imitation/facade

around the corner

lies an unknown fate – hidden –

behind the smiling

If I wanted to

i would work in the garden

go for a walk

cook a gourmet meal for dinner

finish reading the Goldfinch

spend time with a friend or two

clean out my closet

and my drawers

instead i sit here writing

wondering when this malaise

will lift

when the sky will open

and the sun will shine through

when will i again be interested in living

Damn It Antidepressants or Botox?

Blimy

Decking bleached by

endless sun.  Rusty nails stand

at attention.  Ouch.

Botox

Frozen forehead,smooth,

wrinkle free.  No expression.

Smile, despair alike.

Paradise

Boats laden with limes.

Motors churning the water.

Cocktail pollution.

Alcohol

Libations flow from

the beach bar where we gather

to toast good fortune.

Baby Due

Katie will have a

baby.  I may or may not

be there.  Baby born.

Damned Antidepressants

Wellbutrin, prozac

cure or curse.  Hide from them or

hide from me.  Pretend?

February 18- One year, One day at a time – Dancing

Dancing.

We went dancing at Legends.  There were about 8 of us.  We walked down the beach to the road, turned right then left and we were there.  Live music, a bunch of gringos sitting around, stone faced watching an outdated band play really old music.  The lead guitar player was actually quite good and the band leader, who also played the keyboards had a fairly good voice.  The quality of the music was secondary to the fun we had being together, out away from Akbol.  We were with the townies. the locals at a local dive and we danced.  In fact we were the only ones dancing.  Felt a little odd to be out on the dance floor with fifty people watching.  I want to say something here and I notice immediately that my censor jumped in to stop me.  That old voice, “What will people think if you write that?” rears its ugly head.  Damn will I ever be free to write just exactly what comes to mind without concern for others.  I am not saying I want to intentionally hurt another person, but there is a fine line between writing what I see and experience and telling too much about the people I spend time with.  “Bring all blame back to me.”  Probably best for me to focus on my own life.  Well that does not feel right wither.

And I will tell you one more thing.  I hate the antidepressants I take.  Just three weeks ago I was feeling flat, disengaged from my life, did not particularly want to leave the house or even get out of bed.  Now since I added wellbutrin to the mix I am more outgoing, but I feel separate from myself as if I am in a movie theatre watching my life flash before me on the screen.  In yoga we talk about avidya, a screen that separates us from reality, like a thin film that blurs our perception.  Antidepressants do that to me, they remove me from the world just enough do that I can function in it, but so much that my life begins to resemble a fairy tale, a story someone is telling about a woman I don’t really know.

More than anything, I want to get off these damn drugs.  I want to be me.  I quit taking them, everything goes fairly well for a few months, maybe even six or more and then I withdraw.  I want to be more and more alone.  I feel less and less comfortable around others.  I want to stay home and write and write and write.  Why not give in to that desire?  What am I afraid will happen?  As much as I love being with others, dancing, teaching yoga, playing with my grand baby, I cannot imagine that I would hold up in my house forever.

Perhaps, no, not perhaps, most definitely, this desire to be drug free is the reason I signed up for two silent retreats at UPaya Zen Center.  I want to face my deepest darkest fears, do hand to hand combat if I must, walk into the cave of the tiger and come out the other side dancing or perhaps limping.  What does it matter?  I  do not want to squander any part of my life living behind the veil of an antidepressant fog.

Sorry about any errors in spelling or grammar.  Want to post this and the signal is weak.  I am also having a terrible time reading my computer screen.  Too much sun!  Cannot get away from it.

Where are my People, Get My People

Last summer, my grand baby Amelia and I played in the pool every Monday morning when she came to stay with Pops and GiGi.  One of her favorite games involved throwing plastic toys, a ship’s captain, an octopus armed man with buggy eyes, a buoyant blond, bubble headed girl and a little flat plastic fish, into the pool in just the right spot so the current of the pump would push them into the skimmer.  She would then step carefully out of the pool, waddle over to the skimmer, lift the lid with a plastic spoon and scream, “My people.”  She pulled them out and threw them back in.  When they floated back into the skimmer, she would hold up her arms, elbows bent, palms up and ask, “Where are my people?”

