Messy Guru

Burning at the Center

Mark Nepo has these words written at the beginning of today's reading:  

"Burning your way to center is the loneliest fire of all.  You'll know when you have arrived when there is nothing left to burn."

"It is the same in the human journey as in the natural world. As the center grows stronger, what once was protective turns into a covering, like tree bark or snake skin, that is now in the way, and, sooner or later, we as spirits growing in bodies are faced with burning old skins, like rags on sticks, to light our way as we move deeper and deeper into the inner world, where the forces of God make us one."

My experience with Bikram Yoga has been a similar one.  I had to "burn" all my old belief systems, dysfunctions, addictions and my old "skin" to start anew.  

This "slow burn" if you will, was a long and arduous one. Each yoga class would slowly remove the covering of my wounded psyche and reveal a new layer of skin.  

Sometimes they were knots in my mind and at other times it was rebuilding a part of the body overly used and abandoned by misuse.  It all seemed needing of being replaced.  Like an old couch in desperate need of upholstering.

The strange and mystical part of this process is that you cannot really see ahead or behind as you are moving through the fire.  All you can feel is the burning sensations of each new and unexplored parts of your subconsciousness.  

I cannot really explain why I kept going back to yoga.  The process itself was grueling and uncomfortable.  The layers of old "skin" seemed to endless and wrapped tightly to my body like the air around it.  

Perhaps I knew intuitively that doing something was more bearable than doing nothing at all.  The rewards from this type of yoga took years for me to realize.

A kind and insightful yoga teacher pulled me aside last week and pointed out to me just how far I have come while doing this yoga over the years.  Her words of encouragement and message of change brought tears to my eyes.

This yoga brought about the changes needed within.  The yoga postures opened up the body and enabled the fire to start the burning process of eliminating its impurities. 

At some point along this journey this fire will have served its purpose and become still like a beam of light.

Silent and peaceful.  Guiding my way home.

 

Climbing Through The Darkness

I am reading a ground breaking book by Terri Wise called, "Waking Up:  Climbing Through The Darkness".  Her story is a "blueprint" and a mirror into my own journey out of the Darkness.  Her story of sexual abuse, addictions, loss and the daily struggle to find her way, left me spellbound.

Her childhood confusion (and mine) on the details of the events and the subsequent "stories" we tell ourselves (or were told) after the abuse is pivotal in recovering the "truth" of the events as they unfolded and the circumstances at the time of the abuse(s).

A sexual predator will have succeeded if they can get us to "own" even a tiny bit of the event and/or "blame" the victim for the entire event.  Unscrewing this in our head in my experience can take years and even decades.  Our perception of the world becomes a dance between guilt, self-blame, and anxiety.

The abuser dances away free.

One of Terri's many "aha" moments came when she discovered how this impossible logic took hold into her psyche and subconsciousness:

"I always held onto the belief that I had the control. Because, as you've (her therapist) suggested, if I faced the fact that it wasn't  really my choice, then I would have had to deal with being fearful, oppressed, forced or whatever."

"I got the same feeling this morning, I realized that this "pre-empting" under the guise of making my own decisions is something I do in order to avoid feeling that I am under someones else's control."

Her confusion (and again, mine) has so many layers and unexplored challenges to the minds way of "weaving the most plausible story with the least amount of information (or memories)".  I found myself in awe of her profound lack of clarity of what actually happened and by filling in the blanks with "responsibility" and guilt:

"Again, Betsy (her therapist) pointed out something that never occurred to me before.  "Do you really think he was doing it just for you?"  Betsy repeated, almost in summation of her tedious, step-by-step, approach to dissection my beliefs."

After my yoga class this evening, I realized that I had erroneously clung to the belief that I was a willing participant in order to not feel the devastation and chaos of the abuse.  

I also realized that I have viewed the world through a perception of being in "control" of people, places and events in my daily life in order to not feel.  In Reality, I found myself in the exact opposite of this illusion:  

Controlled.

By people, places and events.

This profound realization left me reeling in a space of horror and disbelief.  My power was leaking all over the place.  The only thing I was in control of was the "belief" that I was in control.

While "processing" this out in my mind, I found that I could have not perceived my world any different than this.  I was placed upside down and backwards in this world and it took a mountain of effort to place myself right-side up again.

A huge and momentous breakthrough.  

And ironically it has left me in control and aware.

 

Chasing The Butterfly

Today's reading from Mark Nepo's "Book of Awakening" was so prolific that I wanted to share it in its entirety:

"In release, we begin."

"Once when I was six, I chased a butterfly halfway through the reservoir before cupping it in my boyish hands. I had the beautiful thing, but couldn't see it. To see it, I had to let it go. I kept my hands cupped as long as I could, past nose itch and leg jiggle, and then the dark flitting against my palms made me open and magnificent plates of color lifted against my will.  

