For several months, I could feel this essay swelling up in me. Germinating. Nesting. Fermenting. And now, the story has unfolded. The meaning clarified. The words revealed, as the image of a morning landscape gives way to a lifting fog…
THE GLIMPSE AND THE DIVIDE
In the Zen Buddhist tradition, there is a word assigned to the experience of having a sudden glimpse of pure awareness or enlightenment. This glimpse is called, satori. Thereafter, it takes up residence in one’s memory as a jewel of recognition and a lamp that illuminates the path of practice as the student passes through the delusional web of the mind and the distracting phenomena of daily life. Satori fans the flame of one’s spiritual practice to return to that place once again. In short, the glimpse becomes an ever-present call of home.
When I was 13 years old, while attempting to meditate for the first time in my life (first time was the charm in my case) I had a glimpse of a field of awareness that I was not so much witnessing but embodying, that forever provided me with a direct recognition of the truth of my identity (or non-identity) well outside the limits of this contained body/mind construction I usually associate with. That moment provided me with a profound validation of spirit that no barrage of crazy mind waves since, could ever take from me. That moment would remain a most scared experience of direct knowledge. I had others follow every couple of years, and like satori, these quick, otherworldly visits to my elemental nature, fueled and refueled my spiritual inquiry. I had been home and I knew it.
After every visitation ended, “I” came back; that is to say, an individual sense of identity, enveloped in a fleshy frame, wandering about this dimension continuing to work out my karma. And while doing so I began to discern that while I knew I had an absolute home, I also had versions of home in this relative realm as well. Specific encounters would touch me with such a profundity, it felt like I was dwelling in my birthright; energetically, emotionally, kinesthetically, intellectually and so on. Even though these experiences were temporal and literal expressions, they nourished a passion to be in life itself, even as I sought the journey of transcending it. I started to see specific phenomena taking on the same role as a religious symbol by evoking focus, love, surrender and a reminder of wisdom. I cherished them as living deities that could wake my heart up and break me out of delusion.
Sometimes these earthly manifestations of home appeared as a place and sometimes as a person, and sometimes both simultaneously. Sometimes I touched it. Talked to it. Kissed it. Looked at a photo of it. Dreamed about it. Told others I wanted to be there, in it, with it, doing it. And occasionally, fell out of this dimension and experienced that I WAS IT. Home would come as a profound recognition, like a lightning bolt entering my being and once it struck, it pushed the pause button on my usual state of perception and my destructive thought patterns went on vacation. A portal in me opened up for a brief period lasting anywhere from seconds to days to months, depending on the circumstance. In through this portal came love. Gushing in so much I started to feel my spirit swell. My heart rejoiced. This is home. This is home. This recognition was not so much a giddy explosion as much as a melting into a blissful tranquility. I am reminded of the words of Dilgo Kheyntse Rinpoche, “Whatever circumstances arise, do not plunge into either elation or misery, but stay free and comfortable, in unshakable serenity.” Yes, unshakable serenity.
As satori-like glimpses, they provided a memory of wonder and thereby an impetus to continue to work hard on facing my self-defeating beliefs and habits. To stop wanting and start having. Stop wishing to become and actually be and embody. But like all spiritual rookies, the path home is often shrouded in obstructions and the unknown variables that discern a student from a master. Depending on one’s individual karma, it may take intellectual prowess, relationships, travel, death, creative work and perhaps even marriages, divorces and children as part of that process. Nonetheless, the memory of that lucid realization of what, where and with who you can be never, ever, leaves.
I recently watched a documentary about the composer, Phillip Glass. In it, he likened to writing music as getting really quiet to hear a river that runs underneath the earth’s surface. The music is always there and it can be ignored, but if one just listens, one can hear it. Often the quality of the musical score is determined by the quality of listening. Is not the quality of our life determined by our ability to listen to the subterranean call of home? The experience of knowing where home is, but not being there, is what has made me feel like a divided house. Even in my moments of total rebellion, I always sense that I have a choice to live in exile to my deepest call or not. The division is one between surviving and thriving, liking and loving, bland and beautiful, good enough and great, between using 10% of my ability and a hell of a lot more. Now more then ever, I find that my tolerance level for living in this state of division waning. I’d grown tired of my old excuses and all my coulda, woulda, shouldas. I've never quoted a politician in anything I’ve ever written, but the words of Abraham Lincoln echo the sentiment of what it often feels like when the ego is trying to catch up to the wisdom of the heart: "A house divided against itself cannot stand." Thank You Mr. Lincoln.
