Dead Ex-Husband...Alive at the DMV! (Part 1)

“I had the greatest time at the DMV yesterday,” I said to more than one person today. Of course I sound sarcastic. Who has a great time at the DMV?

“It was heaven on earth,” I continue, because I love this story. As a yoga teacher, I’ve said those words before, but never in regard to visiting a government agency.

“I’m getting along so great with my ex-husband lately,” I also like to say, provoking odd smiles and quizzical looks—because he’s dead. “Seriously,” I add, “We have never gotten along better. Our communication is stellar.”

In truth our communication (never that great in life) is indeed profound, and it has caused a shift that I never thought would happen between us.

I sort of knew it was the beginning of the end when I heard him say, “I don’t really care that much about my car anymore--ever since I got that scratch.” I had no idea what scratch he was even talking about, and I didn’t actually even see it until days after he’d died. In truth I hadn’t actually been listening to him for, well, about 10 years. No doubt he’d told me at some point about a devastating scratch on the bumper of his much-loved car, but I’d tuned him out. I didn’t care quite as much about his car. But a couple weeks before he died I was borrowing it and promised to park it yards and yards away from all the other cars, and that's when he’d said it. “I don’t care that much about my car anymore.” Sure he did! He still cared far much more than most people care about their car. What he was saying was that he was no longer compelled to keep it pristine…and in that moment, I saw that a part of him had given up. In general.

“I feel like I’m dying,” he had said, apropos of nothing, a few weeks before he died. I experienced his comment as a metaphor, or maybe a way to hook into me emotionally, get sympathy for the ongoing pain in his arm. Because of course he wasn’t dying-dying.

And then he did.

And now—not to be unemotional or unempathetic or…anything that I could be accused me of being when I put a thought like this out there—but, now, other than the fact that I have a devastatingly fatherless daughter, whose father prized her above all else, a daughter who misses her dad tremendously every moment of the day, but other than that, it’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be: we now have an angel, an unseen advocate, an angel, whoever thought I’d call him that, an angel who not only makes the daily logistics of life go more smoothly, but who has shown me that the veil between the worlds is very very thin, thin enough to ingrain the message that death is not to be feared.

He helps us out so much. Just like he said he would. On the night he died.

“I can be of much more help to you from where I am now," he said, verbatim, from heaven, or...wherever. My memory in general is not great, but his words still echo in my mind. This, in the middle of the night, as I was tossing and turning and realizing why Jewish people sit shiva: I wanted some company. I was not so comfortable with the massive presence of Barrett’s soul, which felt like it was sitting on the bed beside me. “Back OFF,” I had said at one point, that night, silently, and it worked, and then I felt guilty, like, the poor guy died, and I am still pushing him away. Plus I was a bit afraid he wouldn’t return.

The second time he spoke, the following day, when I was still in the thick of crisis and mentally dealing with logistics that are only now sorting themselves out, he said, “Let me help you with that, Rachel.” As if I were carrying a heavy package. That’s just how he’d have worded it in life. And I let him help. I’d been doing a Reiki healing on a lovely wheelchair-bound client. I wasn’t thinking I needed help. But the minute I let him “help,” I felt worlds open. A stream of energy poured forth through me, into her, in such abundance that I was moved to tears.

I needed to tell Lily. She was not distraught, because she didn’t yet realize what I had known the minute I’d heard: she would never see her dad again, ever, ever, ever. It hadn’t hit yet, and wouldn’t for a few weeks.

“Your dad is around, and he wants to help us,” I said, in a bedtime conversation that I had requested, at the end of the day. We did a little meditation together. Then I described both of his communications.

“That sounds scary,” she said. 

“The first time was scary, but the second one wasn’t,” I said.

Lily said good night to me and walked upstairs to the bedroom she was sharing with her best friend Lucy. On the way up, she said silently, “Daddy, if you’re here, send me a sign, and please don’t have it be scary.” Then she walked into the bedroom.

Lucy said, “Listen!” and proceeded to read Lily a paragraph from a book written by Barrett’s favorite author—a paragraph he had read to Lily a couple months before.

“Thank you, Daddy!” Lily exclaimed, aloud, when Lucy had finished. The chances of Lucy even having Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, let alone reading that particular paragraph to Lily seconds after she’d asked her dad for a sign…were so staggeringly slim that I am still in awe. Of him. Of my ex-husband. Of the soul of my ex-husband. People ask about the content of that Neil Gaiman paragraph and I would love to report that it was beautiful or inspiring. In fact it was an amusing and somewhat raunchy description of sex between homeless people. Had he asked me, those months before, if he should read it to her, I might have said no. But he did. And so did Lucy. After years of wondering why on earth I had picked THIS man to marry, THIS man to have a baby with, I no longer wondered. In an instant, flash! This is who he truly is! The father of my child is an amazing creator. In spirit form, the logistics that so eluded him on earth are now his specialty.

And this is who we all, truly, are. We are all souls. We meet a new soul, in the body, here on earth, and it is so easy to see Soul. But after a few months, or a year, or ten years, or the first sleepless year of a baby’s life, or a divorce, the soul becomes more and more impossible to see.

“Send Barrett Light,” a dear spiritual counselor of mine used to counsel, when we were having relationship difficulties.

One time I showed up for an appointment and said, up front, “I am NOT sending Barrett light, so don’t even go there.” That’s how much I couldn’t see his soul, this soul, this spirit that, for the last three months, has been blessing our life in a tangible way.

He is why I could experience heaven on earth at the DMV.

