Bodies Unbound

CHAPTER 6.

THE CABIN RETREAT

May 28, 2008

            This morning while still in bed Wyn asked if I was feeling married again.  I said yes.  He asked if I wanted to stay married for another year.  We always decide each May if we are going to continue.  I said, “Okay, sign me up for another year.”  We put on our wedding rings and a half hour later waved good-bye.  I was going off on a ten-day retreat at my cabin with Marco Polo and Dorjé, my two beloved Tibetan Terriers.

            It is always exciting heading towards the cabin.  It is my favorite place on earth.  There are seventeen cabins in the area though you can barely see them from our cabin.  There is a river that runs dramatically over rocks and through the woods, crashing and thundering during the spring, demurely in the late fall, always a part of the singing sounds of the wild.  I have done Qigong by that river, trying to merge with its movements.           

            I inherited the cabin from my mother.  I was Mom’s sole caretaker for several years before she died.  My mother and I had not resolved many of our most painful issues before I moved in with her.  We always said we would never live together, but Life intervened.    The last five days of her life, on Christmas morning, 2000, her heart opened and the block that formed when her mother died when she was four years old, washed away.  For a few days I had the mother I had always wanted.  Then she left.  I would not have missed those few days for the entire world.

             The summer after her death I went to the cabin to be alone and to recuperate.  It was a disaster.  It is very isolated there.  I thought I would turn this vacation into a meditation retreat but in no time I was filled with anxiety. There is no phone reception at the cabin and no heat but a Franklin stove that requires you to fell a tree, saw up the wood and split logs into small pieces.  Mom stayed there all summer long until she was eighty.

How did Mom do it?  I remember letters from her describing every cloud in the sky and the leaves of the cottonwoods turning yellow and falling off the trees and floating down stream like happy little boats.  My mother, whom I never respected, was at heart a contemplative.  Why did I only realize that after her death?

After five days, (I had planned to stay a month), I packed up and went home.  I needed a retreat center with a bell, or a reading room to go to, and a phone nearby to call Wyn with my insights.

About 8:00 A.M. I started calling friends from my cell phone to say I would be gone for ten days.  I spoke with my daughter-in-law.  She and my son are separating.  She’s having anxiety attacks.  Tiger, aged seven, is angry, confused, heart broken, and scared for his mother who is beside herself with grief.  Crack goes my heart.  My son is falling apart in his own way. He has lost his cell phone, his wallet, has gotten sick, and sleeps in his office.  The very roots of my hair ache for all of them.

After speaking with my daughter-in-law I took deep breaths while speeding down 99 Highway.  I tried to remember how a metaphysical nurse would think.   She would not see the problem, which is the human condition ruled by a belief that the physical situation is what needs changing.  As a nurse I would look at their true identity – the very image and likeness of God, Spirit.  That thought is like a piano tuners tuning fork.  It holds a strong middle C and allows the out of tune string to come up to its vibration.  I would accept that my son, his wife and my grandson’s true identity could never be touched by their human problems.

My family was riddled with unhappy marriages, divorces and multiple marriages, way before it was popular.  My Grandpa George divorced his first wife when he discovered she was trying to kill him for his property.  He then married my grandmother, Della, from a mail order bride service.  They had three children, the middle child being my mother.  Della died at 38 one night while ironing.  My mother, Uncle Ernie and Aunt Grace were farmed out to relatives and orphanages for years until Grandpa re-married.

I had a huge realization the night before I left for the cabin.  I was meditating and I couldn’t stop thinking about men breaking in to my house to hurt me.   I saw their faces through the windows with haunting eyes filled with malice.  Holding the feeling of these fears their reason revealed itself.  When I was eighteen I was working and living in a small town for the summer.  One night a friend was expected and I left the door to my apartment unlocked.  I was awakened to hear the door open, and, thinking it was my friend, I wasn’t worried until I felt a knife in my back and a man telling me not to make a sound.  My going hysterical thwarted his attempted rape.  The neighbors called the police when they heard me screaming.  The police told me that it was my fault for leaving my door open and was fired from my job.  My employers could not have someone working for them who had been involved in a sexual scandal.

After nine hours of driving, shopping, getting gas at $5.49 a gallon for diesel, walking the dogs, and getting coffee – I arrived at the cabin.  It was pouring rain.  It was cold. 

The dogs were overjoyed to be out of the car.  They raced around the woods, barking their heads off, getting soaked, bringing dirt, sand and crud into the cabin.  In and out we all went, me unloading the car, back and forth in the wet, wet rain.

