Choosing Surrender

Do you remember the movie “The Princess Bride”? As I approach the nine-month mark since my Great Loss, I have been seeing images of this movie in my mind. For me, deep grief feels a lot like losing one’s bones. Like suddenly my skeletal system has evaporated and I am all softness—a crumpled pile of tissue and muscles and hair on the ground.

Remember the scene where Westley is captured by Prince Humperdinck and he is taken to that place underground where that weird bald man is torturing him? And one day the princess tells Prince Humperdinck that Westley will come for her and the prince is so angry that he turns the knob allllll the way up on the torture device? Westley’s screams could be heard everywhere. His whole body writhed in agony. I think this is the true “first stage” of the grieving process. The torture. The screaming.

Do you remember what happens next? Westley is found by his friends and hauled off to a healer. He is declared “mostly dead.” He is given medicine but remains limp, lifeless, and unconscious. This is the second stage of grief. The stage where one is cared for by one’s friends but looks dead. Feels dead.

And after that? Westley slows starts to regain consciousness but remains feeble, weak, vulnerable, and mostly incapacitated. His friends still carry him around. He is pushed in a wheelbarrow. Hoisted up a mountain. Slung over a shoulder. Westley is still a crumpled pile of tissue and muscles and hair on the ground. This is the third stage of grief. The stage I’m in now.

Here’s the thing about being sans bones—true, you have no structure. No protection. No mobility. But you also have no hard edges. No resistance. No fight. In the past several months of therapy, I’ve made more “break throughs” than I have in all of the years of therapy in my past combined. Patterns and beliefs that have plagued me for decades are removed as easily as pulling out a big splinter with tweezers. It’s easy to remove the unwanted from the floating pool of tissue that is me. Burdened by an untrue thought that has shaped all of my relationships? I’ll just reach right into my brain and pull it out in one fell swoop. No pesky skull bones to get in the way.

It’s hard, though, to appreciate the radical shifts in thinking and ways of being because you are being dragged through life. Your head gets smacked on every doorway as you’re pulled through. Your toes get bloodied as they are pulled along the ground on lifeless feet. This degree of surrender, this stage of grief, hurts, and not just figuratively.

I don’t know what’s next in my grief journey, but I sincerely hope it involves me jumping out of a window and riding away somewhere on horseback. 😉

If you are somewhere in the grief process, I’d love for you to join me for my grief series starting in January. Please see my “Workshops” page for details.

My throat is protected by fierce warriors. They have been standing guard for many years. In childhood, they protected me. I spoke the truth far too often then. I told my father his nose looked crooked as I gazed at his reflection in the bedroom mirror. I questioned why my smiling mother was so sad. I called their fighting “fighting,” and was told it wasn’t fighting at all. My warriors listened well and learned the lessons. They stood guard. They knew what needed to be done to keep me safe. The words I once spoke clearly and freely now died on my lips and dripped down to my stomach where they grew ripe and fermented.

My warriors saw the strange looks on people’s faces as I told them of the angels I saw, ripped through the fabric of the world as I knew it. They heard the giggles of the girls in church as I spoke with fervor about religious things. They heard the awe and wonder of my parents as they told the story of my three-year-old self finding the lost plane tickets miles away in the gutter. They knew by the frequent telling of the story that such stories were uncommon and peculiar. The warriors acted as a barely porous cork, allowing only wisping drifts of the powerful me to make it past my throat. They wove my disguise, sticky strands of Maya, interlaced and hung on my aura like so much cloth on a starving man.

In adulthood, they stood guard as the stones and slings of outrageous fortune pummeled me nearly to death. They grabbed at the words, the biting phrases of anger, the black drops of sorrow, and held them, arms full to bursting, to keep them from escaping and causing me harm. They kept me from speaking fences of separation from all I knew of love and acceptance. They kept me safely comfortable in the world I had created for the shining growth of my soul.

And then came the time I started to fight them. I grabbed my rusted sword by the hilt and thrust blindly at my guardians, and they blinked and dodged, confused by my sudden attack. As I begged and pleaded and cried for release from them, they wept at my betrayal, yet defended me still. Like a mother crying into her pillow at night but continuing to serve her teenage daughter bread, they soldiered on in their duties.

Dearest warriors, fierce defenders, may I lull you now to sleep? My heart shakes in fits of sudden seizures with the fulness of stifled love. The kundalini mother in me longs, desperately, to reunite with her beloved Shiva, meeting at the crown of godhood. My eyes, bleary from straining to see through the shroud of layered Maya, long to see from the true eye. My soul, unfurling like a spiraled frond, finds no room to stretch her legs or stand tall. Hunched and aching, she longs to straighten at long last and claim her place in my eager, receptive body.

My warriors, I plead with you to lay down your weapons and pick up the keys to the locks that lay unused at your bare feet. Walk with me, side by side, arm in arm, and transform yourselves into the locksmiths, the ushers, the gilded, winged seraphs of wind and ethers and glittering Truth. May your discarded weapons pierce the rotting bits of unspoken fears and render them lifeless. Walk with me. Oh, how I need a friend.

I lovingly release you from your duties. I thank you for your service. I seal with a kiss on both of your armored cheeks my gratitude. Let us transform together. The mother and father are calling. Their voices echo near. They long to embrace. You need only turn the skeleton key and let the door blow open.

The fact that yoga in the western world is about fitness and image is nothing new. Yoga studios are normally filled with young, thin, white, middle to upper class women wearing tight spandex. The lack of diversity in age, size, race, social-economic status, and gender in people practicing yoga in the western world is a huge problem, and not one we are oblivious to. This is not to mention the lack of diversity in the styles of yoga offered as well as the lack of education about what yoga even is.