That’s what I’m sayin’.  Where are my people?  One day, I will write a post and not care who reads it.  One of my biggest obstacles, the thing that pulls me down over and over, that leads me to betray and abandon myself, that pushes me to take anti-depressants is my belief that I must act certain way, I must do things in my life, especially in relationship to others, to maintain their love and affection. That means I cannot be sad.  I cannot question authority.  I cannot rail against injustice.  I cannot be a loner, a hermit.  I cannot cry.

If that is true, if I must manipulate the world to meet my needs, which it will never do, I will die never having truly lived.  I want to be truthful to myself, to my dreams, and to what I love.  Negotiating, compromising, creating strategies to make my life easy and fun…these things will never make me happy.  They will not connect me deeply to those whom I love and to the world in which I live.

Studying Ryokan, the 18th Century monk and poet, gave me a new perspective on my need for attention.  He was basically a hermit, a nomad, who spent his life reading and studying Dogen.  He suffered loneliness for a greater goal, his love of the teachings.  His suffering is palpable in his writings.

Empty and fleeting My years are gone
And now, quivering and frail,
I must fade away.

No luck today on my mendicant rounds;
From village to village I dragged myself.
At sunset I find myself with miles of mountains between me and my hut.
The wind tears at my frail body, 

And my little bowl looks so forlorn —
Yes this is my chosen path that guides me
Through disappointment and pain, cold and hunger.

 As Natalie Goldberg said today, (this is loosely translated) “No matter what we do, we cannot escape the suffering that accompanies the human condition. We look at Ryokan and think, he didn’t have children.  If her had children he would not have been so unhappy.  Or we think, he was unhappy because he was poor.  I will make money then I will be happy. Everything is fleeting.  Nothing will ever make up completely happy.  We fool ourselves again and again.  If I read this book, I will find the answer.  If I study with this teacher I will learn the secret. But we are still fucked.  Do what you love.  That is what Ryokan did.  No matter what happened, he did not lose focus.”

I want people to read my posts, my book when I write it, but now, more than anything, I want to touch my sadness.  I want to walk through it every day, to feel it, and touch it.  Roshi Joan says, “Sadness is the pathway to uncommon wisdom.”  I believe I have uncommon wisdom and that pretending to be okay, pretending not to be sad, taking antidepressants is separating me from my uncommon wisdom.  May I give up the need  for approval. May I devote the rest of my life to writing and peeling away the layers of false perception, until I, like Ryokan, can walk my path, lonely as it may be.  May I be willing to suffer sadness if it means I become more transparent.  I long to fall in love with life.

Here is another one of Ryokan’s  poems:

I watch people in the world
Throw away their lives lusting after things,
Never able to satisfy their desires,
Falling into deeper despair
And torturing themselves.
Even if they get what they want
How long will they be able to enjoy it?
For one heavenly pleasure
They suffer ten torments of hell,
Binding themselves more firmly to the grindstone.
Such people are like monkeys
Frantically grasping for the moon in the water
And then falling into a whirlpool.
How endlessly those caught up in the floating world suffer.
Despite myself, I fret over them all night
And cannot staunch my flow of tears.

 You are my people. Free yourself from the grindstone.  

A Haiku of my own…..

Bleached blonde hair.

 A case of mistaken identity.

She is sixty two.

 

Expired – Going for the Gusto

There are multiple levels of clarity and  well-being.  I realized today that I have been operating on the lowest of the low, slogging through my days, trying to be motivated, but really having a sense of drowning.   I can put on a happy face with the best of them,  even teach a great asana class, but underneath the façade lurks a murky bog waiting to suck me down.  I have been chronically depressed most of my adult life.  It was not until I turned forty that a doctor finally diagnosed my depression and prescribed Prozac.  I immediately felt better.  Endless days of malaise turned toward sunnier times.  I wanted to be with my children.  I wanted to leave the house.  I was no longer afraid to go to the grocery store where I might see someone, god forbid, who would want to talk to me.  I felt more energetic and more engaging.  That was 1991.