Despite that scratch on the bumper, Barrett is still all about his car. After Lily, it was the love of his life. I drove it home from his deathbed, because it was there, because it was Lily’s inheritance, and because I was in Chicago with nothing to drive. But the next morning I woke up and the battery was dead. I was stunned. I look for meaning in things. “Pay attention to the car,” was the message in that moment. “Be aware" was the deeper message. It wasn't about the car itself.

Steps away was an auto shop, and Barrett's car was running again within ten minutes. It was fairly painless. I had left the lights on the night before, because I was distraught from his death and not used to that car, but more than that, because I needed to pay attention…to the car. A moment of gratitude every time I get into the car was what I thought he was indicating, but I’m now seeing that there was more. Much more.

If I had been in love with him when he’d died, I’d be questioning all this. I’d be thinking that my extreme love was causing me to have wishful thinking, causing me to see “signs” where there were none. Causing me to seek comfort, because of the love we shared. But no. I didn't even like him much. The truth is, I love him more now that he’s dead than I have in the last 18 years. Because he’s not dead. How amazing to know, really know, that the spiritual world is real, that it is alive! It is amusing and ironic that so much of my spiritual communication now takes place in and around his car; how mundane, and at the same time symbolic. But we have a car history together. It was a shared interest.

I couldn’t find his spare key anywhere. I still can’t. The idea of losing the one remaining key sounded tragic enough that I was impelled to order a new one, which is no small expense. From his receipts, it appeared that his car was due for an oil change anyway, so I made an appointment with a VW dealership. There’s one right downtown, 3.7 miles from where we live. But no.

“Go to Jennings!” my intuition said, inexplicably. I sighed. I had no idea why my intuition wanted to make me drive to the suburbs instead of downtown, but when it came time to pay, “It’s half-off today!” the cashier said…inexplicably, making the extra drive much more palatable. But then, looking into the files, “Oh I see you have a credit.” I’d never been there in my life. Barrett’s car had a credit. So the oil change was free. My intuition was now validated. When the car drove up, I discovered that there was a bit of an issue with the trunk. Somehow the trunk was now set to open every time I unlocked the car. I didn’t have time to stay for the diagnostics, and said let’s fix it when I come back to pick up the new spare key, in a few days.

My daughter urged me to transform this minor irritation into a cause for laughter, every time the trunk unnecessarily opened, which was several times a day. So now, gratitude that the engine started when I turned the key, and laughter upon unlocking and unnecessary trunk popping.

“What's up?” the car asked, each time I unlocked it.

We returned to Jennings VW together, Lily and I, due to her affection for her dad’s car, which by that time we had named Johnny, for reasons that amuse us and involve port-a-pottys. We thought the unlocking issue and key pickup would take 20 minutes. So after the first hour we went to investigate the delay.

“Just wondering what’s going on with the trunk of the car…” I said in my fake-friendliest way. “We don’t actually know!” they said. I stared at them, the friendly group of VW service people.

“You know when your computer does something weird and you don’t know why? It’s kind of like that,” one of them said helpfully.

In light of that mystery, they had no idea how much longer it would take. They assured me I wouldn’t be paying for labor.  Lily and I turned to head back to the waiting area. There was a wide, flat computer screen on the wall lit up before us, meant for the service staff only, with names of car owners scrolling down slowly, and just then, right before our eyes the screen read BARRETT FISKE. My daughter gasped.

Back in our waiting room chairs, before we returned to our little phone screens, something occurred to me: “When did you last talk to your dad?” And by "talk," I meant…engage in communication with a dead person. Yes. We do that now.

“Well, it’s been…well, ever since that woman told me to say his name out loud, I haven’t.”

“We are inexplicably and indefinitely locked out of your dad’s car, and we just saw his name flash before our eyes. I think he’s trying to get your attention.” Lily shut her eyes for a long moment.

“Ok, I said hi to him and apologized for not talking to him lately, and I said please make the next person who comes through that door be the person who tells us our car is ready.”

The door opened. Right then. It had been happening all morning…but never for our car.

“Your car is ready.”

“Thank you, Daddy!”

Barrett's car drove up with a placard on top with the number 1134. Eleven is half of my special number, 1111, the number that says to me all is right with my world. And seven is Lily’s. A 3 and a 4 suffice just fine for a seven. We got in. The odometer was at 1111. Maybe this was not as stunning as the time when my odometer was at 1111 and the time was 1:11pm and I put quarters into the meter and the meter read 1:11, but all was, indeed, right with the world.

We were starving. We decided to settle for mall food, because it was close, and because it was where Lily always went with her dad.

“$7.77,” the cashier said to Lily, handing her the number to put on our table: 7. We place great stock in numbers. They tell us that we’re in the right place at the right time. (The sacred number 108 was on a Cubs ticket (seat 108, are you kidding me?) that we found on the ground right outside our front gate weeks later, with a price of $48—our dear friend’s favorite number; the ticket had actually been on the sidewalk near her front door. We care about these things. We like when the Universe says hi to us, in a language we understand.

So we were thrilled with our sevens.

I must interrupt myself to say, with all due reverence for the deceased, that Barrett had been obsessed with a tv show. In his world, obsession meant not just that he watched all the episodes. It meant that he read the book the show was based on—that book was actually in his car when he died. He had looked into the author’s life. He had studied the particular dysfunction of the main character of the show, “Dexter.” He was a very smart guy, and he knew way more about this tv show than anyone actually needed to know. 

Lily and I found it amusing, his passion for all things Dexter. It was our private joke, and when I was in Chicago and she wasn’t, I would send her one-word texts which meant I’m with your dad right now and guess what he’s talking about: “Dexter.”

