No Darshan?

Lily was eight and her babysitter was the 12-year-old daughter of the owners of Healing Earth Resources, Chicago’s premier new age emporium at the time.

Karina was a daytime babysitter, a young babysitter for times when I was not too far away, for not too long. As a mother, I liked her because her parents were well known, and because she went to the Chicago Waldorf school, where Lily went. Ultimately, I liked her because we didn’t seem the least bit weird, compared to her crystal-selling family. I loved their store. Plus, Lily was crazy about her. One summer morning, I picked her up at her parents’ shop, where they both worked for a good ten hours a day, and her mom was excited when I said I was going to go see Ammachi, the hugging saint, who was known at that time for having given 23,000 hugs--it is now said to be 43 million.

Karina’s mom assumed I would be bringing the girls along, and enthusiastically told her daughter to go run and get her Ammachi doll. (Who knew?) I hadn’t actually been planning to take the girls, but my babysitter’s mom said she had taken Karina annually for years, and that it would be an unforgettable experience for Lily. While I had my doubts, and craved alone time in my car, it felt a little bit selfish to refuse, so I drove us out to a west suburban hotel where we easily found our way to the ballroom doors, only to see that the event was already in progress.

“You’ll have to come back this afternoon,” one of the volunteers said, “Get a number at that table over there now, hang onto it for a few hours, and that will be your place in line for your hug.” I had no choice but to agree, disappointing though that was. You sit in a room for quite a while apparently, as long as it takes, so that you can then get in a line to get a hug while the hundreds of other people sing or chant or just soak up the energy of being around Amma. Sometimes it lasts all night. That’s why I was there in the morning. We had gotten there around 10, but apparently it had begun at 6. Everyone who’d ever done this had told me it had been a lifechanging experience…but they weren’t toting 8 and 12 year olds, who were going to need to do things like eat, and pee, and drink water, and then ask to pee again. I was thinking we’d just leave. I don’t like lines. And a hug is nice, but. Maybe we’d go to Barnes & Noble instead.

While I pondered the options, a different volunteer approached me and said, here, I’ll sneak you in. I surprised and thrilled. After preparing the girls to possibly get right back into the car and go to the bookstore, they happily shifted into “never mind, let’s go inside” mode. We stood in the back of the room for a few minutes, wondering where to settle, when that same angel of a volunteer came back and steered us across the packed ballroom. “If you stand right here,” she said, “you’ll be able to touch her as she walks out.” I probably wouldn’t touch her, but I liked the idea of proximity. We stood in her suggested place and watched people one by one walk up the two steps in the middle of the room to the throne on which Ammachi was sitting, receive a hug, and return to their seat on the floor. There were no other chairs, besides hers. You could sit or stand. This process of being recognized by a guru, or a saint, is called Darshan. I had never seen anything like this, and it was pretty cool just to be in the same room with all these spiritual people, and certainly I felt good about giving my daughter a diversity of experiences. Before I knew it, the hugging ceremony was over, literally I didn’t realize it; there was no fanfare. Somehow, I guess had spaced out or something, but with no announcement, Ammachi, a tiny Indian woman in white, and her entourage, also all in white, were walking down the aisle of the crowded ballroom toward us and would indeed have to walk right past us—just as the volunteer had said! Everyone was now standing.

When Ammachi and her entourage were about to pass us, she stopped, looked directly into my eyes, and said, “No Darshan?” 

I was shocked that she had just hugged 800 people yet somehow realized I was not one of them. How on earth?! Maybe it was the little girls, maybe it was Karina with her Ammachi doll. I didn’t know how to reply. “No Darshan?” I didn’t realize she spoke any English, but I didn’t know how much she actually spoke, and as I was mentally composing a reply to the effect of “Well, I didn’t realized it started at 6, I had no idea there was a protocol for this, we don’t even have numbers, and we are not actually even supposed to be in this room, but someone snuck us in,” she opened her arms to Karina, and then to Lily, and then to me. 

In Ammachi’s arms, time stopped, my brain stopped, and I knew nothing. I knew nothing except that my Divine Mother, my real mother, the mother of the entire Universe loved me beyond measure, and that there was no greater love than this. I disappeared into the love. I don’t know how long I was in her arms. It felt infinite. But based on Lily’s and Karina’s hugs, it was probably about ten seconds.

The tiny woman released me and continued on her procession out the door. I could have wept, or sung an aria, but I couldn’t actually do anything. I couldn’t move. I was standing in a magic spot, and I never wanted to leave. This peak life experience seemed to be about being in the exact spot where I was standing, in the right place at the right time. But I was in a hotel ballroom in Naperville, Illinois, the most ordinary place ever. Eventually most people had followed the procession out of the room, and the girls were ready too. Volunteers were making Indian food and serving it on paper plates, so I got each of us one and we sat down to eat. It was heavenly.

I asked the girls how they liked their hug.

“It was good,” they both replied.

Hummingbird Magic

PART ONE

Last year at my friend’s birthday party, I recognized a guy from the tennis club, a guy who always played on court one (my deepest aspiration), so I went over to introduce myself, and as I approached I heard him say the words, “…feeding the hummingbirds.” When I had found myself living in California three years ago, practically by accident, I had entered a mini romance with hummingbirds, stopping to gaze longingly at them and even take their picture if possible, which was fairly rare, because hummingbirds are constantly in motion. I had glimpsed one or two in Chicago over the decades, but in California they were plentiful, and in Palm Springs they were ubiquitous. I found them gloriously captivating and mysterious. When I had arrived in Palm Springs, Amazon magically recommended a hummingbird documentary in which the birds had been slowed down so that the human eye could truly see them, hanging there in midair, beating their wings 70 times a second, while their bodies swayed…in midair. It was mesmerizing. Speaking of magic, the videographer had placed a tiny camera inside a flower, capturing the hummingbird’s beak entering, from the flower’s point of view. 

So I was intrigued to hear that court one tennis player Jason feeds the hummingbirds. Faithfully. Every night. By hand, he said. 