Fast forward to   2005.  I am still taking Prozac not knowing that after years of being on serotonin uptake drugs the effects tend to flatten out.  I figured, “Well I am getting older.  I am probably going to have a shift in energy.”  Then I started studying with Rod Stryker who I heard claim, “If you practice yoga, pranayama and meditation correctly, you should not have to take antidepressants.”  That may not be what he said, but it is what I took away from the teachings.  So I got a mantra, started doing more pranayama, designed my private and public yoga classes, including my personal practice, according to the energetic principles of Para Yoga.  I let go of my vigorous vinyasa practice which included lots of surya namaskars with chaturangas, arm balances, head and shoulder stands and overall steady, but constant movement.  Rod suggested slowing down the momentum, giving the unconscious mind a chance to reveal its dark secrets.  That part worked.  I did heal many old wounds, but the effort to stop taking meds failed over and over again.  I felt like such a failure.  My therapist at the time tried to convince me that my long-term depression was chemical and not likely to be remedied by meditation. In fact, she recommended aerobic exercise.

January 22, 2014. I continue to use my mantra, to meditate and practice asana in a slow, steady way.  But something is shifting.  Yesterday I added Wellbutrin to my antidepressant cocktail.  I am ready to move beyond flat.   I am not giving up meditation or mantra.  I am, however, going to up the ante in my physical practice.  I am 62 years old and I want to be strong physically as well as mentally.  I am bringing back head stand, hand stand, shoulder stand and arm balances.  I am going to play music in my classes.  One of my friends and a wonderful yoga teacher, Jennifer Brilliant, whom I have not seen in years, said, “Everything a yoga teacher tells you eventually has an expiration date.”  Time for slow and steady has expired.  Going for the gusto.

I want to be her, the lady pictured below, in twenty years.

Why I Write

I write for myself and for my friends.  I write to say things to my family I cannot speak aloud, to clear the clouds of misfortune.  I write to elevate my own thoughts and the minds of those around me.  I write to speak the truth.  I write to proclaim that each and every one of us has a right to be heard. I write because I want to be honest and clear.  I write with earnestness and joy knowing that sometimes, often, I do not make sense.  When I write I know I am alive. If I do not write, I feel like a failure.  I write so that I can hold a candle to the world as I see it and not as others depict it.  I write for my grandmother, who could not or would not speak.  I write to play.  I write for fun because it is like frolicking in a flower festooned valley.  I write because I dream and I know there is more.   I write when I don’t take my anti-depressant, out of fear and desperation.  I write to make sense of the world and to illuminate my world.  I write as if I were playing a fine violin, bowing my way across the pages of time and space.  I write to tell my story so that others may live.  I write of wonder and pain and fear and joy and confusion.  I write, when I write, because I believe it is what I have always been meant to do.  I write for all the survivors of sexual abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction, cancer and the like.  I write my pain in hopes of touching yours.  Writing is like playing with fire knowing that any moment I could go up in smoke. When I write I walk the tight rope between what I know to be real and what the world tells me is real.  Will I fall?  Is that why I do not write?  I write to love others and myself.  I write to express anger, hatred, revenge and loneliness. I write to become a dagger that will pierce my father’s heart. I write, screaming at my mother, demanding she tell me what really happened.  I write pleading for understanding and reconciliation. I write so that I will not forget that my son died and yet he lives.  I write to bring chaos into the world in hopes of restoring it to sanity.  I write to cry and laugh and joke.  I write to pretend I am someone who I am not and to be more of who I am.  I write for God, for the Divine mother in me and for the women of the world.   I write to spin a yarn.  I write like a wolf howling in the night hungry for love and companionship.  I write to be alone but not lonely.  I write because I am a writer and that is what we do.  It is our language.  It is my connection to my soul and to the universe.  Writing is my life.

Alcohol: The MIddle Path – Keep Questioning

F_ _ k this not drinking.  Even though I am not drinking, I still woke up at 3:30 am and could not go back to sleep.  I still have a headache every morning.  Maybe that is a result of the bit of sugar I had last night.  I could quit sugar too.  Why not give up eating and drinking all together?  When is enough, enough?