Laden with plates of noodles, our waiter looks for table number seven, and I look up at our approaching waiter and see his name tag:

DEXTER.

Barrett is so not dead.

Anyway...where was I? Right! At the DMV:

<go to Part 2!>

A Tidbit from my Mother-Daughter Book

ENERGETIC CONNECTIONS WITH MY MOTHER

This book is my mother’s biggest fear. Why would she fear that her daughter would write an engaging, pioneering handbook about enhancing the mother-daughter connection? Shortly after I embarked upon a spiritual path, my mother confessed her fear: that I would discover she was a bad mom. Was she a bad mom? Well, that’s not exactly the point. The point is, she had an idea in her head that that’s what happens when people go to “therapy,” or do personal growth workshops. They discover bad parenting. But just to add to the fear that I’d discover she was a bad mom, here I am writing a book about…moms. So as she reads this, she is no doubt waiting for the part where it says she was a bad mom. There is evidence that our thoughts create our world. How disastrous that that fear of hers would be about to manifest…it could be in the next couple of paragraphs! I may be leading up to it now!

Can you see how a belief like that might color her experience? Of life, and of reading this book. Can you see how reading a book from a fearful place, or from a place of vigilance, would cause a feeling of contraction?

Just to liberate her right away, I will proclaim to the world: you were not a bad mom! Part of growing up and part of personal growth is looking back and seeing how our habits were formed so we can be aware and have choices.

And for all the rest of us, moms whose daughters are still growing avidly, I will proclaim: we are the perfect mom for the daughter we have.

The way my generation was parented was often based on a fear of authority. In reaction to that, there is a generation that has been parented from the opposite place, a place of child-led parenting—pleasing the child as opposed to doing the potential damage that the fear of authority clearly created.

And I would like to offer another option: yogic parenting. Conscious parenting. The premise is soul connection. The premise is that at the highest possible spiritual level, this child chose her parents precisely for what she’d get—and not get. And our responsibility is not to go on autopilot, not to unconsciously repeat what we were taught or told, or decide that pleasing the child is the less damaging, easier route. Our responsibility is to be conscious.

If both mother and daughter listen to their own inner voice, the highest voice that comes through at any given moment, we will be guided to a place that will be fulfilling for both of us.

Life is always changing, all around us. How do we handle that change, how do we adapt and enjoy? What messages do we send ourselves when our life does not seem to be flowing in our chosen direction? And on top of that, what do we do or say when our daughters’ lives are not flowing in their—or our—chosen direction?

Fired Up

“NO pain, NO gain.” Remember that lovely workout adage?

But do we still need it?

What if you were told that there's going to be a happy ending, for sure?--that every bit of your life, whatever your current concerns are, magically turns out better than you ever would have expected. How would you live? And what if you were told, in a way that you couldn’t ignore, that there was NO reason ever to worry? Would you keep making up reasons to worry? Would you need more proof? Why do we humans insist that life has to be hard? And why do we insist that there has to be proof?

Is it that we look back at human experience and it was? There are very few history books describing the beauty and spirit of our ancestors. It sounds like all they did was fight each other. Bad things happened constantly. Apparently the people who write history books are mostly interested in stuff like that. It is so interesting to me that my homeschooling daughter has only a very passing interest in history; she has sat through enough of my yoga classes to hear me suggest: stay in the present moment. Don't put any energy into regretting the past or worrying about the future. And then create a vision of your life from NOW.

If you need to look at the past, take a look at a history line and see humans' rapid development at a glance. We are amazing! Living in amazing times! Why look back at less conscious times? Many would say, to study our mistakes. Ok, I'll save time: anything that did not come from a place that honored the planet and its inhabitants...was a mistake. That would include creating far more trash than the planet can process. Let's create our world from a new place in ourselves. Not from lack, fear, or desire for power or money, all of which have co-created the constant stress we live with.

There is no need to look back at the remains of our old perceptions, even in our own individual dramas. Let's look forward. Yes people used to think the world was flat. Guess what, we as a species are still that unaware. We just don't know what the next huge paradigm-shifting piece is, yet. We don't know what we don't know.

What if? What if we looked toward experience, and from this new vantage point, our future looked euphoric? Or even just placid? What if life wasn’t hard, out there in the future; what if food and shelter were easy to create in such a way that everyone was satisfied with their share? What if? Does the evidence around us prevent us from being creative enough to imagine that? If so, that means we are victims of that external evidence; it has us in its grip and we need to check in on it repeatedly to make sure we are still not free, or happy, or rich.

How can we train ourselves as a species to out-create that? To create something new, to create a new vision for the future. Physics has observed that life is all in the eye of the beholder and where the beholder is positioning herself, that she is, in other words, an active participant in creation. Yes, physics! So can we therefore create whatever we choose? Can we the people come to a few basic agreements that could change the world? Does change need to explode onto the scene because a bomb was dropped or a child was killed? Do we need to rally ‘round tragedy? Or can we rally around an amazing new paradigm, a great Creation, a vision that actually does change the world? 

Anyway. Have I mentioned? I walked on fire last weekend.

“Real fire?” is the first question I’m asked. Yes--real fire that’s been baked down to a scrunchy perfection for three hours, chanted to, sung to, then spread into a glowing-charcoal-wood sidewalk under the rich and infinitely starry New Mexico sky. An energy of fear and excitement mingle and check each other out...as is often the case where there's fire. The beauty of this gathering is that everyone is willing to feel the fear and transform it into excitement. The new moon that weekend made the sky extra dark and the lunar cycle perfect for intention-setting. Fifty people who were willing to do things differently were present to inspire each other to create great visions for the New Year. And most of us walked on real fire. For a few it was our second or third or fourth firewalk. 