“Wait, so they land on the feeder while you’re holding it?” This just seemed preposterous. Hummingbirds are elusive. After all, they’re birds!

“Yes, I use a hand-held feeder,” he said matter-of-factly.

“And they land on it.” 

Yes, they land on it. 

“When can I feed them?” As part of my fake-retirement (I am indeed still working, but my life in Palm Springs has taken on a retirement vibe), my entire social circle now consists of gay men. Their presence has a joyfully un-inhibiting effect on me, so it seemed absolutely fine to invite myself over to Jason’s, even though we had just met that second.

The very next evening, I went to his house to feed the birds, and while none of them landed on my feeder, a gorgeous purple-headed hummingbird did drink from my feeder, hovering before me in midair. Mind. Blown. 

Seriously: it really did blow my mind. Because the second the hummingbird hovered over my feeder, I sensed that even one thought would be felt by the hummingbird, one thought might cause it to dart away. I cleared my mind, almost involuntarily, and slowed my breathing. The beating of its wings fanned the hand that held the feeder, cooling it off like an actual fan and making, yes, a humming sound, quite a loud hum for such a tiny creature. We made eye contact. I could see its individual feathers, gorgeously defined, and its improbably long and seemingly fragile beak, hovering before me looking just like it did in the slow-motion documentary scenes, except that its wings were a blur as they fanned my hand. It tipped its beak forward so I could see the top of its shining purple head, then it sipped with what seemed to be a long, transparent tongue, like a tiny straw the diameter of a thread. It was arresting. Jason took a picture. He said it was a male.

At any given time, at least ten hummingbirds were flying around us that evening. Actually, they were impossible to count, unless they landed, which they never did all at once. Jason had a dozen feeders strategically arranged around his courtyard, and he had offered me the best feeding spot, the chair he sat in every night, the chair from which the hummingbirds were accustomed to being fed. Simply being in the midst of so many hummingbirds was exhilarating. It was an incomparable sort of paradox to experience that level of internal exhilaration while sitting absolutely still, so my little yellow feeder would seem inviting.

I thanked Jason profusely when I left and then proceeded to text everyone I’d ever met to proclaim that I had just experienced a peak life moment, like the time I stood beneath a 100-foot waterfall in Maui and time stopped. The next day, when I told Jason I’d had a peak life experience, he responded: “But you have to come back, you have to see what it’s like when they land on your feeder!”

As a yoga teacher and longtime practitioner of presence, I was amused. He wanted me to want more?! But I’ve trained myself to be happy with what is! 

“Jason,” I protested, “Just let me enjoy the moment! I don’t want to feel aspirational!" 

But in truth, I did want more!

I reflected on the mental state the hummingbirds had elicited in me. But wait, did the hummingbirds elicit that state, or did spending my adult life learning to be still and breathe simply kick in habitually? I was excited to explore that question the next time I fed them. Later that day, I texted to ask him when I could come back.

PART TWO

The next time I saw Jason at tennis he proclaimed that we needed a secret hummingbird signal, like a couple of fifth grade girls, so we invented one that second, and we have flashed our little hand signal across the tennis court ever since. That’s how we say hi. I have no idea whether the other players notice our secret greeting, and I don’t care, and I bet he doesn’t either, and I suspect that if I ran into him anywhere else on earth, we would flash our secret hummingbird signal. 

“Does it seem like he’s maybe on the spectrum?” asked my daughter, when I told her about my hummingbird playdates and secret signal with Jason. She pointed out his extreme daily dedication to the feeding routine, which seems totally normal to me and not on any kind of spectrum (even though I’ve left out the boring daily prep and cleaning of the feeders, as well as the week he spent trying unsuccessfully to get the first one to land on his handheld feeder in the first place). I mean, if I had cultivated the attention of that many hummingbirds, I’d have to feed them every day, too. How could I sit in my house focused on my own dinner, while the hummingbirds were thirsty? I said his obsession seemed totally normal, and she said then maybe I am also on the spectrum, after which we agreed that it was, at minimum, in extremely poor taste to diagnose other people. So I prefer to consider it a daily act of devotion.

And yes, a hummingbird did land on my handheld feeder the second time I went to Jason’s. Mind. Blown. (Again.) I watched its little landing gear emerge and hang there vulnerably for a moment. I could hardly believe I was lucky enough see the tiny hummingbird feet emerge tentatively, as he ascertained whether my feeder was a safe place to land. That long moment of watching and waiting was, again, a brief meditation. My mind stopped, in awe. I have never been more still than when I quiet my mind to match a hummingbird’s vibe.

As I got into my car after that utterly improbable feeder landing, I thanked Jason for the even more significant and downright amazing peak life moment, and before I had time to revel in it, he exclaimed, “But you have to come back again soon, so one can land on your FINGER!” 

PART THREE: 

Driving home after the magnificent feeder landing, excited for the day that a hummingbird might, improbably, eventually, land on my finger, I reflected on how fully the hummingbirds and their increasing proximity were a mirror for my human mind and for my human tendency to desire more. And more! It’s what addictions are made of. And it’s what meditation addresses. Despite and beyond the grasping nature of my mind, I was called to be unwaveringly present and truly non-grasping before the hummingbird would release its landing gear and land on my feeder. They are just so very careful about where they land. 

I felt it, in my body, on night three, the first time I wished a hummingbird would land on my finger. It was a childlike excitement, but I could also feel that it was not the most helpful vibration for attracting a hummingbird. Being present for a hummingbird invites a quiet unlike anything I’ve ever experienced with my eyes open. I confess it’s been a long while since I’ve done an hourlong, seated meditation. But that’s what hand-held hummingbird feeding is. It’s about being still. And it’s been one of the highlights of my Palm Springs existence. It’s my new favorite activity that, like yoga--and like tennis before it--instantly drew me in, despite the inactivity. 

And because I must sit still for uncomfortable lengths of time, hummingbird feeding shows me what’s going on in my mind and my body, and I imagine, by extrapolation, the bodies and minds of most of humanity. Because aren’t we all like that? I just want a hummingbird to land, now! Aren’t most of us pretty impatient? Don’t we all want what we want when we want it? And hasn’t that very—merely—human feeling become even more acute in a world in which we can order a hummingbird feeder this second on our handheld device and have it in our hand tomorrow? 