I do not feel closer to others.  I actually feel as if I have created a self-imposed prison.  I did not have dinner with a friend last night because I knew I would want to drink if I did.  Well f_ _ K that.  I wanted to drink anyway, and I missed spending time with someone I love very much.  Why am I doing t his?  Do I really believe I am an alcoholic?  People in AA would say, yes, you are an alcoholic because you think about drinking.  You question your drinking.  I dare say there are others out there who sometimes drink to excess, who think about what cocktail they will have in the evening, and  who plan a party with the idea of what special alcoholic concoction they will serve.  Are all of them alcoholics?

Saying that every person who ever thinks about alcohol or makes plans around alcohol is like saying that only Christians who believe in Jesus will go to heaven.  When my daughter was in Catholic high school, she dared to question this doctrine.  She was in a required religion class.  The nun was explaining that all those who did not believe in Jesus Christ were condemned to eternal damnation.  I do not know exactly how she worded her disagreement, but she made it clear she could not believe in a God who would turn his back on the majority of the world’s population because they did not take Christ into their hearts.

In the same vein, I do not believe that all people who questions their alcohol consumption are alcoholics.  One of the basic precepts of yoga is svadyaya, self-study.  It requires going so far into yourself that you do not come out until you find peace with that which is deep within.  In the book, 365 TAO, on page 344,Deng-Ming-Dao says,

“Don’t be inhibited.  If you hold back from achieving your hearts desires, you will become bitter and frustrated.  If you hold back from expressing yourself, your creativity will stagnate.  If your hold back from taking action, you will become impotent with timidity.  Don’t stop anything. Let your uniqueness flow freely.

In the beginning, one must adhere to structure — artificial though it may be )) until one attains the proper understanding to behave with uninhibited spontaneity.  Thus one must spend a certain amount of time studying structure until there is no need for structure.   By that time, one will have thoroughly absorbed the secret of moderation and one will be able to act with correctness and spontaneity.

How ironic is it that the above was today’s reading?  There really are no coincidences in this world.  Everything we need is here in this moment.  I have spent the last 30 years of my life, in self-study.  I am always learning more and more about myself, about this thing we call being human and about the world I live in.  Krishnamurti, the great teacher and philosopher cautioned, (this is paraphrased) “Beware of breaking out of one prison only to create another.”  He also said,

“Don’t be afraid to be discontent, but give it nourishment until the spark becomes a flame and your are everlastingly discontented with everything so that you really begin to think, to discover.  You see, without this flame of discontent your will never have the initiative which is the beginning of creativeness.  To find out what is true you must be in revolt against the established order.  So one must have this total discontent –but with joy.”

I must say I am not experiencing much joy these days.  I have the “discontent ” part down.  Where is the joy?

My self-study continues to come back, again and again, to my mother.  The bitch is dead, but she haunts me.  I see her drinking, daily, sometimes throughout the entire day.  Then I see myself as her.  I am not her.  I have not spent an entire day drinking since my college days and even then, I never woke up and drank a beer first thing in the morning.  My mother used to make those weird hangover concoctions with beer and tabasco and a raw egg.  Ugh!  Even when I am with friends who have cocktails at lunch, I rarely drink because I know it will affect the rest of my day.  I will feel sluggish and groggy, and I probably end up in bed.  I do not want to spend my precious time recovering from a glass of champagne.

The practice of not drinking is bringing up so many questions.  I am grateful for this time.  As a yoga teacher and practitioner, I believe freedom, moksha, real freedom, is the product of a self-understanding.  I am not you and you are not me.  “This is not your life, it is life itself and we are all in it together”…  I continue to offer my struggles to the highest good of all.  I do not believe for a minute that I am the only one who asks myself the question,” How much is too much?  How often is too often?  What is enough?  Do I have a problem with alcohol, food, television, shopping, reading, and so on?

