed my ability to move my body without debilitating self consciousness was beyond me.  So when I read the description of YogaDance, and had it described to me as “all about letting it all go and just moving,” I felt a shudder of dread go through me: that was the last thing I wanted to do, and I knew I had to do it.

So I went.

At first it was terrifying; I cried a little, I felt completely awkward for about 5 minutes, but eventually I remembered things I had forgotten.  I forgot I’m a great dancer, both trained and untrained.  I forgot that maintaining balance while dancing is much easier sober.  I forgot, no one else really gives a shit what you look like, and if they really do, they probably have plenty of their own suffering to deal with.

In general, these forgotten parts of  my personality bring up the reason drinking became such a facet in my life in the first place: to shut off that voice that tells me over and over again that I’m not good enough, not doing enough, look ridiculous, and judges, judges, judges.  Freud called it a SuperEgo, recently I heard it referred to as The Peanut Gallery, The Board of Directors, or, my new personal favorite, the Itty Bitty Shitty Committee.  By drinking, that voice is silenced temporarily.  Unfortunately, I’ve found whenever it wakes up, it wakes up with more vigor.  The real work that I’m attempting now is to foster a relationship with the Committee, and let it be what it is without letting it control me.  Reminding my body how it can move to music without judging itself was a big step in that process.

Issues of body, movement and self-judgment beg a much more frightening question, though: when the time comes to have an intimate, physical relationship with someone completely sober for the first time, what blocks am I going to face?  I have to say, though it’d be really nice to get laid one of these days (I’m coming up on a year now…) I’m pretty petrified of the impending experience…

Shed the Husk

In Buddhist philosophy, the tree and its seed are one in the same.  The entire tree in all its glory exists in the minutia of the seed, and though it takes time for the tree to arrive at its full expression visibly, it already fully exists.

However, in my mind, inversely, the tree does not contain the entire seed.  In most plants, at some point in the growing process there is a tiny part which falls off the pod and degrades into the earth – the husk of the seed is shed.

Of course, it could be argued that the nutrient from the husk is used by the tree, blah, blah, but for my purposes just assume that in the direct growth experience of the tree, the husk leaves the party.

I think husk shedding is my main order of business these days.  Yesterday, I had what’s called Marma Therapy – an ancient Indian accu-pressure practice.  Be warned: to call Marma a “massage” is like calling surgery a light scratch.  You know when you get normal body work and they hit a sensitive spot, and then sort of move over it and you go, “oo! aaaaah…”?  Marma goes to that spot and stays. And presses. Hard. Like, real hard.  Like burning, deeply painful hard, and then you go “AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH FUCKIN A…. JESUS CHRIST WHAT THE OH GOD….” and then, if you’re me, you sob uncontrollably.

The sobbing, at least partially, was not from pain.  The sobbing was from 28 years of husk being shed; and apparently I hold my husk in my hamstrings.

My husk is in the shape of a little girl who knew she was “overweight” from the time she was four or five, and had tits – big tits – not long thereafter.  My husk also has this chicken-and-egg thing going on between hating her body and being afraid of her sexuality (thanks, Catholicism). So the fear of sexuality kept the weight coming, and the weight kept the sexuality away, and the fear of the sexuality kept the weight coming…

And coming.  Until at 19 she was 5′1″ and just shy of 200 pounds.  And DEFINITELY not getting any, unless you count making out with gay men.  And I don’t.

But the damage was done so long before then.

The damage happened when she was put in gymnastics class in a leotard and was afraid of going upside down so she got stuck on the uneven bars with all the other thin little girls watching and giggling.

The damage was done when the doctor showed her the “percentile” chart every year and noted how high up she was.

The damage was done when she had to wear undershirts in the dead of August or else the other kids would make fun of her chest.

The damage was done when year after year after year all the boys thought she was such a great friend and no one wanted to kiss her.

I know I’m not that little girl anymore, but the tree is still the same.  Obama, in Dreams From My Father refers to, “That constant, honest portion of myself, a bridge between my future and my past.”  That’s the tree.  All that damage that LittleMe experienced is the husk.  And that husk has built and built and built until my legs can’t stand to be touched, and my neck spasms regularly.

I think I understand why so many people love butterflies, no  matter how trite the old metamorphosis-chrysalis metaphor might be: we work so hard to restructure this plant, to release our husks from our bodies, it’d be so awesome to just pop into a little den, wait a couple days and re-emerge fully expressed.

I love that little girl.  I’ve developed a lot of compassion for her suffering.  But she’s gotta take a hike. Or at least take a nap. I got growing to do.

The Wordless Word Space

Ever since I was a little kid, I was aware that my thoughts worked in layers.  I knew there was a part of me that would actively use words to think – where if I had opened my mouth my thoughts might come spilling out – another part that saw pictures, another part that remembered sounds, and then ever back and back and back from there seemed quieter and quieter voices, that sort of used words, but very far away, and in a different way.

It’s only in the last month or so of my meditation practice, that I’ve realized these ever quieter places are precisely where I’m trying to draw myself.  I owe this realization to the forms of practice I learned in my yoga school, of which frankly I was never a big fan.

The Tantric system uses a great deal of seed-syllable mantra in its meditation practice; for example, each chakra has its own syllable such as “yam” for the heart center, “ram” for the solar plexus, etc.  Practice can include focus on the internal, silent recitation of these syllables, the concentration for which will theoretically leads you to Samadhi (a goal with which I have big fundamental problems – subject of another post…).   As a Buddhist, I found a lot of these techniques clunky and scrambling to my Vipassana practice which requires nothing but simple, elegant, bare attention to the breath or sensation.

Though I still prefer the latter technique, it occurred to me recently that when I “say” these syllables in that front, loud part of the brain, they’re more accurately said first – but not said at all just sort of felt – in that much quieter part of the brain.  Acknowledging and accessing that far away part seems to be my key to discovering a more peaceful, still place inside, and creating the space necessary to gain vantage on a cluttered, monkey mind.

That non-saying place is what I’ve deemed my Wordless Word Space, and the recitation of that phrase has, in turn, become my mantra.  I’ve found I can access this place much quicker these days – probably due to the increased activity in my yoga practice – but I’m not able to stay for long.  The problem is once you start thinking about the fact that you’re there, you’re not there anymore.  Unattached concentration in this place is my next big goal.

It’s funny to me that I always knew this structure of my brain, but it never occurred to me beforehand to try to utilize it.  It relates directly to what Buddhists call “Identifying with the Observer.”  Whenever we feel something, or think something, there is an “I” that knows that is happening. If we realize we know it’s happening, then there is an “I” which knows we know.

It’s a spinning mirror constantly looking in upon itself, never coming to one solid, singular self.