Over decades, I’ve learned to address my human impatience as it emerges, a minor but inevitable hurdle. Finally, these days, the first moment of feeling impatient has become a reminder to be patient. So, there is a way in which waiting for a hummingbird to land has been a version of yoga, to the extent than anything else can “be” yoga. It simply points out the impatience inside me, so I can let go of it.

The sweet satisfaction of feeling a hummingbird grip my finger is one of those things that simply can’t be rushed. I have almost no control whatsoever over whether one lands or not. That’s why it was such an unexpected, etheric blessing on evening three to feel Purplehead’s minuscule toenails grab onto my index finger, his wings stunningly still and silent while he briefly dipped his beak into my feeder. Afterward, I was thrilled to find that Jason had captured it on video. And in case you’re wondering, as I left that evening, Jason insisted I come back soon so I could experience a double finger landing! 

Over the past year, while feeding the hummingbirds, I’ve had the urge to check my email, check Instagram, photograph the hummingbirds, video the hummingbirds, text a hummingbird photo or video to a friend, and FaceTime my daughter--and yes, I have succumbed to each of those urges at least once…while feeding the hummingbirds. And yes, they are utterly captivating. But I've fed them a lot, so it's no longer new. These impulses are unremitting, always out there, requesting a response, whether or not I’m feeding the hummingbirds, and it is my choice whether or not to let them distract me from that fleeting, priceless moment when that tiny spark of life finally hovers before me, checking me out, discerning whether I’m friend or foe. But it’s not just when I’m feeding the hummingbirds. I can be driving, doing yoga, teaching yoga, or playing tennis. I can be anywhere on earth, and there will be an impulse to check to see what’s happening somewhere else on earth. 

A new experience, whether it’s in your backyard or a foreign country, is so much easier to be present for. So is a new person! How long has it been since you gazed into your longtime partner’s eyes? What does it take to actually be present in daily life? My phone always holds the promise of something new. It’s the product of an entire industry that masquerades as essential, beneficial, but is actually an ongoing distraction that lures us into anything BUT the present moment. Having acknowledged that, as a yoga teacher, I can’t blame my phone for adding distractions any more than I can blame Jason for fanning the flames of my merely human desire for more.

To quote myself: “What yoga does--if you’re truly doing yoga as opposed to merely stretching--is teach you to recognize the thoughts that keep you from fully experiencing any given moment.” 

With or without the magic of hummingbirds. 

Serving Up Some Yogic Tennis

 

In ninth grade, I read a book called The Inner Game of Tennis. At the time, I had no idea whether or not it was a good book, because I was in ninth grade. And I had no idea whether it was just a fad, because I hadn’t read enough books like it to compare. What “sort” of book it even was…likely I couldn’t have identified a genre (because: ninth grade). 

Regardless, I took it to heart. Retroactively, it is clearly a personal growth book, practically a meditation book, wrapped around the sport of tennis. The Inner Game of Tennis popped into mind recently when I was pondering the value of hitting the ball “at two-o’clock,” the part of the ball I was instructed to aim for when I hit a serve. The difference between simply “watching the ball” and seeing “two-o’clock” on the ball itself is remarkable. It narrows down the focus. It’s actually a yogic idea, in that it intentionally filters out every distraction, leaving a very narrowly defined spot, such that one can’t help but be Here, Now.

Lily has Here, Now tattooed on her wrist, but that’s a story for another day. 

I’d forgotten all about that book until Wimbledon 2022, when a tennis commentator referred to it, and I realized that the book, whose cover I can still see clearly in my memory, remains relevant—what an amazing gift to have somehow read it decades ago, when it was released! In retrospect, clearly that book had planted a seed of pioneering consciousness long before I knew of yoga, or consciousness. And interestingly enough, when I resurrected tennis after a 25-year hiatus, I experienced the re-training of my body as yogic. In order to re-learn tennis, I had to clear my mental space moment by moment, amusedly banishing thoughts such as "I can’t."

And the truth is, it’s not just tennis: everything is yogic, everything is yoga. Yoga is simply union. Yoga really has nothing to do with becoming flexible; flexibility is merely a fringe benefit. What yoga does--if you’re truly doing yoga as opposed to merely stretching--is teach you to recognize the thoughts that keep you from fully experiencing any given moment. It brings us into union with ourselves and potentially the Universe.

In tennis, for instance, it’s so unhelpful to get mad at the teacher, or at yourself. It’s tempting, when the going gets tough, to blame someone, but after 25-plus years of yoga, I know beyond a doubt that my mental reactions don’t help the learning, training, or reprogramming process. 

If “everything” is yogic, what does that actually include? It includes grocery shopping, social media consuming, car driving, people meeting, child rearing…all are opportunities to draw upon the felt concept that while we have almost no control over the world around us, we do have 100 percent control over our reactions to the world, in any situation. Yoga is an opportunity to practice that, to strengthen the muscle of consciousness, so that the “muscle memory” of true consciousness takes the reins when we find ourselves in challenging, uncomfortable, or undesirable situations. 

As I re-learned to hit the ball in this second phase of my tennis life, the moment I felt a smidgen of anger at the tennis teacher, or an impending frustration that it was taking too long to re-train my body to play the modern tennis style, I simply let go of that potential thought and re-routed myself back into the present, which is the only time I—or any of us—can actually make a difference. That's how yoga works. Time spent on the yoga mat is practice for everyday life.

Cheers!

PART ONE

Five or six years ago, every time I drank a beer, especially if I had had one the night before, or even two nights before, my teenage daughter would ask, “Mom, are you an alcoholic?” 

I found this triggering. Never had I ever had anyone monitor or even notice my alcohol consumption. Alcohol monitoring was my job.

Three out of four of my grandparents were alcoholics, one out of two of my parents was an alcoholic, and one out of two of their kids—and that one kid is not me. I gave birth to one kid who has, I think, grown up to be a normal social drinker. 