My dear friend Cyndi Lee just spent  7 days in a silent retreat at Upaya, a zen  center in Sante Fe.  When I spoke with her last night, she talked about how challenging it was to be still and to have rigidly defined structure.  She said, “There was nothing to look forward to.  Every day was the same.  We sat in meditation, we ate, we cleaned our rooms, we rested, we sat again, we ate, we meditated, and we slept. ”  She said there were times when she dropped in to  the routine and was comforted by it.  I admire her courage.

But I also know that we are “householders.”  We live in the world.  I practice yoga and meditation on a daily basis so that I can be a part of the world in which I live.  I am grateful for teachers like Cyndi and Rod Stryker and others, including myself, who spend time in reflection, apart from outside stimuli, but I know for myself, and I would hazard to say for Cyndi too, that we do it so that we can be a part of the greater good, so that we can serve others,not permanently separate from them.

My favorite grandmother, Momo, told me on her death-bed, “Petty, always have something to look forward to.  Just a little something.  And remember, everything in moderation.”

What would life be like without our friends and families, without the daily events we plan, the things we do that engage us?  My grand baby, Amelia, comes to our house every Monday.  I love our time together.  I anticipate the day with wonder and excitement.  She brings so much joy into our lives.  I enjoy having friends over for dinner, or at least I did, until I quite drinking.  We are hosting a neighborhood party this Friday.  We planned it over a month ago, before I decided to give up alcohol.  I love all the people who plan to attend, but now I am dreading the event.  I will be separate, just as I was at the luncheon on Sunday.  I will have fun, I always do because I know how to pretend,  In fact, I pretend so well that I am now not sure when i am really enjoying myself.  When is it an act and when is it real?

My whole life, I have felt separate, different from others.  Yoga teaches that this kind of thinking is an illusion.  There is no separation.  We are all one.  In AA, they say that this feeling of being separate is what drives alcoholics to drink.  I do not believe that is entirely true.  Acknowledging separateness is accepting the human condition.

For a long time I worked with the sankalpa, ” I am happy to be sober because I feel so much closer to my friends and family.”  Oh but if that were the case!

Looking back, I remember clearly that to stay sober for the 10 years that I did, I gave my entire life over to AA.  I gave up all my old friends, I spend hours in meetings and with other recovering alcoholics.  Yes, I did not drink.  Yes, I was sober, but my life was incredibly small, limited.   Depression set in.  The doctor put me on prozac.   Was it because I was unhappily married?  Was I disatissfied with myself and my life?  Will I ever be satisfied?

Tantra teaches that life is ever expanding, that there are no limitations.  Paul Tillich taught that the answer to every question reveals  a deeper, more profound question.  We start with small inquiries and keep moving higher and higher into the realm of the vast unknown, but we continue because we know there is more.  This is because, according to Tillich, a lifelong pursuit of philosophy reveals that the central question of every philosophical inquiry always comes back to the question of being, or what it means to be, to exist, to be a finite human being.

I do not want to give up all my friends to live a sober life.  I must find my own way.  I do believe there is a middle path.  When I went to treatment for bulimia, the counselors there told me I would always have an eating disorder.  I do not.  When I quit smoking years ago, people told me I would never be able to touch another cigarette.  “If you do, you will start smoking again.”  I did, now and then, take a drag off of a cigarette, but I never returned to daily smoking.

I will find the middle path for alcohol.  I will.

The journey continues.  Day 10.  Still sober.

P.S.  I wrote my therapist last night.  This is  the man who saved my life two years ago..  Here is what I said, “Do you have any openings this week for an appointment?  Feeling strangely psychotic.  Not suicidal.  Watching myself thoughts go from one extreme to the other.  Have not ingested any alcohol for 9 days.  Been going to AA meetings which I hate, blogging about the whole thing.  I really need to get clear about my relationship to alcohol.”  I am seeing him at 1:00 pm on Wednesday.

