Sunday afternoon – choices must be made

Why not?

My hard drive wants to get fucked up.

Fuck all you all.

That’s the way we say, fuck you,

here in the South.

Way down South in Dixie.

Doesn’t really mean fuck you, does it?

No, It means fuck me.

Why not it’s Sunday afternoon.

Ain’t nothing else to do.

Why not get fucked up?

It would be fun, right?

That’s what my history tells me.

We talked about this at brunch.

MIght call it fucked up family syndrome –

child becomes addicted to rush

engendered by abuse within the family

needs it, has to have it, to feel alive.

Yeah you see if i get fucked up

then tomorrow will be harder

and I can say to myself all day

“You do not have to do this again.”

Then I can imagine I am being reborn

coming back to life,

like Lazarus rising from the dead.

Like the foxhole prayer.

“God help me.

I swear, God, I will never do this again.

Just help me now.  I promise I will be faithful.”

Does pleading with God help?

Does it give life meaning?

Kind of . . .  sometimes.

Boy then that is really fucked up.

Look outside,

the sun is shining.

Do something besides sitting

around here getting fucked up.

Fuck you.

Going to watch the Good Wife instead.  Happy Sunday to all.

 

Stuck on the First Word

The first word is invariably the most challenging.  College term papers, answers to essay questions, letters to enemies, mission statements, the list goes on and on.  Where do I begin?  What am I try to tell you?  Can I be authentic?

TIMES THEY ARE A – CHANGIN’

My dear friend, Cyndi Lee, has written several books.  My favorite to date is May I Be Happy, a Memoir of Love, Yoga, and Changing My Mind. 

I know Cyndi fairly well.  We go back some 13 years.  I took my first 200 hour yoga teacher certification from her in 2001.  She came to Memphis for a workshop.  Thirty people attended.  I was teaching in the rehearsal hall of a black box theater.  It had one corrugated tin wall. one wall lined with mirrors top to bottom and two concrete block walls.  While we practiced yoga upstairs, other rehearsed on the stage below.  The technical people, stage managers, lighting technicians and the like, walk through our little studio to get into the sound booth.

Cyndi said, “You need to open a studio.  If you do, I will come to Memphis (She was living in New York where she operated OM Yoga) and do a teacher training program here.  I did open a studio, Midtown Yoga, and she did do a teacher certification program there.  Twenty seven people attended.

I sold my studio in January, 2013. The one year anniversary of the transfer ominously looms its bedraggled  head.  At this time last year, I was a basket case.  The sale of the business had not gone according to my plans.  I was hurt, angry, and disappointed.  I felt disenfranchised, betrayed, and I wanted revenge, which, thank God, I never enacted.  Today, I am at peace, grateful for my friend who now owns and operates Midtown Yoga.  She has completely and tastefully remodeled the space.  It is clean and elegant.  She instituted a computer check in system, Mind Body Online, which I admit, I railed against, but which now seems to be running quite well.  In addition, she has rented another studio down the street where Midtown Yoga teachers can do small workshop classes, teach private lessons, and where, in 2014, I will be teaching 30 hours of the 200 hour yoga teacher certification program that has been offered at the studio for the past 13 years.

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.

Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.

Out with the old.  In with the new.  Now I teach two public classes a week at the same studio.  I have many private clients with whom I meet weekly, bi-weekly and more.  I started a new business, Being and Becoming. 

Are you interested in learning to meditate or take your meditation to a deeper level? Do you want to delve deeper into the philosophy of yoga, but you do not know where to begin? Are you sensing that your life could be fuller and more rewarding, but you are not sure what is lacking or what obstacles obstruct your path to wholeness?

These questions and many more are the reasons I started Being & Becoming, a whole life counseling service. Through one on one counseling, asana practice, meditation, mantra, and pranayama, I work with students/clients to unleash their greatest potential.

Yoga is more than asana, the physical poses. It is a life time practice of being that which we have always been and always will be, and becoming that which is the manifestation of our deepest dreams and desires. Yoga has the potential to enrich and expand our lives on all levels.