My experience is: it doesn't get easier. But it does get more fun.

Once one has walked on fire, with no physical trace whatsoever (my feet were actually cold from the time they spent in the snow, not hot from the time they spent on the coals) it is absolutely clear that where we place our minds has a direct effect on the experience of our bodies. Once one has walked on fire, there is a sense that nothing is impossible. There is a sense of euphoria, both a personal “I did it!” and a Universal, “Life is magical!” It becomes very clear that we create our worlds, and that our minds can be put to much better use than worrying that life will have a bad ending.

Not only is there nothing to worry about, but we can and are being called to create our own experiences--and a New Earth--from the highest place we have access to: our Spirits. Think it won't work? If I had considered all the reasons walking on fire wouldn't work, it wouldn't have worked.

I loved the "no pain, no gain" adage for ages. I worked it. I was so willing to go there--it felt genetic. But in recent years, my experience has shown: no pain, HUGE gain. And part of the gain is: the experience that life can be painless. Life—can be painless! No, really. Life can even be euphoric in the face of potential pain. I've lived it. I walk my talk. On fire.

Yes!

It’s all about where you put your mind.

For Mature Adults Only

A bite of my mother-daughter book:

~~~~~~~
Somehow, what gets stuck in human beings and keeps us from flourishing are the “bad” moments, the uncomfortable moments, the moments of conflict. These moments can keep us from being fully expressed in the future, because they were so uncomfortable when they happened in the first place. Like when I knocked a cartoon figure from my teacher’s desk in fifth grade—it went clattering to the floor and its little protest sign broke off…all because I was making a grand gesture with my arms. Do you think this made me want to be expressive?

What if it’s not an accident? What if you’re in a great mood so you randomly get up and sing a love song to your whole class, who respond by staring back, in stunned embarrassment that you were willing to be seen--do you think you’ll ever do it again? No, of course not. Wait--would you? Why or why not? How much does or should our past experience dictate our now? We learn from our mistakes, but how do we even know what’s a mistake and what’s just something that the world isn’t ready for yet?

And what if someone else sang to their class and it was taped, and put on YouTube, and had a million hits? All of a sudden it’s cool, to get up and serenade the class. And it would be cool to know this kid, who is now a YouTube sensation--but who is taking the risk to BE this kid? To be fully expressive? Didn’t that end before kindergarten? Maybe it didn't end, but it likely became more of a risk.

As we age, we are taught to pull our expression further and further inward (unless we’re a rock star) until we become mature adults. That’s what “Mature Adults” means, right? It means boring people who are in judgement of us; mature adults are the gatekeepers of the expression of pleasure and joy and anger and intensity. Mature adults define our borders and boundaries and “contain” us. And that’s what our society used to need, because of limiting belief systems that told us that if grownups didn’t contain their kids, they’d grow up to be criminals, outlaws. But slowly the world is coming to realize that the personal power and expression of individuals is not inherently dangerous, if we are connected to the highest part of ourselves.

~~~~~~~

'Tis the Season

Lily has been obsessed this week with “feel-good” movies. Coincidentally (surely!) I’ve been crabby, and looking for the route out.

“Mom, is this a feel-good movie?” she asked in the middle of Burlesque. That was the first time I'd ever heard her use the term. She was apparently born a feel-good person, so of course this term would catch her attention. Her personal dramas always have happy endings, but it seems suspicious to her that it’s a movie genre.

The afternoon after we saw Burlesque, because we’re homeschoolers and we can do whatever we want, she was watching Amelie, as a French assignment. Kind of. Later, I asked her how it was. “It was a feel-good movie,” she said.

“Seriously?” (I thought she was teasing me. But I do recall it had a happy ending.)

I too have a reaction to the label ‘feel-good.’ It smacks of marketing. How gratifying that my daughter is suspicious, because she’s otherwise fairly gullible. I imagine her questions, the ones she’d ask if I weren’t in such a crabby mood: “Mom, does anyone NOT feel good after a feel-good movie?” I imagine my crabby retort.

“If people don’t leave feeling good, is it still a feel-good movie?” This is the kind of question that makes me gaze at her speechless. I am going into a mini-trance just typing it. Wisely, she never asked either question, which gave me space to wonder why I’m so unreceptive to feel-good movies. I seem to assume that these movies cannot possibly be works of art and therefore must be works of marketers, because they know, they totally know, because they do focus groups, that people will PAY to feel good. Sure, people pay for other movies that aren’t feel-good movies…but I’m not suspicious of those movies. I only feel this wariness about feel-good movies. They write the endings after the results of the focus groups are analyzed. I’m so crabby.

Two of my facebook friends recommended The Blind Side; Lily has been avidly reading the comments to my status update query regarding feel-good movies. As she reads my comments she critiques my facebook comment-writing style, which makes me also-crabby. “That was confusing,” she points out, and indeed the next person who commented was, indeed, confused. (Somehow, her friends’ comments are not confusing at all…even though they don’t use vowels.) Anyway--Lily and I once tried to watch The Blind Side and couldn’t. We tried--I had thought she was enjoying it; I thought she’d object when I said I’d had enough, but she agreed.

“It’s lame,” she had said. I was relieved. I excused my facebook friends’ questionable taste with the fact that they are from Indiana, and Lily was curious.