Do Not Hide From Your Shadow

“And what do you find at the heart of fear, dread, loathing, anger, hatred?  You find a surprise.  You find a gift. A gift at the center of hatred?  A gift at the center of aversion.  Could it possibly be?”  Stephen Cope

Could it possibly be?  The knot in the middle of my throat signals, yes.  Yes, I am getting close to the truth.  Can I dive into the burning heart of my anger?  It strikes like a burglar in the night, creeping into my dreams, disturbing my sleep.  My anger lashes out, blaming my husband and others for my unhappiness, my frustration, my lack of enthusiasm, my fear of dying, of getting cancer again and more.  I feel like a Tansmanian Devil howling at the moon, ravaged by an deep desire to destroy every one and every thing around me.  Who would want to live this way?  Why would I invite this intensity into my life?

Instead, I could practice more yoga.  Meditate more.  Go back to my therapist.  Get acupuncture.  Quit drinking alcohol and coffee.  Stop eating sugar.  Take antidepressants, again.  No.  I do not want to do any of those things.

Instead I want to follow the advice of Marion Woodman:

The shadow may carry the best of the life we have not lived.  Go into the basement, the attic, the refuse bin.  Find gold there.  find an animal who has not been fed or watered.  It is you!!  This neglected, exiled animal, hungry for attention, is part of your self.”

I sold my business last year.  Without going in to detail, I will say that I cried more tears than I ever knew could flow out of one person’s eyes.  I filled thousands of kleenex with snot and spent hours wondering if I would ever stop crying.  Then a friend told me, “Your  tears anoint you.”

Wow.  I never would have thought of it that way.  My tears were a baptism, a passage from a long term identity, into the unknown.

I always believed that my anger originated in my childhood, in the abuse I received and witnessed.  It never occurred to me that I could have fresh, raw, newly wrought anger.  The great philosopher, Krishnamurti, talks about staging a well planned prison break only to create another such prison somewhere else.  It is not others who imprison us.  We do it to ourselves.  I constantly set traps for myself and then pretend to be shocked when I step into one of them.  I lie in waiting, lurking in the shadows, ready to attack myself.  After the kill, do I lick my chops with delight?  No, I cry and whine, play the part of the victim, withdraw into my depression and blame the world for my plight.  Not a very pretty picture.

Where is the gift in this rage?  What is my soul attempting to say?  Today, I promise to listen.  I give myself permission to be a mess.  I commit to hear my anger, to give it a voice. Rather than ignore it, or banish it, I will invite it to sit and eat with me.  I will ask it to talk to me, to tell me her story.  I am going to write this story.  The story of my rage.

And maybe, just maybe I will discover that  what Rumi said is true.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

come momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

the dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

“I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

When fictional television anchor Howard Beale leaned out of the window, chanting, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” in the 1976 movie ‘Network,’ he struck a chord.  This famous quote refers to the workplace, but it is also applicable to life in general.

Ho many times have you opened the door to your heart only to be greeted by the face of criticism, judgement, fear, mistrust or even worse, the specter of those who want to “fix” you, to give you advice, to help you be the person “you are meant to be.”  And just what person might that be?….the daughter your mother so desperately wanted and needed to give her life meaning?….the wife who dutifully sublimates her needs and interests to those of her aspiring husband?…the woman who, in the face of societal norms, represses her sadness, her anger and frustration only to become depressed and suicidal?…..the child who has been abused and then threatened to prevent her from “spilling the beans, airing the dirty laundry, asking for help?

If you were to ask me what I regret most in my life, it would be not speaking out sooner.  My wonderful mother in law coined an expression for the language of the South (I moved from Indian to Memphis in 1969).  She called is South-mouthing.  Ya’ll know what I am talkin’ about.  It happens when you run in to your husband’s bosses wife at the grocery. She immediately pastes on her beautiful, fake smile and says, “It is so good to see you.  John and I have been meaning to have you over for drinks.  I’ve just been so busy getting the kids off to camp.  Mother is a nursing home and I have to get by there everyday.  Then there is our older son, James, who has been accepted to Harvard law.  I am going up to get him situated in an apartment.  Poor boy has no sense of decor.”  Pushing the cart forward, she turns her head and gives the Eva Peron wave.  “Best be going.  Call you soon.”  Of course, you never hear from her.