For those who exemplify this way of being, I like to call them: But People. These are people whose sentence structure looks a bit like this: “I would love to do this but...and I would really move here but…and I should have always done this but…again and again and again. It’s like they graduated high school and immediately entered into But People Academy. The mission statement is: The place to learn how to successfully rationalize why you cannot and should not ever do what your heart is telling you do to. If such a place existed in physical reality I imagine it would go bankrupt, but many people seem to have enrolled in such a place within themselves and have gone spiritually bankrupt.
Recently, I came to terms with the fact that I myself, had been a card carrying member of the But People Academy. And on one formidable account, I was ready to bridge the divide. What follows is a summary of a leap, from one version of myself to another; over one particular divide to one particular home.
A LEAP HOME
This October marks one year of my living and teaching in Orlando, Florida. When I told the owner of the yoga studio that I work for, that I would commit to a year of teaching and see how things unfolded, I wasn’t aware that I had officially set the timeline for one of the most pivotal internal revolutions of my life. In retrospect, it’s clear that I came here to end one major chapter of my life and prepare to begin another. Orlando was neutral territory for me. I had no history here, few friends and little to distract me. Therefore, I spent a lot of time alone in my one-bedroom apartment, turning it into a purification retreat in which to meditate, cry, shout, write, daydream, wrestle with my demons and dance with my hopes.
As I started to head into my 30’s last year, I became more and more consumed with a thirst to know where I wanted to build a home and plant some roots long-term. I wanted to travel and study extensively, but I also knew, I wanted a place to land that would anchor me in all the wondrous ways an actual physical location can. I yearned for a place to call home; a city, a culture, an energy that correlated with my own. A place that surprised me and delighted me and was an exuberant display of what I valued. Every day of the 10 years I’ve lived in Florida, I knew this place was not it. This knowledge always prevented me from committing to any long-term ventures. Over the years, I traveled and considered many other locations that would have been a much better fit with my character, but I never made the leap.
Then last summer on my visit to Nepal, I got a glimpse of my dream home nestled in the valleys below the Himalayan peaks. Nepal was like a shock wave and a healing elixir all at once. It was a chaos and a calm I intrinsically understood and I imagine, very close to the kind I would find in India, the one place I’d been passionately wanting to study and live in for sometime. Kathmandu became my city of love and yet, I STILL came back to Florida. Instead, I committed myself to living in Florida for at least another year, to teach and help build a new Ashtanga Yoga community. I threw myself into all the daily to-dos of a typical life but would secretly rebel against them just as quick. I was signing contracts that I really wanted to tear up. Driving a car and talking on a cell phone I no longer wanted and sought refuge from a landscape of rampant commercialism whenever possible. I had lost my taste for this American life. I gave myself a few good-natured pep talks but they all seemingly failed. Finally, I got real with myself: why was I doing this? I could not suppress these yearnings any longer. The glimpse of home was in my memory, grinding down my wall of fear everyday. Everything in my being was telling me to get my ass back on a plane and head east for something wholly different. I had been home and I knew it.
I initially told myself I would try to live six months in the U.S. and six months in Asia and why that may not be out of the question in the future, when I investigated that line of thinking more closely, I couldn’t find a compelling reason to come back for six months each year. I saw it as a formula that still had a tablespoon of fear in it. If I was going to go (as least for the immediate future) I had to go all the way in. And if my heart suddenly felt a deep a yearning to live in my own country once again, then I would do so. I knew that the point was to surrender to the call of home and not to compromise, bargain or mutate it to make it more palatable.
Well before my visit to Nepal last year I had been wrestling pretty consistently with a feeling of entrapment. This feeling constantly fed a lingering sensation that I was not living in a place that inspired me to live my greater potential and it was driving me nuts. But to actually acknowledge and live what I felt that potential was, meant shedding so much of myself (including my environment) I wondered if I would even recognize myself afterwards. So I was running. Running by rationalizing with the feeling instead of surrendering to the most expansive call. After all, it was less scary to work with the fractured self I knew instead of jumping heart first into the unknown.