But wait, what even is that? Couples my age split a bottle of wine every night; because of luck or grace or genetics, I’m just not into it, as a nightly habit. When I ask my daughter if she drinks alcohol daily, she reminds me how many of her peers get blackout drunk, or drink till they vomit. That answer reminds me of when I asked my mom if her father had been an alcoholic, and she responded, “My father never missed a day of work in his life” –-because apparently that was the criterion for not being an alcoholic. Anyway, everyone drank every day back then; haven’t you seen Mad Men?

While it is not my responsibility, and, come to think of it, none of my business how much or how often my daughter drinks, it is hard to not wonder, and I feel like I could save her a ton, a lifetime, of energy and effort and anguish, if she would heed my advice to enjoy alcohol sparingly, advice she likely doesn’t actually need. I mean...I hope she doesn’t need it. 

I love when she hangs out with sober people; I’m always relieved when she’s having dinner with Susan, or Patrick, because I know, in solidarity, she won’t drink. Clearly, she doesn’t want wine so much that she orders it when she’s out with sober people, even if everyone else is drinking. Does that mean she’s in the clear? Does that mean I can take that off my rapidly decreasing list of parental concerns? 

She says it is, and it does, and I can. 

“Mom,” she has said, “I don’t have a drinking problem,” and I have refrained from saying, well, yes, of course, that is what people with drinking problems say.

My mom died of cirrhosis of the liver a few months ago. “I never really thought of your mom as a heavy drinker,” my cousin Lisa (whose mom had died a decade ago after 30 years' sobriety) said to me, when my mom was on her literal death bed. “I mean, have you ever even seen her drunk?” she asked. 

“Not really,” I said. I mean, certainly it had been awhile. Though I should point out that I had told my mom in 1986 not to call me if she’d been drinking, not to answer her phone if she thought it was me. 

So how would I even know? 

Last month, my brother left six progressively drunker voicemails, from a number I didn’t recognize, while I was teaching at a sacred sexuality retreat in Maui. I had no capacity, or time, or cellular signal, to help him in any way. He was convinced that our father had died, and that I hadn’t informed him—“just like when mom died,” he accused, through tears, and I involuntarily giggled. He had gone from concern about the whereabouts of my dad and slightly slurring, to very drunk and flat-out victimhood, crying to me via his final voicemail: “What kind of way is that to treat your brother?” I giggled. How did he even have my number? I texted my dad and suggested he reach out to my brother. I didn’t tell him that his man-child thought he was dead. A week later, back in Chicago, I played his string of progressively drunker voicemails and giggled again, without judging myself. 

But when my daughter posts a fun Instagram story of herself in which she drinks from the wine bottle, I don’t giggle. 

PART TWO

Lily has a certain skewed perspective on what constitutes alcoholism. While my mom considered the condition to be a moral flaw, my daughter seems to think it’s a lack of discipline. While my mom needed an inch or two of alcohol every day just to take the edge off, the primary alcoholic in Lily’s life is a dear friend her age who would “lose count” and accidentally have 19 drinks, instead of the three he’d planned to have. “But I lost count!” he would explain, each time. He was known to throw it up later, in epic proportions. It was all rather dramatic. 

That’s one way to do it. 

For me, alcoholism looks like drinking in secrecy, in small quantities, because that’s what my mom did, back in the day, back when my 13-year-old brother reported it to 16-year-old me, and I told my dad about the ever-decreasing vodka bottle. 

My mom could never really love me as much, after that.

I went to visit her in her rehab facility last January—rehab for starting to walk again, not rehab from alcohol use, even though alcohol is what led to her not being able to walk. Too many enzymes in her liver had led to an intestinal infection, which had led to a prescription and a warning not to drink while taking the medication. And she didn’t. But if you’ve been a daily drinker for decades, you apparently can’t just stop drinking, or you’ll have a seizure, and she did--a seizure from which she never recovered. Who knew? Apparently not my mom, or the doctor, whom she probably hadn’t told about her “little alcohol thing” (which is how my mother once flippantly referred to her drinking problem). I imagine she filled out a form for the physician and checked the box that said 3-5 cocktails a week, so as not to incriminate herself.

Having grown up with the mom I grew up with, my level of vigilance began with my first bitterly undrinkable beer in college. Would my drinking become unmanageable? I will never know if it didn’t because I never let it, or because I just didn’t have the gene. My daughter has none of the vigilance she might have had if I had been a secret or excessive drinker. She just has a mom who seems a wee bit paranoid about alcohol. 

When I spent a few days with my mother last winter, I wanted to optimize what was likely the last time we’d be together. I went through our old photos and articles and brought them to the facility to remind her of our past adventures and holidays and conversations. She hadn’t exactly been a person who sucked the marrow out of every morsel of everyday existence before the seizure, so I wasn’t expecting much emotional payoff for either of us that day. But, in those photos, 30 and 40 years ago, she sure looks like she’s having a good time. 

“You know, that can be addictive,” my mother warned, interrupting me from her wheelchair. “I read an article about it.” 

She was referring to my lip balm, which was made of, I feel compelled to mention, an organic blend of beeswax, coconut oil, vanilla, and rosemary. At any other time in my life I would have announced the ingredients that second, or protested that even if lip balm were addictive, it was the kind of addiction like exercise, or drinking water: arguably good for you. Her observation about my lip balm addiction reminded me of the time, about 15 years ago, when I had told her about an Ayurvedic product called nasal oil, which was an organic blend of sesame oil, eucalyptus, and healing herbs. It was a uniquely helpful, alternative-medicinal product, and I had no idea why it didn’t fly off American pharmacy shelves. As I rhapsodized about how much I loved nasal oil, my mom had informed me that one of the worst addictions a person could have was putting substances up one’s nose. 

That was the kind of alcoholic she was: the kind who accused other people of being addicted to their lip balm. 

When I speculate on what kind of alcoholic my daughter would hypothetically be--and believe me, this is not something I even want to do, but if I don’t, it will haunt me, so, in a fit of negative self-indulgence, I can’t help but speculate that my kid would be, first of all, fun. 