I heard this same phenomenon described in another way.  Here is the South we avoid telling it all.  You know, it is propriety over priority.  Something like that.  What the Hell.  I want to have meaningful conversations.  I am sick to death of small talk, cocktail banter, frivolous chatting about nothing.  My mother accused me of being to serious, dramatic, overwrought, bossy, hard to please, whiny, needy, always wanting attention and doing anything in the world to get it.  Never mind that my father was sexually abusing me, and physically harming my brother and grandmother.  Mother said, “You are prone to exaggeration.  What a Sarah Bernhardt you are.  You are so self-absorbed.  Always me, me, me.”

So what did I do?  I turned to cigarettes, alcohol, sex, anything I could find to numb the feelings I had.  I decided that no on cared, and it would be best to shut up.  I worked hard in school and did well.  When feelings arose, I found ways to push them down, to hide from them, to disguise them, to dress them up and make them pretty. That worked fairly well until I got married.  I assumed my knight in shining armor would want a deep and meaningful relationship with me.  Boy was I wrong.  He wanted a dutiful wife who would cook and entertain and keep her shit together.  Betrayed and angry, I acted out.  Drank more, became more and more irrational, even violent.  Finally I had an affair and the marriage ended.  Thank God.

I threw myself back in to school, and finished my undergraduate degree.  I then entered the masters program in French.  The thread of life was running thin.  Squeezing myself like a giant pimple I squirted into a full-blown psychotic break.  I dropped out of school, and, of all things, got married again.  This time to a radical, hippie theatre dude whose flamboyant promised permanent oblivion.  Not so.  I got pregnant, had a daughter, and came face to face with my warped internalized expectations of motherhood.  I had a home birth and breast-fed.  Never mind that I was drinking and smoking on a daily basis.  I had a full-time job, which I left everyday at noon in order to breast feed my sweet child.  I would be the perfect mother.  I must be the perfect mother.  I was not.  No matter how hard I tried, I could not meet the “standards set.”  I screamed and cried.  I felt trapped and alone.  I wanted to run away.  I did.  Into alcohol and affairs.

Then I woke up.  I realized, I am my mother.  I am my own worst enemy.  I am everything I said I would never be.  I am mad as Hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.  I went to AA.  I got sober.  I faced my fears.  Well maybe not.  I was so depressed, I ended up in treatment where they immediately put me on prozac, the new wonder drug, the vallum of the 1990’s. s It worked.  Life became manageable.  I successfully raised two children who are both fairly well-adjusted.  I broke the cycle of abuse and dysfunction.

I opened and ran, for 12 years, a very successful yoga studio.  I put my heart and soul into the business and the practice of yoga believing it would heal me. It did not.  It taught me to be breath and move and to quiet my mind, but it did not give me the tools I needed to open the Pandora’s box of my past.  In fact, being part of a “spiritual community” demands    repression.  In order to attract others, one must present the image of being “healed” even if that is not the case.  Yoga philosophy promises the practitioner will, over time, be calm, discerning, compassionate, to be loving, giving., to thrive in all areas of life, to be joyful, hopeful and fully alive in every moment.     That he or she will learn to work without desire for reward…. Whew!  No pressure there.

Two years ago I found a lump in my left breast.  It was cancerous.  Surgery, radiation, recovery and therapy have brought me to this moment.  There is no panacea for life.  No miracle cure.  Life is messy.  It is meant to be messy.  I am no longer afraid to air my dirty laundry.  You are not likely to hear me South-mouthing.  NO.  I am going to tell i like it is.  I am no longer medicated.  I have a full range of feelings, the most prominent one being sadness.  I love the soft edges of sadness.  I treasure the way it caresses my heart and moves me out into the world where I long to touch the hearts of others.  Sadness is like a soft melody that accompanies my every movement, my every thought.  I am reminded of this quote Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.   Khalil Gibran  I live in both.  When I share my sadness with you I no longer have to scream.  I am no longer angry because I my sadness mitigates the need I once had to pretend, to play the game, to long for approval, to be the perfect daughter, mother, wife.  Today, in this very moment, I am only me.  What a relief.