The first thing I did was make a fire.  Alan and Betty, the couple I rent out the cabin to during the winter had left wood by the fireplace so it was dry.  I carefully arranged paper, kindling, pinecones and wood and in no time a fire was blazing and the cabin began to warm up.

It was so still except for the sound of the river, the crackling fire, and the gentle rain.  These ancient sounds are medicine for the soul.  My road weary body was comforted by the simple chores, the familiarity of my surroundings and the beauty.  Beauty is medicine.

In time the rain stopped and the dogs and I walked off our stiffness.  The clouds and mist cut mountain ridges in half and the sun came out occasionally creating vibrant colors.  Everything sparkled and glowed.  The rain brought out the smells of the forest.  I was the only one there.  I felt like the first woman on earth.

This was where Smoky went wild.  This was where I had been coming since I was two years old.  This was my home.  I knew every bend in the river, every tree, every secret path up the glacier rocks in a way only a child can know things.  They were all still there.  Nothing had changed in sixty years; there is the wisdom tree where I had brought countless dilemmas and sat under it until I had an answer, there was the place the fawn who lost its mother came out of the bushes and sat on my lap, there was the cliff over-looking the valley where I have done yoga at dawn for forty years, there was the clearing I had my first kiss.

            I came back to the cabin, made tea and sat by the fire.  I was so grateful for the peace I felt.  There is a picture on the wall of my mother in her seventies.  She has on a stripped t-shirt and a familiar smile.  Sitting there in the cabin I remembered a time I came here to visit her in the 90’s.  I was living in Boulder, CO at the time.

  My son, who was living in L. A., met me at the airport and together we drove to the cabin.  That night we all slept outside on cots by the river.  We always said we couldn’t close our eyes until we’d seen a shooting star.  The bats came out and flew over our heads.  We saw a satellite blinking through the black and starry sky.  I do not remember if we saw a shooting star. 

During our first breakfast I fought with my mother.  She was making snide remarks about Russell’s belief in magical healing, or healing oneself through proper thought and diet.  I blew up.  I said, “Mom, you say you love Russell and I but you have never made one bit of effort to understand what it is we love.  You won’t read anything about it and you criticize us for trying to be healthy.”  We fought and fought.  It was an ancient battle.  I had started one of the first health food restaurants in Boston in the late 60’s and Mom ate ice cream even though she was dying of emphysema.

                 Afterwards I realized in order to stay sane with my mother in the woods for eight days I was going to have to do a mantra.  I started repeating 3,000 times a day, “Divine Mother be with me.”  Two days later my mother came to me and said, “Please tell me what you are in to.  I really want to know.”

                 I was lying in the hammock.  She sat beside me on a little stool.  Her lovely face was open.  I told her about the spiritual paths I’d been on since I was twenty-two and the kinds of people I’d met along the way.  I talked to her about the struggles I faced in my own nature.  There was a yearning to know God but I only had the energy to reach that transcended place when my life was so horrible I needed a miracle.  Once I reached that transcended place everything my human side wanted would come to me.  If I needed money, money would come, if I needed a man, a new relationship would present itself.  Then all these things, men, money, jobs, home seduced me away from God.  Then I would have to wait for everything to fall apart again.  Trying to bare the emptiness of the false self I ruined my health with coffee, sugar and depression.  On and on I talked.  Even I didn’t understand it.

            As I told her the truth about the struggles I faced trying to find a world I could live in, a world she had never known nor wanted and didn’t understand, my heart opened to her. What a cruel joke to give a daughter like me to a mother like her.  My mother could make a box of chocolates last a year.  When she was full she stopped eating.  She was content with the slightest gesture of appreciation.  I needed a stage and a three-ring circus to entertain me.  It was like she was a bird and I a river.  She couldn’t find my mouth.  She didn’t know how to nourish me.  But that day, instead of trying to make me into something she could understand she tried to know me.  I was so grateful.  

                 The next day I continued saying my mantra, “Divine Mother be with me.”  I got up at dawn and climbed the mountain near our cabin.  I sat on a rock and took off my clothes.  Wanting the warmth of the sun I prayed with all my heart.  I could understand how people felt the sun was God.  The power, warmth and gifts the sun brings make it paramount to the human condition.  The gratitude I felt when the sun came up over Night Cap Ridge was a blessing few now know.  If you truly want to know Joy, allow yourself to be so cold, so hungry, so tired, that food, warmth and rest are ecstasy. 