When her fun had peaked, she would want whichever friend she was with to tell her that she was their best friend. Once assured, she’d suddenly regret drinking in the first place, leave, and on her Uber ride home, develop a compensatory workout routine, and post the hilarious drunk-Uber exercises on her Instagram the next day. She’d have only the slightest hangover, and I’d be—virtually--proud of her creativity in a way that would predictably warp into sadness and guilt, and that’s the kind of alcoholic she’d be: a fun one, a funny one, who nevertheless elicits my refined sense of guilt. “Mom,” she’d say, with an eye roll I could hear over the phone, “I left before midnight, and my workout post got more than 12,000 likes!” In fact, it would probably go viral and she’d probably get a web tv series out of it, because that’s the kind of alcoholic she’d be.

But I would nevertheless feel a sense of personal guilt, because who would have brought a child into the world with 50-50 odds? I’d look back to now, and wonder what I could have done. But I know, as well as I know anything, that there’s nothing I, or anyone, could do, or say. It’s in the genes and it’s in the stars, and back in the day when I felt compelled to pry glasses out of people’s hands and stomp on people’s cigarette packs, I ultimately realized that rash oaths and grand gestures don’t work, because that’s not the way it works; that’s what I learned back then, and haven’t needed to revisit the topic. It’s been decades since I’ve secret-policed how much other people drink. 

But, I am told, “the little alcohol thing” can skip a generation. As a mother, that’s both a blessing and a curse.

Another equally irreverent blog regarding my mother's death: Barbara Terket Thomas Connolly (1940-2018)

But Don't ALL Lives Matter?

Q: What can I do in light of current events if I am a liberal white woman who is (obviously!) not a racist?

A: We grew up in a racist society. No matter how racist we think we're not, we’ve been pretty clueless. When I cautioned my kid to be careful at a protest, she said, "Well. Now you know how the parents of black kids feel every DAY." So. My mailing list is full of cool conscious primarily white women who sent their kids to diverse schools, and we likely have more black friends than our parents did, we've attended diversity trainings, we’ve read Toni Morrison and White Fragility and we voted for a black president, and of course no one on my email list would be racist, no way! But. The American system is permeated with racism. I believe it’s time to examine the stories we’ve believed about race. Unlearn them and understand where we got them. I think white women are afraid to feel the collective shame. I certainly am. It’s uncomfortable. I don’t want to know that I’m imbedded into a system that has caused suffering. But it’s also SO cool, because the collective is actually creating a more conscious world rather than playing out this horrible old story that we have outgrown, this old story that we were born into. Everything I just said, though, is considered hijacking the narrative. And it's also super privilegey to even have the IDEA that we can create our own reality. I can not imagine what it would feel like to NOT be able to create my own reality simply due to the color of my skin. Assuming that I can "create my own reality" is a privilege.

We were all born into this system and something about it does not work for "minorities" (see how we are writing a story in which there are more of "us," so "they" are the minority? It is just mind blowing to start to see the old stories we were taught, which simply don't work anymore.

I have experienced that We are One. And I understand that even THAT is super priviledgey. But the entire reason for yoga, as I experience it, is to have that knowledge, that felt experience, that humans are inherently Divine. And yes there are also some nice physical heath benefits too! So it is from that place that I want to share some enlightening but also entertaining suggestions. Most of us know nothing about history from a non-colonized perspective. The only way out is through. We are the ones we've been waiting for.

When “sheltering in place," for reasons I don’t actually understand, I felt compelled to learn about the Vietnam war. (I got really into it—major blog post coming soon.) So I was on a big 1968 retrospective during the lockdown, and when George Floyd was killed and the protests began, I couldn’t help but notice the parallels between now and 1968. Based on my deep dive into the ‘60s, here are some recommendations that offer a perspective that's valuable right now:

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, free documentary on Amazon. Apparently, the FBI files have been opened because 50 years passed, and this film uses FBI documentation to illuminate the disparity between what I was taught about the Black Panthers as a kid (dangerous black guys, basically terrorists) versus what this organization actually was. It especially shows HOW THE FBI created lies about the Black Panthers that the newspapers then printed, leading every white person in the country to consider the Panthers dangerous. Actually, they were male citizens trying to peacefully protect their community from police violence. In 1968. Ultimately, the FBI broke into their pad and shot the leaders. (That could not happen with Black Lives Matter, because it intentionally has no mailing address and no official leader.)

13th, free on Netflix. This documentary is about the 13th Amendment and the prison industrial complex. Does that sound boring? It’s not. It’s lively and well produced, historical but also very current. The US has a surprising number of for-profit prison corporations, and they have to keep the prison populations high, because: stockholders. (Please make sure you are not accidentally invested in any of these barbaric places.) For-profit prisons are filled with people who couldn’t afford decent representation. And they have to work there. It’s practically legalized slavery. This illuminating and heartbreaking movie also explains the huge rise in the prison population over the last few decades. You’ll find out how Jim Crow laws are alive and well in the American South, and why the majority of black men in Alabama are not eligible to vote. I was taught that black men commit more crimes, but they don’t, actually. They just get picked up more often because they are perceived as more dangerous, which also just what we were taught--see the Black Panther documentary. The only thing that has changed since forever is that everyone now carries a video camera. Worth watching till the very end; correct me if I’m wrong.

The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson. Fascinating book telling true stories of three black families who left the south in search of a better life. It reads like fiction. The level of vicious racism these people were trying to flee is painful to hear about. Minor detail: early 1900s southern society considered the biggest threat to be black men raping white women, but guess what: actually, the rate of white men raping black women was far higher. (What the heck is that even about? Honestly it just makes white men look super insecure.)