“Really? Really, mom? People from Indiana have bad taste in movies?” She was asking in earnest. I was hoping she was not going to make this the thesis of her homeschooling term paper.

“I don’t know,” I said, “maybe just the ones from my hometown.” (I’m from Indiana too, so I can say whatever I want, right?)  Ever so crabby.

Meanwhile, this week I was writing a eulogy--bummer--and coming face to face with who I even am as a human being and how much of my ancient ingrained human-ness I can transform into Light in order to come ever more into harmony with my partner. It was a long two days. I could see why people take pills. I have every skill and tool and awareness to not declare war on the world, on my partner, on my kid, on myself, so I didn’t, but I was still crabby as I drove to my hair appointment.

And I was trying to remember what had lifted Katrina last week, when she was in her own allergic reaction: all that is not love, within, reacting to the unremitting flow of Love, causing acute discomfort to the human self. Our shadows, we have seen, sometimes react against Love Itself. It's just an energy dynamic. We see how it works. We’ve got its numba. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make us pause, sometimes. I knew I had a choice, a route out of the darkness…but what was it again? I tried to resurrect Katrina's experience as I drove north on Sheffield to my hair appointment...what was it again?

And then I remembered what lifted her up, into a mini-epiphany: she had missed feeling good, she missed being close to me, and simply chose to change, for no reason, chose to reroute…immediately…yes! And that’s all I needed to do too; realign with love, JUST because it feels better. Right!

Just then, a white Honda pulled in front of me with the license plate: “LOVE WINS.”

Uncanny timing. Confirmation. So much better than a movie! Instant gratification. The Universe loves me, is invested in my happiness. Absolutely arresting—though in truth, there was a part of me that still wanted to stay crabby nevertheless. 

Do I deserve to feel happy and be loved right now? On my crabby drive up Sheffield? Even though I am totally flawed as a human being? Apparently yes. Even though my issues aren’t totally, totally sorted out yet? Apparently yes. Yes! Love wins. Yes: love whatever’s in your way, love whatever is blocking the way of Love. LOVE WINS was a stunning moment delivered by the Universe and followed by a series of 11's in a more esoteric but still staggering communication to me that all is well.

Turning toward the Light, I repeatedly experience, is immediately rewarded, with good feelings and license plate communications and lucky numbers, and is worth accessing by almost any means necessary…even feel-good movies. Really, whatever it takes. It is absolutely essential--and I'd even venture to say, it's the meaning of life--to be present to LOVE, every moment that we are alive. Whatever it takes...dropping the ego story that thinks I'm right, dropping the ego story that resents that I'm wrong...whatever. Just find the love, the Divine Presence. Now.

In case I still didn’t get it, LOVE WINS proceeded to park right in front of me when I reached my destination.

PS. I must add that facebook friends from my hometown also recommended two of my favorite movies as well: Slumdog Millionaire and Little Miss Sunshine. So actually people from my hometown have GREAT taste in movies...when it agrees with mine.

(And hey, is Burlesque indeed a feel-good movie? And if so, aren’t all musicals, Corrie Lenn Borris? Because otherwise... wouldn’t they be operas?)

Just Between Us

In one of the “best” private high schools in Chicago, girls are making out with each other and exposing each others’ breasts to willing boys, at parties, for the boys’ viewing pleasure. Boys record these make-out sessions on their phones. Shyer girls record them themselves for shyer boys. What luck, that kids were born at this time in history when such amazing technology exists! How clever! How convenient! No longer do boys need to find their dad’s stash of boring old still shots; they can keep live action in their pockets! And no longer do girls have to pretend that they are not sexual beings! They are! Not only are they sexual beings, but stars, emailed from boy to boy for unlimited exposure! Fifteen minutes of fame, indeed! We are living in a new age! What freedom! What clueless parents!

I’m stunned, that with all this evolution on so many other levels, we—parents of the new millennium--have allowed our kids to become live porn for each other, instead of teaching them to be heart connected. It’s not that I’m sexually naïve. If I haven’t done it myself, I’ve read about it; but years have gone by since the last time I heard of a sex act that jarred my world as much as the news that high school girls are making alcohol-fueled soft-core porn videos for boys.

What does a girl need to ignore in order to let herself be filmed at a party? How desperate to be loved and seen must she be? When did women start to disassociate like this, and create disassociated daughters? With all the evolution and awakening and access to information and technological wizardry of the last 20 years, sex is still in the dark. Disassociated from love, from a heart connection, and universally unrecognized as a union of SOULS, of spirit shared, it is passed on to kids in ways that allow them to dishonor one another. How can we teach this honoring, though, if we don’t embody it ourselves?

How on earth do we do this? How do we walk our talk, rather than leaving our own sexuality in the dark and commenting woefully on the de-generation of this generation of teenagers? Can we fully embody our own sexuality in a way that honors it as the creative force it is? Can we celebrate it in ourselves and revere it in our partner, our mirror? When will NOW be the right time to make a change?

We average everyday people have squished sex into this tiny category, moved it to the end of the day, and only if our partner deserves it; we’ve kept the energy of sex so locked up in the genitals for so long, that we have culturally forgotten what it truly is: the energy of transformation, the energy of creation. Meanwhile kids, in an effort to discover what sex is, in an effort to actually feel something in this world of digital media, have learned to use our magnificently evolved electronic technology for sex play, without an evolved spiritual perspective. Why not? What do they know? We have never known how it feels to liberate this energy from its conventional pathway and send it throughout and around our body, throughout and around our partner, throughout and around our lives. We’ve never learned how to embody it without shadow and secrecy and shame.