                 I prayed all day hiking.  I hiked up on the Sonora Pass over St. Mary’s trail.  The first part of the hike is steep, but a half hour up and over the first ridge you enter a bowl that is several miles across and flat.  It is a moon-like landscape in a great bowl, the color of slate.  In this bowl was every color of wild flower.  In between the slate grey rock there were coral Indian paintbrush and chartreuse flowers that glowed.  There were little streams I drank from flowing over and down the rock.  “Divine Mother Be With Me.”  There were pine trees shaped by the wind and stunted by cold and a little black snake.   I walked through this wondrous land with my prayer like a pilgrim.

                 The next day, back at the cabin, I sat on a rock in the middle of the river saying my prayer.  I was annoyed.  I was bored from being at the cabin, bored with my prayer bored with my mothers constant talking.  She told stories I had heard hundreds of times.  She spoke in clichés.  In a temper I asked the stream, “Who is the Divine Mother anyway?”

In an instant I heard the answer.  The stream said, “I am the feminine face of God.” 

“What is your name?” I asked. 

She said her names were patience, forgiveness, love, and beauty.  I asked her to be with me while I was with my mother.  She said to ask in the moment she was needed.

                 That evening in the cabin after dinner during my mothers endless story I remembered Divine Mother and I prayed, “Please give me patience.  Give me Joy.  Give me all your qualities.” 

In a flash I was interested in what my mother was talking about.  That was a miracle in itself.  I began to hear parts of the story I hadn’t heard before.  My arrogance dropped away.  I asked questions about aspects of the story she hadn’t mentioned, and we laughed and laughed, imagining “what if’s”, or “who knows.”

                 In no time my mother was off to bed, very happy and I felt happy I had not turned into a horrible person, withholding my love because of my annoyance.

Remembering that happy moment with my mother and feeling her presence inside the cabin, I was at peace.  I put another log on the fire and began to meditate.  I slowly watched and counted my breaths as Ram Dass taught me thirty-eight years ago.  With the inhale you think “rising” and with the exhale you think “falling”.  I have counted to a thousand, “rising” and “falling”, most days of my life since then.  At some point the words disappear and I look at what is behind the breath.  It is a deep, still, indescribable place that nothing I know me to be can identify with.  I touch it then am thrown back.  My ego finds something to complain about or fear, and though I try not to listen, I can’t help myself.

I made a bed in the living room because the bedroom was too cold, and with a dog on each side of me we slept and snored our way through our first night.

Chapter 5.

 I am planning a trip to my cabin in the Sierra for ten days even though I hate being alone.  Every spiritual teacher I have ever read, listened to or met has in some way said that you can’t trust your choices as long as you can’t face your fears.   As long as that fear is there you can never trust that you are loving for the right reason.  If you use romance to keep away your fears, how can you know if you love that person or are just tricking yourself?           

            I have been to workshops to find and face this place in me that is afraid.  There is a Vipassana Meditation retreat in the foothills of California at North Fork.  There they hold ten- day retreats in absolute silence.  They provide two light meals a day for the one hundred fifty people who show up for each retreat.  It is free.  The only thing they insist on is that you show up for each sitting and complete the course. There is a monitor who counts heads to make sure everyone is there for each meditation period. 

            The first day, the meditation hall looks orderly and everyone is sitting with strong resolve.  By the second day you can sense agitation and restlessness.  By the third day the intensity of the place has risen.  People have built forts of blankets, extra pillows for knees or to sit higher on the meditation cushion.  Then people stop showing up and the monitor is off to find them.  People hide in their rooms, get sick, need to sleep, anything to avoid that place inside them.  People are trying to think of ways they can be called away on an emergency.  That place that has been avoided by talking, eating, comfort, jobs, and relationships is starting to arise to the surface of their consciousness.  The inner operation has begun.

            On the third day of my first retreat I met the grief of leaving my son when he was three.   I had done countless kinds of therapy to resolve this but it always came back.  I had come to accept it as a part of me that couldn’t be healed.  I, in some ways, felt like a shrine, a warning of what happens to a woman who leaves her child.  Each time I remembered putting my son on the plane with his father I fell apart.  “How could I let him go?  What kind of person could let their child go?”  I would picture his little tear stained face and scream inside. 

            For days I tried to fight off the memory with the meditation technique, but the feelings grabbed all my attention and the pain it caused in my body was unbearable.  I finally talked to the retreat leaders, a couple who volunteered to sit with us for these ten days.  They were available for instruction.  They listened to my story with great compassion then told me to feel the feelings without the story.

            I went back to my meditation torture chamber.  “What good is that going to do?” I asked myself.  I was pissed off they didn’t have a better suggestion.  Soon the feelings were alive in me again.  I thought, “Well, just try it for a second.” 