American Values by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. This is a view of the Kennedys through the eyes of Bobby Kennedy’s son, Bobby, who is married to the woman who plays the wife in Curb Your Enthusiasm. (She’s adorable, and I follow her on Instagram because I love Bobby Kennedy Jr. inordinately much.) Over the years I have found that most people are either Kennedy-lovers or Kennedy-haters, and, well. Hi. You’ll be reminded in this book that there were tons of great ideas and a trend toward racial justice in the 1960s—which I remember well, because my parents were totally against it. “You can’t legislate equality!” they used to say as small-government Republicans who did not want the government messing with human relations—that’s overreach. But I digress. After MLK was assassinated, 110 American cities rioted. On the 6th day of the riots, the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was passed. This book illustrates the great ideas of the 1960s and how RFK senior, speaking from his heart and not using speechwriters, was loved multiculturally, which was apparently just too much unity for…whoever shot him. It appears the family thought both RFK’s death and his brother’s were pretty sketchy. If you like Kennedy antics, the environment, and civil rights, this book offers a comprehensive and colorful picture. It shows how close we were to major racial progress in 1968. Too bad everyone who might have tipped the balance toward racial equality was assassinated!

If you are not into the 1960’s but you want to view race relations from an educated, hip, contemporary African perspective, the novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is just the book. All her books are great.

If you really want to challenge yourself, check out The Great Unlearn (@thegreatunlearn on Instagram, or rachelcargle.com).

A little action step: call Target, Whole Foods, and Walgreens corporate and use your white voice to demand they distribute goods to the south and west sides of Chicago, where unstocked shelves still prevail from the early days of covid.

Things to say to your Facebook friends from high school who just don’t get it:

> 1 in 3 people killed by a stranger was killed by a police officer. Unarmed black people are twice as likely to be killed as unarmed white people. There were only 27 days in 2019 when police did not kill someone in the US.

> Don’t ALL lives matter? YES. But black lives are the current focus. Only black lives need a protest. People shouldn’t have to protest for their basic civil right not to die. It’s not like it’s 1968 anymore!

 > Don’t ALL lives matter? YES. But when the Boston marathon was bombed and everybody said “Boston Strong,” nobody said, “ALL cities are strong.” When someone posts about breast cancer, no one says, “But what about colon cancer?” Black Lives Matter is not an either/or proclamation. Americans traditionally rally round the group in crisis. That does not discredit or diminish any other group; it brings awareness and support to the group that needs attention. (Paraphrased from an Instagram post.)

> Police can’t even refrain from police brutality at a peaceful protest against police brutality. (Another Instagram post.)

> “I have friends who have been police officers, and I have friends whose spouses are or have been police officers. They are nice and not racist.” Me too. The protests are not about individuals. The protests are about the system of policing. (Police Departments are super funded and reforms do get put into place, but, for example, countless policemen covered up their badge numbers during the protests, and so many were not wearing their required video cameras. I didn’t see that on the news, I heard it from young friends who observed it firsthand in Chicago, LA, and NYC. )

> “It’s horrible that an innocent black man was killed, but destroying property has to stop!”  How about: “It’s horrible that property was destroyed, but killing innocent black men has to stop!” (More from Instagram.)

Let's not wait for external evidence of change. Let's hold space for a shift we probably never thought we'd see in our lifetime. We don't even know what this new world is going to look like--I mean, how could we? But we can hold energetic space for something better, and open our virtual spaces to a glorious diversity. I have no idea what to even say about physical space, but when we CAN congregate again, it's going to be even better than it used to be.

IMAGINE.

“Our lives begin to end the day we become

silent about things that matter.”

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Coro-Nation

“Happy virus!” said the older Chicagoan, gallantly scooting himself and his dog away to give me a wide berth on our shared sidewalk. “Happy virus to YOU!” I replied, amused and heartened.

That was yesterday. Today, everything could be different.

While I’ve never had LESS security in my life than I have during (and because of) this pandemic, at the same time, I have never been more comfortable with my utter lack of security. Perhaps because everyone (the self-employed service providers, anyway) is in the same boat. We are a collective. Perhaps because I had felt this one coming.* Perhaps because, after the other times when the “bottom” has dropped out and everything I knew to be true suddenly wasn’t, I learned that I create my own security, and that in fact what looks like security externally is actually merely…familiarity. Comfort.

Like when my daughter’s dad (my dead ex-husband), a trader, lost a million dollars, plus $50K which was not even ours, or like the moment he died, or like the moment I read the email from the real estate agent telling me that the house I was happily renting was suddenly on the market—those were moments I’d never want to repeat. But what I had learned from those moments of dire discomfort was to not  reach out immediately to whoever I thought would say the perfect comforting thing, but…to stop and feel. Feel my body, feel where the terror had landed, and if possible, where the truth was located. To observe the way my mind tends to project into the worst-case scenario, and to not believe that story. To trust that the actual truth is both unknown and trust-able. How to trust the unknown?

First of all, don’t make up stories about it—unless it’s a story of opportunity.

Indeed, that is the entire point of having a spiritual life—and/or a religion. Dealing with the great unknown.

Having evolved from Catholicism to New Church to yoga to tantra over a lifetime, I’ve gleaned a few truths along the way…and on the tantric path, the bottom line is non-duality, the concept that everything and everyone IS divine. IS “god,” as opposed to god being outside us. Wait, even Donald Trump? Even Covid-19? Yes. And yes. I know that seems crazy, but first:

Western culture uses the word ‘guru’ synonymously with “all-knowing,” but actually a guru is simply someone who lights up the darkness. It’s not about what they know. They are just a mirror that reveals you to yourself. A guru shows you who you truly are. They light you up. You know those stories in which the devotee is yelling at the guru, or crying, or begging for help, and the guru is calmly sitting there, legs in lotus position, with a beatific smile, maybe even laughing? It’s sort of a guru trope, but…what that image conveys is that a guru is simply a Mirror. A guru is a mirror for what is going on inside us.

So: Covid-19 as guru. I know. I could not be LESS interested in doing my personal awareness via a virus. But bear with me.

What first came up for you, when this virus hit? Knowing only that about ourselves, we can learn so so much—and learning so so much, in my line of work, is the entire point of human existence. Awareness. What if the virus is here to accelerate that process of knowing who we are?