What if? What if instead of the “don’t do what I do, do what I say” perspective, we evolved ourselves? What if we boring old adults with mortgages experienced the way that when this supercharged energy flows through the rest of our cells we feel and look more youthful and live from a joyful, conscious place? What if?

Have you ever tried to promote a tantric sex workshop? A whole weekend, people wonder. A whole weekend, about sex? What are we gonna do? We can’t take time from soccer games and birthday parties and bar mitzvahs and our Netflix queue to be sexy!

It’s about time.

It’s easy to say there’s not enough time. Especially for that! But this creation energy, sexual energy, is the same energy that makes the world go round; it’s life force, it’s the same energy that fuels the people and situations around us; liberating it makes our lives more synchronistic and easier to navigate. That’s the biggest draw for me: tantric sex, conscious sex energy, fuels my life. I am able to create my life, able to create happiness. Plus! I can see karma coming several miles away, without needing to interact with it. I can see illness coming a mile away, rarely needing to embody it. It’s not just about sex. It’s about living life from an awakened, happy state. It’s about evolving sex at the same rate of speed that the rest of the world is evolving.

There is no reason why we all can’t be ten times happier than we are. We have everything else we need. Don’t we? Our needs are so well met, better met than at any given historical time period, and American needs are met more easily than anyone else’s on the planet. We now have plenty of time for the world’s most blissful, most misunderstood activity—but we can’t, we can’t do it in the middle of the day, or move evolved, conscious, life-affirming sex to the top of the to-do list, because it’s been so culturally repressed. Or we can’t, because our partner was irritating that morning. Or we can’t, because we don’t have a partner—the second most used reason for avoiding addressing sexual energy.

What is the point of all of this ease and comfort and abundance? So we can have more time to watch movies? Surely it’s not to evolve our perception of sex so that we can raise sexually enlightened children.

There is no known cultural or spiritual permission to have spiritual sex. It is not held within the language and comprehension of the sacred. But it is, indeed, sacred. It is ready to evolve, into the Light. And Now is the time.

The Tantra Heart beginning level workshop in Chicago October 8-10 is the place, a sacred space, to begin awakening to the light behind the darkness that has shrouded sex. It is a safe time and place to let your own inner light shine, to awaken yourself to the abundance of Universal Love that is ready to come forth on the New Earth. Imagine a world in which you were honored simply for showing up, for seeing and being seen, in the Light. This is the world—this is the community, at least—that is being created Here, Now. Join us to get a taste of the future.

Let’s be a living example for the next generation, by learning to fully embody sex-heart-consciousness, so that kids have real live role models for how to live as fully connected, enlightened sexual beings.

Tantra is where yoga was 20 years ago: edgy, unknown. So be a pioneer. The unknown frontier is so much better than what we have inherited and what we are passing on to our kids, because we have an opportunity to create it, consciously. I’m in. Are you?

Tantra for Superheros

It's no more outrageous for the President to attend this month’s Tantra Heart workshop than it is for me to be on Oprah (April 8, 2010!). Tantra is where yoga was 20 years ago...it's being reborn. I had considered voting for Dennis Kucinich in the primary in part because I'd read he and his wife were Tantra practitioners. I was very aligned with his edgy, far left politics. But it was the Tantra piece that excited me the most. Imagining a President who practices Tantra inspires optimism for peace on earth. Admittedly, Kucinich was unelectable (in large part because, according to my friend Chuck, a politically savvy, articulate, esteemed Shakespeare professor, “He looks too much like a ferret”).

Nevertheless, we can still have a President who does Tantra! The workshop is happening in the Obama’s former neighborhood, Hyde Park, at the home of his daughter’s former schoolmate! How un-exotic, how do-able is that?

You can tell that the First Couple is already having darn good sex—have you noticed the way they look at each other? I suspect if the President did this Tantra class, we would be that much closer to world peace. Truly. You cannot do this TantraHeart weekend and go back to sleep, thinking you are not a creator, on a very high level. You cannot come out thinking we the Human Family are not One. You come out knowing that. So, yeah. That’s scary. It’s a big responsibility, to be a conscious creator, to honor all of life. Tantra introduces a new way of seeing. Since our First Couple are already fearless, highly responsible, conscious creators having really good sex…why not just formally embody that for all to see? Claim it! Register at www.ugoddesstantra.com!

They're probably registering right now. Did I mention I'm going to be on Oprah?

My daughter and I live in a wonderful single-family home in Lincoln Park, far better than my modest income would allow, due to the vision and heart of my dear friend and pelvic floor goddess Missy Lavender. (By the way, you might remember her as the perky blonde woman standing beside Oprah on Inauguration night. Missy is a right place at the right time kind of goddess.)

So. It’s a long story. But it began four years ago on the descending stairwell of a rental two-flat when, in a moment of inspiration, I set an audacious intention: "I want to live in a home that I love, a home much better than my income would allow."

Setting intentions works. But, as I explained to the group of goddesses that my dear friend Julie had assembled (she had been introduced to me by Missy, by the way) it helps to set audacious intentions.

I spoke with my goddess friend Katrina Rivers one afternoon last year and mentioned to her that I was going to speak at Julie’s gathering that evening.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Nervous,” I replied.

“Do you know nervousness is JUST energy? And that you can take that energy and turn it into something else? Such as excitement?”

Of course I knew that. I taught that to people, didn’t I? It’s just that…I had forgotten. Because I was nervous.

“Ok, hang on!” I said, “I’m going to do it right now!” And I did.