            I let go of the story, the words to criticize myself, even the words of the facts of what happened.  It was as if the story was keeping the feelings about two feet away from me.  When I dropped any words to describe it the impact of the emotions were like a kick to my chest.  My chest, neck and head began to burn with an intense fire.  I burned for a long time.  At last the burning ended.  The sadness I had carried in me for over thirty years, this self-hatred and grief had just burned itself out.  It wasn’t me at all.  It was something I believed.

            For a few days I felt as if I were freezer burned.  If I experienced the slightest breeze or if the air conditioner came on my skin felt as though it had been physically burned.  Then, that too disappeared, never to return.

            With the story gone from my body, new insight came.  Though I was not a conventional mother I had stayed alive for my son.  I had gotten sober and have remained so for 27 years.  When I was five years sober he came to live with me.  Though my son is still very angry about me leaving him, he calls on me for help from time to time and I can be there.  I am there for my grandson Tiger.  I also saw the family pattern of my grandmother dying when my mother was four and leaving my mother motherless.  My mother had put me in a foster home for a while.  It was a family pattern, leaving children.

            I am fascinated about the connection of our minds and bodies.  In my thirty-two years of being a massage therapist my constant question was what kind of thoughts created that kind of problems in the body.  It eventually led me to be able to read bodies.  Reading bodies I can tell in an instant what is unconscious in a person.  For instance if the left foot is sticking out at an angle there is an unresolved issue with the mother, the right, the father.  Rounded shoulders and upper back pain is always related to affairs of the heart; abandonment issues, a broken heart, etc.  Lower back is financial, always a lack of some needed support.  Large stomachs are related to mother issues.  Scoliosis, or a twisted trunk is usually about the upper part of the body, the mind and heart, not being able to communicate to the lower nature; sex, a need to belong, power, etc.           

            While I was wrestling with the demons of fear about Wyn not responding to my gesture of reconciliation, my right arm began to ache and became unusable.  I could not lift it from my side.  It was as if my arm was showing me my dilemma.

            “You are so helpless you need someone, (Wyn,) to do everything.  You are not even capable of lifting the slightest object,” said my arm.           

            As the realization hit me that I had married Wyn to save me financially, to protect me from my intense pain body, from all my fears of abandonment and of being alone, – as this awareness exploded in my consciousness the ache in my arm became unbearable.

            I was in Santa Barbara for my grandson, Tiger’s, first violin recital.  I drove there from Ojai with my left hand.  My son, Hesu Whitten, a chiropractor in Santa Barbara, was also at the recital.  He adjusted me.  Every bone in my body was out of alignment.  His expert hands put into place my neck, the entire vertebral column, hips, shoulders and arms, with the accompanying sounds of release and movement of bones, muscles and tendons.  Had I not been aware of the issue that had caused every part of my body to be out of place, his adjustments would not have worked.           

            I awoke the next morning and the pain was gone.  It was gone, not because the adjustment had fixed it, it was gone because the issue was gone.  Once the awareness comes there is no need for the illness.  It is the belief in some conflict that keeps the pain in place.

            I recently did body work on a woman who was going to school to become a therapist.  She was looking for a place to do her internship.  She had been on many interviews and not been hired.  I saw how her shoulders were rounded protecting her heart.  Her back was so tight and twisted from tight muscles she flinched every time I tried to put the slightest pressure into my strokes.  Her neck was unmovable.

            “Where do your people come from?” I asked her.

            “From Russia.  We are Russian Jews.”

            “Ah, that makes sense.  You are carrying the pogroms, the persecution in your body.  Your family probably didn’t know how to talk about it.”

            “No,” she said.  “No one ever talked about anything.  They didn’t smile, they weren’t happy.  They were critical about everything.”

            “They internalized what happened to them,” I said.  “You have done the same thing.  You are carrying their story in your body.  You did not become a therapist to help others you became a therapist in the hope you would receive the love you have never had.”

            She gasped and began to cry.           

            “Do you have a spiritual path to help you?” I asked.

            “I guess you could say I am a Zen Buddhist.”

            “Good.  Are you familiar with the story of the Bodhisattva?”

            “Yes.  They are people who have awakened to the Truth of Life, but have come back to help others.  In fact they have vowed to come back until all human beings are saved.”

            “You have decided to become a therapist.  You have gone through years of training.  If you choose to stay with the Russian Jew story you will perpetuate it and it will kill you.  You body is in so much pain it will create an illness that will take you out.  If you choose the Bodhisattva story you will not only heal yourself but all those who come to you for help.”

            In that moment her shoulders released.  It was a beginning.