Sadly (for me, anyway), growth and the expansion of consciousness rarely happens when we are coasting along. Growth happens when we are confronted, thwarted, or challenged. (Hello, novel virus.) So, again, what first came up for you? Who did you worry about, what did you worry about? Whom did you blame? What did you hoard, what did you mourn? What worst case scenario stories did you make up?

These are not rhetorical questions. These are retroactive journaling topics; go for it. The time is now. Notice what your deepest fears are, see what your concerns truly are, see what matters most when all is said and done, and see how other people’s fears can lead you to act in ways you might not ordinarily act.

BECAUSE here is the thing. We (yoga teachers and power of positive thinking type people) have been saying for decades that we “create our own reality,” and people are so quick to disagree and say no way, humans would not have created war and famine and dis-ease, but let’s break it down into a tiny manageable simple bite:

(Oh, but first, Welcome to the New Age. Welcome to the Awakening of Human Consciousness. There’s no turning back now!)

This is how it works:

Human THOUGHTS freak out over a potential shortage of toilet paper…for whatever reason. Those thoughts spread virally. We as individuals and quickly as the collective then hoard toilet paper, and thus we CAUSE that. We caused exactly what we feared. It is so clear. Writ large. We just created our own reality.

On the other hand, what if humans of the western world had a fear of a potential toilet paper shortage and instead someone said, let’s all help each other out here and distribute the TP to those among us who need it most, then buy enough for two weeks, and only enough for two weeks, every two weeks…and use this as a collective TRUST exercise instead of creating our fear? What if we trust that there will be enough for us all? (I mean it’s a steep what-if. But: what if?) See how our very thoughts would have created a different reality? A reality of cooperation and abundance? Yes, sometimes shit happens, but also…we to a very large extent do create reality with our thoughts.

What if everyone all prayed at once, instead of everyone running to Trader Joe’s at once? What on earth could THAT create? (I am not saying we could pray away a disease but I do wonder whether we could pray away dis-ease.)

For me, having had the bottom drop out of my life more than once, and having learned a lot from those experiences, I see this virus as another massive screen upon which we all project our thoughts and fears--and the toilet paper example is the easiest one to grab and run with.

So.

What if…I know, here I go again, but…what if one purpose of this virus was SO we could see that, SO we could see a clear example of how we individual humans create our own collective reality?

And what if another purpose of this virus is to help us SEE what goes on inside our own sacred selves when our world is suddenly filled with troubling unknowns? And by that I mean: what if this virus is a guru? How can we use it as such, how can we use Covid-19 to bring our lives back into alignment, whether we start with organizing our kitchen pantry or our computer desktop or going back to basics with our now-adult children who are temporarily living with us until the crisis passes?

I am going to take it even one step further, for those of you who may be thinking oh, yes I already know all this so far, thanks, but I already do all this (and if you are not in that category, and you can’t possibly imagine taking it one hypothetical step further, skip this next part because it’s more a leap into the absurd than a step). So. What if, those of you who are still with me, what if, in the Byron Katie sense, in the New Testament sense, what if we are meant to LOVE the virus?

I mean, I don’t, I can’t, it’s a virus, and I love my health and those two are clearly mutually exclusive--I mean I don’t just hate this virus; I hate each and every virus and I want to kill them all with Purell! (Oh wait, there is no Purell because everyone else wants it too!) But as long as I’m encouraging this leap into the absurd, I will have to take the leap too, so I ask…how can I love this virus? Wow, well that is really a steep curve, a drastic jump…it really sends me back to my roots, to Jesus’s last-ish words: they know not what they do. The ultimate forgiveness of what is literally killing you. Viruses are not alive. They feed on us. They have no consciousness. They know not what they do.

The minute I “hate” the virus, I put myself into victim mentality. The minute I love the virus, I take back my power.

By loving this virus, I do not mean I offer it my body to cohabitate in…I mean I give it the power to remind me to take back my power, to make me actively change—in this case it has taken me from my introverted one-on-one healing role in my individual clients’ lives and into being here writing words that may actually help or inspire someone outside my sphere. It has definitely taken me out of my everyday procrastinating writing until 10pm, and into crisis mode, into “write now, or forever hold my peace” mode. Is it possible to be inspired to love your enemy? Our enemy? I find that I need to take it one day at a time. Wake up, find something in this world of unknowns to be grateful for. I am grateful that we are all faced with the same enemy. It seems to be uniting us, even as it physically separates us.

Speaking of viruses, here’s another thing.

There are viruses literally in and around us all the time, but this is a new one that has been isolated and labeled for us, and its behavior has been studied, so based on that, in this new world populated by this novel virus, now we get to CONSCIOUSLY CREATE our relationship to it and to each other and to ourselves. What are we going to do with all that power? What if we use it to increase our awareness, because if we don’t, we risk letting it dictate that we become victims, victims of this external, invisible enemy.

Speaking of victims, here’s another thing. What if, and here I depart from my early religious roots and leap into yoga and tantra, what if the “savior” is not external? Are we looking to be saved, do we want pharmaceutical companies to research a cure, and better yet do we want them to research a vaccine, so we don’t even have to deal with the enemy in the first place? That’s the old paradigm, in which the savior is external. But in the new paradigm, we are not meant to be victims. The world is changing this very second. Old paradigm: god is out there, and we are at “his” mercy, victims of “his” will. New paradigm: we are creators, not victims; the savior is within. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are being shown how to SAVE ourselves: slow down, be with our loved ones, work from home, don’t panic-buy, nurture our immune systems, trust we will pull through with a lot of help from our friends and communities. We can do it. As a collective.

I am going to take a step further, extrapolate even more. My daughter went to a Waldorf school, a school with a philosophy of life and a form of education and its own method of organic farming and even its own branch of health care called anthroposophic medicine. While there is a misconception that the anthroposophic philosophy is “anti-vax,” it isn’t, but they definitely do consider childhood illnesses to be a re-booting of the immune system and a way of moving a child into a new phase of development. So, my one step further is this: what if that’s happening to us, here, now? What if Covid-19 is, for those who unfortunately contract it, a system reboot, but also, for all of those who don’t, for not just this country but for the entire…what if this is a new way of seeing the entire world, a new way of being in the world? The flowering of human consciousness, as Eckhart Tolle says.