"It was too delicate a story to tell over dinner, and soon there were books and assignments and model cars to glue and arguments and anger, and I forgot there ever was a butterfly. It's only now, some forty years later, that it awakens in me like a revelation placed in the hands of a pilgrim long before he knew enough to believe. Now chasing the butterfly seems a way of life: afraid to lose or be left out, we chase and cling, and clinging, we are lost. It seems so obvious once living it.

"Now I can see that during my illness, this was the difference between fear and faith, between terror and the presence of God. Landing in a hospital bed, I chased the beat of everything I faced into my heart and tried to cup it in my boyish hands, burying my head. Of course, I had the beautiful thing beating like that butterfly, now trapped inside me. As long as I kept all of that beauty and power of raw life cupped-in my chest, in my face, in my hands-I couldn't see it. To see it, I had to let it go."

"Just as when a boy, I held it as long as I could, until the pounding made me open and this magnificent sense of life lifted out of me against my will. I now know that what I held so tightly within was the presence of God, which held in felt like pain and fear and terror."

"Over forty years to learn this vital lesson: that the deepest things beat within, made dark and fearful by our holding, only uplifting the instant we let go."

Mark also suggests at the end of today's reading a gentle exercise that I found to be immensely beneficial:

+ Feel that pain or fear beating in your chest like a butterfly, like a small thing of beauty waiting to be released.

+ As you breathe, open your hands and let it go.

+ Let it rise out of you into the open.

As I did this I could feel this intense, dark, foreboding energy lift itself up and flap its wings out of my Being.  My body shook with its release.  

And then I watched the butterfly drift ever so gently away.

 

To Thine Own Self Be True

It would seem after all these years of intense introspection and digging I would have found the ultimate Truth of my way of Being somewhere along the way.  Not just any Truth.  

My Truth.  The long journey home from the head to the heart.

These words from Shakespeare come to mind:

Polonius:

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell, my blessing season this in thee!

Laertes:

Most humbly do I take my leave, my lord. 

Somewhere in my journey "here" I had learned to not bring my Truth along with me.  I brought along a facade of sorts to be welcomed with family and friends.  The "truth" as it was taught to me was not "welcomed" nor respected.

 

My "survival self" had to take over for survival.  Its job was to protect me until I had enough space to finally accept the Truth of my existence.   It worked really well for everybody except for me.  They kept their "story" and I went along to get along.  Especially in my mind.  The truth it would seem got left behind.  

 

None of this was intentional or a conscious action on my part.  It was hidden in plain sight.  Hiding in Reality.  Like the sun behind the clouds.  Or a fruit hidden beneath a tough and coarse rind.

The break in the psyche continued to widen as the Truth remained buried beneath the rubble of my life.  Mark Nepo writes of this dilemma:

"I have a friend in recovery, and when asked what made him stop drinking, he says, "The pain of drinking became greater than the pain of not drinking." The same can be said for us all.  We can flower in an instant, as soon as the pain of not flowering and not loving become greater than our fear."

This "flowering" of sorts came forth for me yesterday as I realized that my "Truth" was never honored and respected as a integral part of me.

Especially by Me.

My authentic Self seemed to have a lot of caveats.  My body responded in kind with pain and anxiety.  It manifested as addictions, dissociation's, denial, anger and rage.

It's odd that my own Truth could be so well hidden from me. I could talk about it quite comfortably and did.  The part that is perplexing is that left brain could not "hear" what the right brain was experiencing.

 

I also realized that I could not have withstood the immense totality of it all.  The bone crushing, emotional devastation of being left alone in the world with no support.

 

"Nobody" was truly coming to help me.

This was at the age of 4.  A time when "adults" could not see me.  All I could see and feel for miles was chaos and confusion.  A world swept away in sexual abuse, religion and dysfunction.

I created a world in my head that made me wrong and all the others "right".  I had to be the problem.  It was the only thing that made sense.   And my truth got swept away with their story of us.

Today I stand together with my Truth.  All of it.  It is the only thing that keeps me tethered to Reality.  Moving away from it causes great alarm within my body and soul.

And the Universe accepts this wholeheartedly.

 

 

Be Myself and I

In September of 2003 I set out to become a certified Bikram Yoga Teacher.  I had trained hard and believed I could handle the 9 week and 2 (one and half hour) heated yoga classes a day training schedule in LA at Bikram's Yoga College of India. During the first few classes I started blacking out and feeling intense nausea.

At night I had my first experience of what I've come to describe as "night terrors".   Intense shaking of my body and unbelievable terror coming from inside of me.  Instead of resting, I was in high alert and lay in waiting for all of it to stop.  

