Bleeding Between the Lines (Or, On the Language of My Transformation)

Tied up and twisted, my heart has spent too many years
longing for a foundation that can steer my boat to safer shores.
All of the rebellion and the resistance
landed me in too many self-imposed hells.
Prisons with unlocked doors where unrequited relationships
masked a painful confusion undistinguished from reality.

Thrashing about in misery, I lashed out in defenses whenever the house
of cards I had haphazardly assembled came crashing down.
Or, gone, like the wind, I would simply stop showing up.
Deeply intuitive, I wasn't thriving
yet I was too embroiled within my own ego to respond from anything
other than emotional reactions.
A myopic lens lent me an inability to see the larger perspective.

"Place your hand on your chest," she commanded.
"What does your heart say?"

Pressed beyond the rationale and the reasoning,
encouraged to tread past the concepts and to leave the monkey mind behind,
"You can't think your way into this," they chimed in unison.
"Listen - what does your heart say?"
Supported within a warm cocoon of sisterhood and friendship,
they spun their magic around and around my ailing spirit.
"True alchemy is turning all of this shit into gold," they confided.

I desperately sought to maintain my masks but their reflections could not be ignored. With trepidation, I began peeling away at the layers. My voice shaking, I spoke of the ugliness of some of my truths. The resentment - a tough exterior where anger and apathy mix and mingle - that erects walls of judgment and criticism, as well as the inability to let go of the pain of the past, were suffocating my strong, unique beat.

"Listen," she said. "What's does your heart say?"

Plump tears fell from my dark eyes as a lost little girl emerged from my psyche. She's sad and she's hurt. She's deeply wounded. All she wants is to experience safety - to know the strong arms of a protective father and the compassionate love of a nurturing mother - but she doesn't and she can't. So, she hides. She crawls up and into the music and the movement, the stars and the sky. She shields her deep sensitivity - falling victim to the notion that vulnerability is a weakness - as she moves through the world desiring to see but not be seen. Ironically, she hypocritically performs while literally and metaphorically screaming, "See me! See me! See me!"

And they sit there, unfazed by the brazen brat and unmoved by her rage.
"Listen, what does your heart say?" they sing.
And she is shaken by this stirring, by the wise wisdom welling up from the
deep pits of the Earth. An ancient demonstration that the only way to reclaim one's true authenticity is to honestly give voice to the pain and the sadness that resides within. "A whole Be-ing fully acknowledges the depths of their shadow while allowing this space to be fully carved out - into a container large enough to hold the suffering of others."

"The deeper the shadow, the brighter the light."
Indeed.

On the Metaphor of Movement, take I

As a natural mover and athlete, I've always been drawn to the metaphor in movement. My first true love was gymnastics when, as a girl of seven, I discovered abundant joy in this moment now by flinging my body through time and space, across the vault, over the bars and head over heels through mid-air. Competitive by nature, I hold myself and my own abilities to an extremely high standard. When I am not reaching for the heights that I know I am capable of, I begin to feel petty and envious. However, I am equally comfortable playing the role of coach and cheerleader. For one of my truths is that I want us all to win - together. Softball taught me the meaning of cooperation and teamwork, while marching in the drill team and performing with the color guard demonstrated the power and potent imagery of many parts moving as one entity.

While backpacking through New Zealand in 2001, I came to view each day's arduous hike, and the vertical ascents laying between myself and the next hut, as a walking meditation. Just like life, there will be many steep mountains to face, each seemingly insurmountable. Yet, if I just breathe and place one foot in front of the other, I eventually arrive at my destination. Disc Golf is similar in that I have both of my feet firmly placed upon my starting point and my vision clearly sees my end goal. Nonetheless, most of the time my unwieldy arm winds up and lets go of the heavy disc in such a manner that I end up taking a much more circuitous route than I planned in getting my disc into the hole. Still, even if it I shoot far over par, I always end up where I intend. The point then becomes can I enjoy the conversation, perhaps a beer, the scenery and the sky, along the way?

Recently, I was left to my own devices to move Shakti's heavy and cumbersome couch out of my cave in the back of the Prosperity Hive and into our honey-colored wood floor studio. I did what it took two grown men to do - turning that thick piece of furniture onto its side, twisting and turning, hopping from the back of the couch to the front, just to squeeze it through the narrower door. As difficult as it was, I didn't give up because I took the task on as though it were synonymous with my hardest emotional block. I knew that if I could move that couch through the door, then I could move my own Self from where I've felt emotionally and professionally stuck for too many years now and on to the other side of whatever is to come next.

I have also jumped back on the bicycle again, and I approach each lumbering, San Diego hill with this same mindset. Bearing down into my core and accessing my energy from this place, I locomote that bike up these hills. Remembering how to tap into my own, internal power source while feeling the cool wind against my head of brown, flowing locks is a freedom that very little in life compares to. Join me!

Once..

Once, a beautiful man began referring to me as Frida.
We met on the land, southeast of San Diego,
where festivals and workshops transgressed and where
Native American sweat lodges still stand.
It was the Grand Mother's land
and a first that I found
intoxicating.

Once back within the bustling city, I purchased a book of Frida's found journals
(en espanol, no less),
and I spent months painting homages to her style
on palmbark.
I even claimed my own Diego, passionately
crying and feeling torn up inside
by his continued rejection.
The choice, though, was too much to bear -
after having once suffered through such a fate.
So I turned on my flat footed heel and finally
walked out that open door.

Once, a bald headed monk would read to me
Rumi as we laid on a dirt dusted driveway
in recently washed work clothes and as Arcturus
flashed its nightly display overhead.
Still, I crawl into the books and words,
the poems and stanzas of a time now past.
Over eight hundred years of spinning divinity
reaches my eyes, washing over me. Absolving my human
soul as I sit perched in grandmother Magnolia and once again
above a bustling city scape. Once, I penned my own
short ditties, my own odes to my beloved. Once,
I channeled the spirit of a whirling dervish now past.

"In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,

but sometimes I do,
and that light becomes this art."

Once all the dust has settled, however.
Once I have sat long enough.
Once I have cried my river of tears
and torn my vulnerable heart open.
Once I lay bare my virtues and my longings.
Maybe then, you and I will both begin to see
Carita.

An Ode to the Past

Yesterday, my heart was broken.
Mistaking the mirage in the shattered mirror
for me, I erroneously believed
that I was the broken pieces, scattered like bits
of colored glass - all the mistakes that have come before.
Yesterday, my heart was broken but today,
sitting here in stillness and silence as morning birds
chirp out a spring's refrain and as the vehicles of a
Saturday city amble by, I reclaim what was never lost.
I sink into the wholeness, the presence and the non-duality
of this Be-ing.
Now, the tears that fall from these rosy cheeks roll into
glimmering diamonds. They lay strewn at my folded feet,
their sharp edges once again sanded by the hands of time.
Taking my mat, I bow to the day, turn and walk away.
Leaving those priceless jewels twinkling in the
rays of the dawn's early light.
An offering of beauty, brilliance and bounty.
Namaste.