Yes it certainly sucks, I do not deny. Having a mere flu or a sinus infection or a bad cold also sucks—and the extreme contagiousness and potential death rate of this one is horrifying—so yes, it sucks, but also! We have been able to communicate with and learn from Italy and China and our literal individual next-door neighbor through the miracle of technology (years ago I wrote a blog about how the internet is merely a physical, tangible version of how connected “we” all already are, in the We Are One school of thought that characterizes the New Age, and maybe back when I wrote it it sounded outlandish, but…). Today WE are all fighting the SAME virus…the president tried to characterize it as a foreigner, but in truth it is a PAN-demic, affecting everyone, and everyone needs to participate in some level of isolation in order to arrest its spread. In the midst of all this isolation there is evidence of profound connection. But beyond and before anything else, we are being given time to connect with our Selves.

*I had been feeling an unusual level of anxiety several weeks ago regarding my (and my cat’s) living situation. The anxiety was so puzzling, because the one thing I know in general is…everything’s gonna be alright. So to have life not at all seem like it was going to be all right, to feel like life was an actual emergency, was so disconcerting and puzzling. I felt a wave compassion for those who live with anxiety on a daily basis—though it didn’t assuage mine. I did breathwork of every kind, I got a massage, I already do yoga at least once a day so I amped it up by attending a class, twice…but I still had anxiety. So when this crisis hit, when we were told not to touch our faces or shake hands, I felt liberated, vindicated. The anxiety had not been personally dysfunctional; it had been intuitive. I was relieved that my anxiety about where I and my cat were going to live was not some random, dys-functional, out of the blue regressing. I was relieved that decades of yoga and meditating and breathing and loving my "enemy" had not inexplicably collapsed and had in fact empowered my resilience. Exhale. 

My older friends and relatives are at risk. My living situation and lifestyle of ease and comfort is at risk. But. Also. I knew that moment of crisis heralded the fact that: now IS the time. This IS the paradigm shift. No doubt we are in the middle of a CORO-NATION. I’m a creator. You’re a creator. What do we want to create, individually and as a collective? How can we re-create a society that honors and supports every single person? As individuals, and as a collective, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are ripe. Let’s make it good.

Dead Ex-Husband Alive at the DMV Part 12

Yesterday, Lily woke up with a clear intuition to visit her grandmother, Barrett’s mom, who for the last few years has lived in her hometown of Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, the "mecca" of Barrett’s former religion, where there’s a beautiful and cohesive community—an entire town’s worth of New Church people. Barrett went to college there, and he’d be thrilled to know she was making the effort to contact her relatives to make a trip happen. Our friend Steven was thinking that exact thought as he drove us to the San Francisco airport, Lily texting her cousin and exclaiming with glee, when I glanced up to see an exit off the expressway: “Barrett Avenue.” That second. That was pretty cool in and of itself, even cooler than the day before when Lily called me so I paused my book on tape, somehow at 1:55:55. And also cooler than when, on the plane, I told Lily my computer was using battery too quickly, was already at 68%, so she turned off my computer's wifi, leaving my computer battery at an amazing 55%.

It was our Christmas trip. He was making himself known.

I had been slightly unwilling to believe (because this may be getting old to some people, and because really I have no proof, do I?) that he was making himself known a week before, when we were decorating the tree. It was the one time a year I’d invited him over for dinner when he was alive—to put the lights on the tree (my not-favorite task) and to make us dinner. (Yes, I invited him over annually to make us dinner, and it was the same dinner every year, called, post-mortem, “The Barrett Dinner.”)

Lily put the lights up herself this year for the first time ever; my kid is a trooper. She is absolutely committed to having great holidays and loving life, even when she’s sad. So the lights were up, most of the ornaments were on, and she was staring at the tree, when she said, “Mom, see how that one light is WAY brighter than all the others?” Indeed. It was weirdly bright. Five times brighter. Transfixed for a moment, we were silent. Lily, because she’s like this, reached out and touched it. “Ouch!” she yelped, and that entire strand went out. “It was really hot!” she said.

Our friend Steven arrived for dinner and he simply IS all things Christmas, yet he had no explanation for the weirdly bright, burned-out light. My instinct then and there was that Lily’s dad was making his presence known: on that one day a year he’d come for dinner, on that one day a year he and I would simply get along, so our daughter would have a tradition that included both of us. Never in my daughter’s 19 years did we have a strand of lights go out, let alone have one amped-up bulb.

We kept it to ourselves; she’s less inclined to share, and even to my most mystical friends I hesitated to say, “There was a really bright light on our tree, and it was Barrett!” Because, come on. I completely see the ridiculousness of it, while at the same time I regularly and randomly feel his presence with no need to tell people or seek proof. And I’d have let this Christmas bright-light magic/weirdness recede into coincidence had this book not arrived today, reminding me of the synchronicity of the Barrett Avenue sighting.

So I texted his sister, who told me she had just been scanning photos of their grandfather, who Barrett strongly resembled, and had therefore been thinking of Barrett. I then texted our most heavenly new age friend, who said she’d recently come across a photo of Barrett and me from 1992. That’s a lot of Barrett, and synchronicity, and 55’s in one week.

“I Am The Word.” I will keep you posted.

>> 18 hours later: I quite enjoy the book. I read Chapter One last night. It is very Barrett. Had it been given to me by a client, I'd say they were very intuitive and possibly even guided from beyond by Barrett, due to the fact that Swedenborg is mentioned on page three, and that the book is just, well, verrrry Barrett.

But indeed it was not given to me by someone. I called Amazon. I waited happily on hold, while the customer service rep searched two times each for the USPS number and the Amazon order number, neither of which were in the system.

Neither of which were in the system. If YOU sent me this book, now is the time to jump out and say, "Surprise!"

I wonder if Paul Selig has ever had any other readers receive his book in the mail from anonymous and possibly post-mortem loved ones.