At first it may seem strange that a girl who was raised in family who relocated every 2-3 years throughout her youth (Germany, Ohio, Washington, Sicily, Hawaii, Japan, Vermont) and had learned to travel abroad alone with confidence would even bat an eye at establishing a new home. But I had gone from being a deeply insecure 19 year old girl to unearthing the performer, therapist and yogi I am today on Floridian soil. And whether I wanted to admit it or not, I was attached to this hot, humid, swampy, peninsula of sand. It was the one place in my life I had lived the longest. The place that served as backdrop to my twenties. The place my parents and sister lived. I had a lot of growth and a lot of memories here. I was dumbfounded by the thought of beginning to manifest a life in such a brilliant new context. And yet, my spirit was very clearly telling me that this was what I was destined to do. It was just a matter of time. While sitting in meditation one day last spring, I heard a voice within me loudly say, “You came back to say goodbye.” THAT folks, was the voice of wisdom. THAT was the voice of truth. In that moment, I knew why I had come to Orlando. I’d come back to say goodbye to a fractured self, to Florida and to the personal limits I had existed within up until now.
On the day that I told the studio owner I would be moving to Asia, I realized that I was not just moving on from a one year commitment but a way of life and belief system that had been in operation for at least ten years and I FELT the reverberation. Right after that phone conversation, I was the Kali Yuga personified. There was a several week period where I felt my insides totally rupture and my sense of foundation unreservedly absent. I was in a fetal position for days, crying and crying, floating in an abyss of darkness. I woke up everyday nauseated and could barely eat. I could barely speak and if I did, it was a pre-programmed version of myself, because “I” was gone. Truly. My ego was trying to catch-up to the fact that there was a massive shift in my infrastructure taking place. I had taken an action that was completely antagonistic to my previous wiring. The old me would have not left Orlando. She would have been planning new projects and teaching commitments and have set up some sort of temporary life here for several years. She would have been resigned to being comfortably, uncomfortable. And suddenly, I was doing the opposite. This was a distinct personal death. That time, especially the first week after giving notice, was horrific but it was my right of passage. It was like walking through The Valley of Shadow of Death with only a compass fashioned out of love to guide me through. That was the week of my quantum leap.
It seems true that after the darkest moments come the most glorious light and this experience has been no different. Where I was before, at a loss for savvy ideas of how to relocate, build and sustain a life abroad, suddenly people, resources and a flux of ideas abound. Right now, I’m amidst sorting through it all and making a plan. I’m taking all my belongings and selling, storing or giving them away. I leave Orlando in late December and head back to Jacksonville to live with my family and meet up with a best friend who has decided to collaborate on this next phase with me, which has been an unexpected and joyous development. The coming months will be filled with projects all aimed at living and studying in Asia. In 2011, Operation Move Sati To Asia officially begins and I have the memory of home to propel me forward. I cannot imagine doing anything else.
IN CONCLUSION
Even though this particular leap was to a place, it could just as well have been to a person. Either way, there is something glorious in how embodied forms can illuminate a light that damn near blinds us. A light that calls upon us to pull out our swords and slice through our pretenses. You may have to abandon all you thought you were for the dream of who you could become. And in moments of quiet, you’ll hear that subterranean truth. All you have to lose is everything that barricaded your heart and fogged up your vision. All you have to let go of is your attachment to being homeless.
Recently, one of my students gave me the book and CD set, Flow of Grace by Krishna Das. The CD is the chant, the Hanuman Chalisa and the book tells the story of the deity, Hanuman and his role in Hindu mythology. In the Hindu epic, The Ramayana, Hanuman, The great monkey god leaped over an ocean 800 miles in distance to reach Sita who was being held captive. He made the leap to find her whereabouts and to deliver a message to her from her husband Ram, who was God incarnate. Hanuman was the only one who dared make such a leap and he did it out of pure love and devotion to Ram. I read the story several times before I went to bed at night and realized that Hanuman was a perfect reflection of the role I am enacting right now. That is why this gift had fallen into my hands.
In truth, I am Sita. I need to be saved. I am Ram. I am ready to save. But perhaps most appropriately at this moment, I am Hanuman, the servant who out of total devotion to love, makes a leap over a divide that no one thought he could make. A leap that would help God build a bridge to his love. A bridge to a new life. A bridge home.
Written by Shannon "Sati" Chmelar