Public classes give you a taste of what is possible, but there is so much more to learn. Those of you who cannot do the physical practice of yoga can benefit from all the other things yoga has to offer. Please be assured that there is absolutely nothing that can permanently prevent you from becoming the fullest manifestation of your true self.

But writing is my life.  I write to live.  I write to understand.  I write to connect to myself and to the world.  I write to fill the void.  I write to follow the endless question: What is the meaning of life?   What is my purpose?  Is there such as thing as destiny?  Why do I suffer from anxiety and depression?  why does Jimmy have Migraines?  Did my father intentionally abuse us or was he the victim of an even greater evil?  Is my mother in heaven?  Does heaven exit?  Is there reincarnation and if so, why?  What do I believe about the great prophets, Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammad?  What is alcoholism?  I write to find my voice. I am writing into the light.

I write to learn how to speak with the authenticity and clarity of my friend,  Cyndi Lee.  She is an inpsiration.

 

Going Public! Hanging Out the Dirty Laundry

I am stone cold sober and loving every minute of it.  I drank 2 glasses of wine last night.   Not tumbler size glasses.  At one time, before I stopped drinking for 10 years, back when I tried every which way to rationalize my consumption, I found the biggest wine glasses available and filled them to the brim.  But I only drank 2 glasses of wine.  So last night, I consumed two 6 ounce glasses of wine.  I certainly felt better this morning than I did yesterday.  I am stone cold sober and loving every minute of it. I am learning, every day, something new.  My teacher, Rod Stryker says it so well.  “You only know what you know until you know more.”

I knew so little for so long.  Here is a summary many things I thought I knew about myself and the world until I knew more.

My father sexually abused me.  He repeatedly beat my grandmother, even pushed her down our basement steps.  He forced my step-mother to have sex with him.  How do I know he did this to her?  My bedroom abutted theirs making me privy to their frequent copulation.  He impregnated her 7 times in as many years.  My father did not work.  My father, Carl, hated my brother, Scott and beat him unmercifully.  He also verbally abused Scott, my grandmother, and Elaine, my step-mother.  Elaine drank and took pills.  I thought these people, the grown ups in my life represented the world.

I lived with 8 other people in a 2 bedroom, 1 bath house for the first 14 years of my life.  I shared a bedroom and a double bed with my grandmother that entire time. When we moved, my sister Carrie became my roommate. Random, but important.  I started smoking at eleven.  I took cigarettes packages from the bottom of Elaine’s Bellaire carton and arranged the rest of the packs to look unchanged.

My mother, Sally, married 5 times.  She had multiple affairs.  She drank alcohol in excess.  She abused me, verbally and physically.  I thought I deserved the abuse.

At 16, I moved to Memphis, Tennessee to live with my mother and her fifth husband, Bill Smith.  I came in the middle of my junior year.  Sometime after that, I started dating Jeff Michael and I attended St. John’s United Methodist Church with his family.  I needed counseling.  I turned to our minister, Daly Thompson.  He told me he could help me find peace.  He took me to his cabin in Mississippi.  He and his wife had purchased the place as a get-away, a place to reflect and pray.  I am chronologically challenged so I cannot tell you exactly how old I was at the time.  Let’s say 17.  I know I married Jeff at 21, and the visit to the lake house occurred some time before our nuptials.  Daly must have been in his early 40’s.

Wait, I know more now than I did five minutes ago.  I was 20 when I went to the cabin with Daly.  I had just moved back to Memphis from South Bend where I had gone to “save” my family.  Having “found the Lord,” I decided He wanted me to return to my family home and help my brothers and sisters find the path to redemption.  I failed.  Once back “home,”  I reconnected with a high school friend, Scott Brewer, who introduced me to his friends, a bunch of LSD popping, pot smoking drug dealers.  Reeling from the downward spiral that ensued, including a midnight drive to Chicago to pick up hundreds of pounds of pot, I called Jeff begging him to come get me.   He did.  As a side bar,  I did learn how to swim while I was there.  I took lessons at the YMCA.  In reflection, I am sure I wanted to balance my 24 hour drug use with something healthy.  To this day, I love to swim.