I am a “typical” western yogi in many ways. I am white, young-ish, middle class, and female. Additionally, I practice yoga and meditate every day. And yet, somehow, I still don’t feel like even I belong in a typical yoga studio. My body is curvy, not what I associate with a “yoga body.” My yoga clothes are usually baggy and comfortable. I am flexible, but there are many, many poses that I cannot do, either because I’m lacking the flexibility or the strength or because I’m very tall and my center of gravity is different…or something. Also, I practice types of yoga that are largely out of the main stream and sometimes seen as strange, even by other yogis. If an experienced yoga teacher who mostly fits the “typical” mold and practices yoga at home every. single. day. feels out of place in the yoga world, what hope is there for everyBODY else to feel included?

I wish I had answers. I know there are studios, like 21st Yoga, that are making efforts to reach out, break stereotypes, be deliberately inclusive, and offer a wide-variety of classes. I know, too, that there are teachers teaching yoga in low-income schools, in hospitals, in rehab facilities, in prisons, and many other places where people may not normally have access to yoga. As for my part, for now, please know that you are welcome in my classes exactly as you are. Come in a tattered t-shirt or sweatpants. Come with your perfect yoga body, because if your body is in a yoga class, it IS a yoga body. Do my yoga classes from a chair, if you like. Take what poses and exercises and meditations work for you and leave the rest. Talk with me if yoga interests you, but the costs are prohibitive.

It’s really no surprise that I’m drawn to classes (Yin, Nidra, Kundalini)where everyone keeps their eyes closed the whole time (but only if they want to!). Whatever kind of yoga classes you are drawn to, physically or metaphorically practice closing your eyes and I’ll do the same. Let’s make the experience what it’s meant to be–a way to reconnect and integrate all of the parts of ourselves. Flexibility and strength are just awesome side effects, real yoga is internal.

Kundalini is my favorite kind of yoga to practice, but I hated my first Kundalini Yoga class. At the time, I was in a yoga teacher training program that emphasized yoga for healing. When the gong was played at the end of my first Kundalini class, I felt myself “pop out” of my body. It was a strange reaction that I didn’t understand and I left the class crying and vowing never to go back. I did go back, however, for answers to what had happened to me.

When I spoke with the teacher and shared my experience, he said it was a very uncommon reaction and was definitely not the intent of the gong playing or the class. He then asked me several questions about myself, really looked at me and listened to me, and then recommended Kundalini meditations and postures I could do to strengthen my auric field and my radiant body.

The result of that interaction changed my life. I began to truly understand, for the first time in my life, why I had the sensitivities and proclivities I do. It also led to a deep understanding of tools I can use to manage those sensitivities. Kundalini Yoga was what I had been looking for.

As I delved more and more into the Kundalini practice, I found my personal meditation practice becoming a larger, more meaningful part of my life. I found myself clearing out old thought patterns and behaviors that did not serve me. I healed from deep and long-held wounds. I moved, and am still moving, toward the truest version of myself–one that is profoundly joyful.

Kundalini Yoga challenged me. It moved me rapidly toward change and growth. It urged me to reconnect with my own divine self. If these things sound a little scary, you’re not alone, but there is nothing to be afraid of. Kundalini helps you awaken your own dormant life force energy, to everything you already are and somehow forgot. And who you are is better and happier than you can even imagine.

Neem Karoli Baba, an Indian guru, said, “Love everyone, serve everyone, remember God.” Karma Yoga is the yoga of action. It is work. It is a yogic path where enlightenment is achieved through selfless service. It teaches us that we should give no thought to the outcome or results of our service, but dedicate our work to the Supreme Consciousness.

Sometimes I find great beauty, comfort, and purpose in striving to be a Karma Yogi, but oftentimes I feel frustrated. I wonder if I’m doing enough. I take my eyes off of the Divine and look at the seemingly non-existent results of my efforts.

This spring, I visited India for two weeks. When I returned home, I found the apartment I share with two roommates in complete disarray. Rotten food filled the kitchen counter tops and fridge. The sink was full of dishes. The garbage can and recycling bin were overflowing. Every cupboard was open. The smell made me gag.

It occurred to me in that moment that I do a lot more housework than I realize. I’m certainly not obsessed with cleanliness. In fact, I often feel like I don’t do enough around the house. But when I saw the cumulative results of my absence, I realized that I do, in fact, a lot of small and simple things. I wash a dish after I use it along with an extra fork or two that might be in the sink. I take five seconds to wipe off the stove after I use it. I empty the garbage can when it fills up. I close a cupboard after it’s been opened.

I am trying to remember this experience as I strive to walk the Karma Yoga path. My efforts to serve and love others are small and simple. The results are all but invisible. But perhaps the cumulative results, could I see them, are something more.

If they are not, if the kitchen had been perfectly clean, if the results of my service truly are non-existent, then this is still a worthwhile path. I am changing in ways that are both simple and profound. I will keep drawing my eyes back, again and again, to the Divine, where I’m reminded to let go of the outcomes. To surrender.

I recently had someone tell me that I am a “regeneration artist.” This could not be more true. I have gone through cycle after cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. I pour my heart into building something–a relationship, a career, a home–and then I let it all go and start over. I cry. I complain. I wonder why, but I know.

Each time I am reborn, I am one layer closer to my center. It’s true that I must sometimes shed places and people that I love. But I also shed fear and self-loathing and patterns that no longer serve me. I am at once nearly unrecognizable to my teenage self and within arm’s reach of what can only be described as my True Self.

And so I choose, and choose again, surrender. I surrender to the cleansing fire that burns my life to the ground and the green bud that curls up from the ashes. I choose to practice ishvara pranidhana, surrender to the Divine.