Katrina held on, talked me through the transformational moment, and I emerged, saying, “OK! I’m excited!” I thanked her profusely, and headed to my computer where I made an outline of everything I wanted to say to Julie’s guests.

Enjoying Julie’s gathering, I could not help but notice that the other speakers, including my colleague, tantra goddess Elsbeth Meuth did NOT speak from an agenda. The piece of paper quartered into my back pocket began to haunt me as I listened to Elsbeth and breathed my enlightened sexuality up into my heart, as she was instructing us to do. I was brimming with excitement, enough to ignore the thought what if I can’t do it without my typed-up, well articulated agenda?

I walked to the front of the room and looked at the open faces waiting for the NEXT words and I let it flow. I was more open than ever, the voice of the Goddess flowing, when I gleefully instructed these women to dig deep and imagine what their heart’s desire truly was.

“What’s your heart’s desire?” I asked, to a handful of women.

I revealed mine. I said, “Naming our heart’s desire can actually be stressful. For instance, I want to write a book. And I can say that, but then the thoughts creep in, thoughts like, ‘do I have time to write a book?’ or ‘what if I don’t write the book?’ so it is very, very beneficial to set an intention above and beyond that. So, yes, I want to write a book. My book will be about enhancing the spiritual connection between mothers and daughters. Now for the audacity: I want Madonna and her daughter to read it, and form a mother-daughter circle. I want Michelle Obama to read it, and I want there to be mother-daughter circles at the White House (she hadn't moved in yet, but that was beside the point)! I want mother-daughter circles to form across the country. AND I WANT TO BE ON OPRAH!” And everyone laughed, as I had expected. I laughed. Because, what an audacious intention!

“See?” I said. “When you set an audacious intention, it makes you smile.”

A few weeks later, I went through that same series of thoughts in one of my UrbanGoddess workshops. Each participant amped up her intention until it made her smile.

“I just want peace in my family,” one of them said. “I bet you can't amp that up.”

“I can,” I replied. “What if your family went to a yoga workshop together? What if at the end of the workshop, they composed a song and sang it to you, thanking you for how peaceful they all felt?”

She laughed. We all laughed. Outrageous, right? Why set an intention that’s going to stress you out, when you can set one that will make you laugh?

So I went about my life. For months. For a year. The mother-daughter book was slowly being written. One day I took a nap. When I woke up, I checked my messages.

“Hi Rachel, this is Brian from the Oprah Winfrey Show,” the message began. I put Brian’s voice on speaker, stunned and euphoric. “I know this is late notice (HA! I thought, This is happening much sooner than I had imagined!), but we’d like to come over and tape you teaching Tantra to some clients of Dr. Laura Berman.”

With deep gratitude, another goddess, my dear friend Annmarie, popped into my mind: she had introduced me to Laura Berman, based on her intuition that we should be working together. (In case you're wondering, Missy had introduced me to Annmarie too.)

I listened to Brian’s message two more times. I savored it. If you had asked me then—and maybe even if you asked me now—what the highlight of my life has been thus far, I would say, “Hello, this is Brian from the Oprah Show.” Indeed.

Audacious. Not so much because I wanted to be on tv--but because the Universe had heard my intention!

As it turned out, the Oprah show did not film at my house.

I met the couple four or five times. They kept walking in the door of Vessel Yoga, and I kept introducing myself, as if for the first time, five times. The second time, I felt somewhat insincere. By the fifth time, I was trying not to feel fraudulent. After that, they went and sat down. I approached them. “I am here for you,” I said to them, wanting to make a real connection this time. “I’m not here for the tv show. I’m here to do what I always do with couples, and I can assure you that if what you want is to be healed, you will get what you came here for." I paused, waiting for them to take that in.

But Brian, the director, respectfully took my arm and steered me aside. “We ask that you only talk to them when the cameras are rolling. It’s kind of like…reality tv.”

When I arrived home from taping that day, my beloved goddess of a daughter Lily looked at me and said, “Mom. You wore THAT? On tv?!” I had no idea what was wrong with my outfit. I was wearing what I always wore to teach yoga. She illustrated how I was supposed to dress, by pulling my yoga pants tightly around my legs.

The next day, Ann the assistant called me to say 1) we were changing studios due to the el train noise; and 2) they were running late. I was already used to the running late part by then. I canceled the rest of my appointments that day and headed to Moksha Yoga, where, coincidentally, I had spent hundreds of hours and am very comfortable. When Ann called again to say they were running even later, I headed into Moksha’s boutique and tried on the first yoga pants I saw: they looked exactly like Lily told me they were supposed to look. I felt a tad exposed. But the ease of shopping and the thrill of buying something hot at the right price…reminded me of my intention for the day--to HAVE FUN!

The tech guys were cool 30-somethings, intrigued by my job. I was equally intrigued by theirs. Harpo cameramen. I loved the camaraderie they had and how smoothly they worked together. There was a level of respect for me, in part because the day before I had been assertive enough to tell them what I would need, in order to do my job and assure success for all of us.

“You’ll get the hot footage and good sound bites that you need IF this couple gets 45 minutes’ uninterrupted yoga, and 15 minutes uninterrupted breathing,” I had said. “I need to feel like I’ve given them the same healing appointment that everybody else gets. ...No, I never take off my mala beads.” My mala beads were clicking against each other, interfering with the sound. The sound guy settled on taping them to my wrist with medical tape. A clever compromise, which worked.

“I hate to ask you this,” he said, hesitantly, “but can you take off your necklace?”