I would wake up exhausted and begin another day of 2 yoga classes and lasted exactly 2 weeks.  I had to quit.  I knew I had within me an unhealed past and went home to Houston in absolute shame and defeat.  

My entire life had crumbled on the edge of a yoga mat and I had no "coping" skills to match this new identity.  One day I was a successful business executive and the next a "failed" yoga instructor.  

Nothing in my old world made sense and everything in the new one was filled with anxiety and depression.  My old company filled my position and the relationship I was in was over and done with.    

I spent the next 9 years going deep within to find the source of my darkness.  It was a one step forward and three steps back process.  Addictions kept rising to the surface to be addressed.  Mental instability and the night terrors would come in like the tide.  

I just felt completely worthless.

I stopped doing this type of yoga regularly and filled my nights with martinis and wine.   I had surgery on two blown disks in my lower back in 2007.  The pain in my lower back stopped and reappeared in my sciatic nerve in my left leg.  This pain left me bitter and angry.  Everything I tried to do to alleviate this pain did not work.   Cortisone shots, other types of yoga, and still the pain persisted.

I remember driving out to White Rock Lake in Dallas and looked up from a stop light and saw the sign for Bikram Yoga Dallas.

Screw that I thought.  

Going back meant facing the pain in my leg, addictions, mental illness, a broken body, and all the shame of failing. Each new Bikram studio I joined I kept most of my exhausting "story" from the teachers.  Trying to explain my past and way of Being in the world left me with little words and awkward glances.  

Finally I went back to Bikram Yoga Dallas in late 2007 (I checked yesterday and I have completed over 450 classes at this studio) and started to face my life.  I was an "angry" student.   Rage and anxiety covered me and the yoga mat.  I hated everything.  

At some point the physical pain stopped completely.

I started up a "regular" practice this January.  The anxiety and emotional issues still bubble up from time to time and I now have a lot of new coping skills.  

And Bikram yoga.

What I failed to appreciate is that the yoga has been doing its "job" all along.  It is meant to bring up all of our "issues".  I was actually a "success" and my "mind/ego" was being slowly replaced with the Light.  I just had no "other" inside of me.   

I am seriously considering going back to LA this coming September if the opportunity presents itself.  The anxiety and issues come up if I try to be anything other than myself. 

Complete with all of my imperfections as a Human Being.

I realized tonight in yoga that I can be no other way.

Be Myself and I.

  

Silence Breaking

I realized in yoga this evening that the room was completely quiet including my mind.  A strange and familiar sound.  It echoed peacefully off of my Being and into my Heart.  I kept looking around for what was making this so, and realized it was inside of me.  The steady noise of buzzing bees and the drone of white noises lifted itself off of me and migrated elsewhere.

I could feel what Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor calls the "peanut gallery" or the left side of the brain wanting to get in on the action.  This Silence kept it a bay.  Expanding like the feathers on a peacock.  Its brilliant colors dazzling and spectacular.  Providing a protective shield of sorts.

David Hawkins describes the process of thinking as:

"Thinking proceeds from lack; its purpose is gain. In wholeness, nothing is lacking. All is complete, total, and whole. There is nothing to think about, nor any motive to think. No questions arise, and no answers are sought or needed. Totality is complete, totally fulfilling, with no incompleteness to process." 

It seemed so simple and obvious.  

Yet.

Elusive.

I can see why the mystics are quiet about this.  Words fall short and fill up this beautified space.  It begs your forgiveness and pleads for your innocence.

Lost and found.

 

Let It Be

While doing Bikram yoga yesterday I heard a clear and distinct voice (with whom I call the Holy Spirit) whisper into my Soul:  "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased."  I looked into this quote and found it from the Bible in Matthew 3:17.

I immediately felt this intense feeling of Love envelope my body and Being.  A direct hit, if you will.  A message of the highest order.  I could feel my heart open as this message was being processed and assimilated into my Being. 

The "ego" it would seem does not have the last word to define my Self.

God does.

It's odd that I hear such "whispers" of such profundity and especially given my proclivity to the Eastern traditions of yoga, meditation, chanting and pretty much anything out of India.

His words sat with me for the night and into today.  I also pondered how I could write about something so subjectively experiential and profound.  And perhaps this is where words fall short as David Hawkins describes the difference between a Transcendent God vs Immanent God:

"God is knowable and known as immanent (in here); whereas to the ego, God is seen as transcendent only (out there)."

Either way, I don't want you to believe me.

I also happened to glance up from the screen while reading the quote to my sister Beth and looked directly at the framed picture above my computer on the wall:

  and the words again came to me:

"This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased."

This prophetic drawing was also illustrating perfectly my journey of a thousand miles inward to rescue a long forgotten child.

My inner child. 

My son.

Myself.

Let it Be.