Back to Mississippi.  Daly drove me to Mississippi.  We studied the Bible.  We prayed.  We meditated.  We  talked.  We took the row-boat out on the lake.  We ate lunch together and then, somehow, we ended up on the couch, me next to Daly.  I think he asked me to sit with him.  My gut tried to tell me “No.”  But where could I go?  He kissed me.  Did I kiss him back?  Maybe.  He groped me.  He laid down on top of me all the while whispering in my ear.  “The Lord loves you.  You are so beautiful .”  Something like that. He did not penetrate me.  I managed to keep him out of my pants.  Shaking, I lifted myself from the couch and told him I wanted to go home. To his credit, he complied. At the time, I rationalized this experience by telling myself that it was late 60’s, the time of free love.  Today, I know, Daly abused his power as a minister.  He overstepped ethical boundaries.  He took a mixed up, impressionable young woman, to a remote house in Mississippi and tried to take advantage of her.

My experience with Daly, coupled with my excommunication from a prayer group I attended for over 10 years, culminated in a lifetime disdain for organized religion.   The women in the prayer group, women I deemed trustworthy, women I loved and called my closest friends took the “high road,” or so they said, when I decided to leave my second husband for the man to whom I am now married.  My choice did not meet their high Christian standards.  Wow.  I think Jesus said, “Let the one among you without sin, throw the first stone.”  Who among us has not made mistakes, has not hurt another, or betrayed another?

Drinking, especially heavy consumption, represses these memories.  I want to remember everything I can and tell it all.  Mom, I hope I am not disrupting your eternal peace.  I know you, at one time, preferred that I not air my dirty laundry publically, but that was then and this is now.  I know better.

Resurrecting the Past

I am  in our bed snuggled up next to my grandmother as she reads stories from the Bible.  This nightly ritual gave me a deep respect and reverence for the miracles that Jesus performed.  I believe that He did turn water into wine, that he fed thousands with a few loaves of bread and that he did raise Lazarus from the dead.  Do I call myself a Christian?  No more than I call myself a Democrat or a Republican.  I believe in what I know to be true in my heart.  I do not need a label to prove my faith or my politics.

Back to the story of Lazarus and what his resurrection means to me today.  I am working to recover long-lost memories from childhood.  I recall many things about my first 4 years, but I have little recollection of the time after.  My next full screen memory appears at age 15 when I started dieting.  I measured  5′ 4″ and weighed 115 pounds.  I deemed myself grossly overweight and proceeded to starve myself for the next 30 years.  But that is a story for another day.  In my effort to retrieve my lost past, I am pouring over pictures, reading accounts of national events from that era and talking to people who I knew at that time.

Why am I doing this?  Good question.  I believe that I must resurrect the past if I am to live fully in the present.  In one of my recurring dreams, I know there is an unfinished room in the house where I am living.  I am not aware of the lost room until friends come to visit and I need more bedrooms to accommodate my guests. Haunted by the idea that there is a lost room, I go search the entire house-top to bottom.  I always find the mystery bedroom at the far reaches of my house.  It appears to be an addition, but it is old and rundown.   The roof leaks.  Broken floor boards reveal gaping holes that prevent full access to the room.  A dilapidated, unmade bed leans against the far right wall.  I think the room holds potential, but I am overwhelmed by the work required to fix it up.  I inevitably leave the room as it is, closing the door behind me.  When I leave, I feel terribly let down.  I know I am leaving a part of myself behind.

Can I. like Jesus, ever resurrect this room? Can I make it whole?  Why has it been abandoned for so many years, left to languish?  I must find the answer to this questions, because I know this room is the master-key that will unlock my lost memories.

In his book, To Bless the Space Between Us, John O’Donohue writes a blessing,      For Someone Awakening to the Trauma of His or Her Past.

Now the act of seeing begins your work of mourning.

And  your memory is ready to show you everything,

Having waited all these years for you to return and know.

Only you know where the casket of pain is interred.

You will have to scrape through all the layers of covering,

And according to your readiness, everything will open.

May you be blessed with a wise and compassionate guide

Who can accompany you through the fear and grief

Until you heart had wept its way to your true self.