where God dwells

I have some readers out there now, and being honest is getting harder and harder. Some of what I want to write about feels too heavy, too dark, too real. You will come into the yoga studio tomorrow and you will know me better than I really want to be known.

I started talking to a friend tonight about my life. It wasn't a conversation; it was a monologue. My life has gotten really good. Really clean, I should say. I have a dog that loves me and is really cute. I have a nice car and a graduate degree and a cool business that's doing pretty well.

But that's only the recent story, and I started telling her the rest, the first thirty or so years that were so painful and destructive, when I felt so lost. I talked about high school, and the friends that died in car accidents and drug overdoses and knife fights. I told her about spending half of adolescence locked in institutions, and about the nights alone in Mexico, drinking, playing the same songs over and over, longing for a different place, a different time, a different outcome, wondering if it was time yet to drive my car off the cliff on the toll road from Cuernavaca.

There are no more big deals. I want to shout that and write it in all caps and scream it and hope that you'll remember too. Once we're not living like that, it doesn't matter much what happens. If I can remember what I can be like (I forget all the time), I take nothing for granted. It's all a gift.

When I did my yoga teacher training, we had a two hour Advanced Pranayama session. The teacher told us some of us would not be able to handle it. I didn't for a second think that I might be one of them. I'm strong. I've been through shit. I've gone to therapy, and I've worked twelve steps. A few times. I can handle it.

But I lost it. Somewhere in the bhastrika and the seed mantras, I was overcome by grief. There was no end to it. I cried and cried with only the vaguest understanding what the grief was about. A few months before I had lost an old friend suddenly and under questionable circumstances. It started there, but it went way beyond that. It was the grief of lifetimes, and I knew then that everything, absolutely everything, they were teaching me about karma and past lives and enlightenment was true.

Later that evening, the teacher said, essentially, "Hey, you don't have to do this. You don't have to renounce everything or become a swami or spend your life studying the scriptures. You can have a nice little life, maybe a couple kids, do some asana and enjoy yourself."

At that moment, I loved him for that. It may all be true, but the reality of it is absolutely overwhelming. It's too much. It's heavier and more intense than the best acid you ever took and just as unpredictable. I got a taste, and I didn't want it. Not then, probably not now either.

So I got busy creating that lovely little life in the material world I thought he was talking about. Very busy, and I'm afraid tonight that it's turned into running. I've forgotten where I come from, so lately I've been taking everything for granted. I've become entitled to more than I have. Even my asana practice lately has been more about sweaty rooms and endorphin highs than getting quiet. Do, do, do. Go, go, go. Get, get, get.

Does owning a yoga studio bring me closer to God? What if I own two? Is knowing God too much to ask for in this life? Can I know God and live in the material world and eat lots of cheese and chocolate chip cookies and text while I drive? All of those things keep me from my grief, keep me floating above the grittiness, keep me focused on the next task instead of something else, some place where all the fear dwells.

But the problem is that is also the place where God dwells.

Slow down. Slow down. Slow down, Miss Katy Mae. What's the hurry anyway?