It was bumping right against my microphone. It has deep significance, was made by my partner, and I wear it every day. It has an OM on it. It worked with my top, and my lotus necklace. Of course I didn’t want to take it off. “Sure, no problem,” I said with a smile. It’s not like I’m a prima donna or anything.

“Can you say the thing about the full-body orgasm again?” my director, Brian, requested. I repeated it. About six times. Keep that in mind, reality-tv fans. I did a lot of repeating, until reality and what Brian wanted were united as One.

“Can you say that again, without using the word ‘esoteric’?” asked Brian. “That word is a little too--”

“—esoteric?” I asked.

By the end of the four hours of taping, I understood just what Brian wanted. I wished I could come back the next day, armed with ten-second descriptions of Tantra, a 4,000-year old spiritual path which takes book-chapters to describe.

Later my friends and clients asked what it had been like.

“It was like trying to get your child to do their homework…during their birthday party,” I replied.

The couple, especially the wife, was very distracted by what was going on around us. I rely about 95% on intuition and 5% on what I’ve done with other couples in the past. Imagine tuning in to your intuition, and to your clients’ body/mind/spirit, and to the clients’ relationship dynamics...while all three of us are miked, with lights in our faces, and cameras following our every move. There were eight other bodies in the room for me to NOT tune in to.

I loved every minute of it.

I loved the challenge of getting through to the couple, despite the challenges. I loved the challenge of Brian asking me to oversimplify everything I said. I loved my new, tight, yoga pants. I would do the whole thing again the next day, in a second. I would do it EVERY day.

I might have forgotten all about it—two months have gone by—when another goddess, my friend and former sister-in-law, Kathryn, emailed me with a link to Oprah’s schedule. “Is this it?” she asked. And indeed…it was.

So, I have no idea what they will show, after our four hours of taping. I am thrilled that tantric sex—spiritual sex, heart-sex-consciousness in union as taught to me by my teachers Richard and Antoinette Asimus --is going to get some valuable daytime tv exposure, even if I personally come off as a flaky, nervous, new age nymph in tight pants.

THE COUPLE: What I doubt they’ll show on TV

Dr. Berman briefed me on the couple, and because of the tv time constraints I didn’t have a leisurely introductory dialogue with them. But I did ask what I always ask. They answered that they’d met at a non-profit, where they had both volunteered.

I often use that question, “Where did you first meet?” as a point of departure. It is an easy question for nervous novices to answer. I can also see who talks first, who holds back, whether they agree, whether one defers to the other…then I often ask, "What did you first like about her?" And then I might move on to, “And when did you really focus in on them and realize, wow, he might be the one for me?” And finally, “How did your first sexual encounter go?”

We had, of course, started two hours late. I wanted this couple to DO, rather than talk, because I knew that they had already talked extensively to Dr. Berman, and lord knows how much repeating they had done for "reality's" sake.

Fortunately their non-profit initial meeting struck a chord which allowed a leap forward into their new paradigm. After they were softened up with some yoga and breathing, I offered, “You have been living as a couple who has “sex problems,” and you have come to identify yourselves as a couple with “sex problems.” I bet you’ve lost touch with that initial meeting. So let’s go back there, to the non-profit. Let’s remember that you met performing selfless service, and that by being HERE NOW you are still performing selfless service. You are showing the world—how many people watch Oprah? 16 million? 23 million? You are showing the world that sexual challenges do not need to be kept secret. You are allowing cameras into your life to help people; do you realize how many people out there will benefit from watching you on this show? Do you know that cliché about love, ‘It’s bigger than both of us!’? Let that be your new mantra. From now on, when you think about your intimate life, if you fall back into discouraging thoughts, reroute. Use your mantra. Remember that you have been presented with your unique challenge because you were meant to help others. Millions of others! How amazing that your so-called problem can be used for the benefit of millions! It is not just about you two in the bedroom. Take a moment and transform your former ‘problem’ into the gift to the world that it’s going to be! Create a new vision of yourselves, for yourselves! You are SUPERHEROS!”

It was an audacious intention for them to embody. I bet they were the least likely superheros they could imagine. But they smiled. As the cameras rolled.

And that was their pep talk. They breathed into that new reality, grateful to have let go of the old one. Superheros.

When the lights were taken down, after we were unmiked, after we had found our socks, but before they left for their next event…the wife approached me.

“Do you say that to everyone?” she asked.

“Do I say…what…to everyone?”

“You know, just, everything you said to us. Or were you saying it for…you know…the show?”

“I was absolutely saying it to you, for you,” I replied. That is exactly what I had tried to establish the day before after we’d met five times. Right then I realized that she had probably been too nervous and distracted to hear most of what I had said, but I could tell by the transformed expression on her face—and the ease and warmth between husband and wife—that even though she might not have heard it all, energetically she had “gotten” it.

And truly, beyond my lofty and audaciously met intention to be on Oprah, their recognition, their transformation, makes for major job satisfaction.

That evening, Lily and I remarkably ran into them and the crew at Whole Foods. I was still flying high. This time the husband pulled me aside. “The breathing we did,” he said. (For more on that breath virtually meet David Elliott!) “After that breathing. I felt like…like…it kind of felt like…I felt like I was...in church,” he concluded. "Do you know what I mean?"

“Yes,” I said, “I know what you mean. That’s your spirit. Feel it! Because that’s who you truly are!”

Skyrocketing job satisfaction at this point.

What more could I ask for?

PS No, I did not meet Oprah. (Everyone asks.) Why didn't I? Because it had not been part of my intention! But I do want the Obamas to come to my Tantra Heart workshop!