From Now to Now

I was spindly, wild and always hunting for that place in nature where no one could find me. Except, of course, the toadstool fairies and elves I loved hiding with. Ducking under the bushes in the backyard, I crawled into a semi-clearing around an old tree stump. My toadstool.

Here I conversed with that world no one else seemed interested in. The translucent other side. The realm where loud words did not have to fall out of my mouth. I was simply and fully understood.

Here even smells were translucent. Sun-warmed grass, breeze-blown thicket leaves, and tangy white clover that hosted bees and satisfied my need to snack. Absorbed for hours, I tended my heart by holding therapy sessions with my invisible friends.

“Now close your eyes and open your mouth” my sister cooed into my ear. Obedient little thing that I was, it took a moment to realize she put dried dog poop in my mouth. Another day, she knocked me down and held a garter snake to my arm until it bit me.

Life with Wendy was not safe. Her undiagnosed bipolar disorder made her behavior a mystery to those late 50’s doctors and psychiatrists. While my parents blamed and argued, no one ever seemed to wonder what might be happening to me. Clearly it was my job to arrive into an adult world unscathed. I would have to teach myself. 

My first real breakthrough came at around age 10. Because Wendy and I always shared a room, she could delight in verbal torture. She knew my triggers', and relished using them. Once she was in my head, her voice became another form of torture. Getting rid of that voice became my goal. To do this, I needed to get really good at turning off my mind.

By the time I was twelve, I found that sitting in the sun on a rock, especially a rock in a stream, would bathe my brain with blissful non-thinking moments. I would revel in my now-to-now existence. The bliss would linger like heat in the wax of a melting candle.

By fourteen I had discovered a book called “Masters of The Far East.” Descriptions of wise old men traversing the Himalayan mountains in search of enlightenment captured my fascination. I read “Siddhartha.” I read “Autobiography of a Yogi.” I read “Be Here Now.”

That summer I spent several days on a pine fragrant mountain with friends of my Mom’s in Northern California. The double-wide trailer was meant to suffice as a home until a house could be built. I was sharing a bedroom with their 12-year-old foster daughter.

Suddenly I was awake in the middle of the night. At the foot of my bed stood a little man dressed in white cotton. He had slicked-back dark hair and brown skin. His stare burned into my eyes. I felt paralyzed in time. Visceral. Not a dream. Not hallucination.

The image seared into me like a shape on a photo negative. Like a tattoo on skin. A memory impaled and embraced with both confusion and wonder. Part of me now.

I don't remember telling anyone. I long since learned that translucent friends and middle-of-the-night manifestations were not going to be a welcomed conversation. I harbored my heart within art and music. I taught myself to play the guitar and learned how to oil paint.

My mother Barbara was now divorced and supporting three kids alone on a lowly teacher’s salary. Equal pay for women still caused looks of consternation on the faces of men in the 70’s. Wendy’s behaviors grew more aggressive. 

Once I had friends over. While we were chatting, Wendy began to cackle like an old crone. She pointed to a shadow moving across the ceiling. My friends freaked out. The next day at school while in the bathroom, I heard kids whispering about me being a witch. 

I used tears to get Wendy to stop fighting with my mom. She would wail and scream at her saying; “why don’t you hit me then?” My poor mom. She was never willing to accommodate the demand. She had no placement options. Wendy didn't qualify for foster care, but she did like using her carefully sharpened fingernails as weapons. She was also short, petite, had huge breasts and an innocent, pretty face.

At the first sign of a serious boyfriend and at the age of 17, my mom allowed Wendy to get married. I was free. It never occurred to me that sharing a small bedroom with a real-life Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde would cause undetectable rips in the weave of my personal tapestry. My life had formed patterns. I fell blindly into the deep water of living with repressed trauma. I also retained my hard-earned ability to flip that off switch in my mind. 

This came in handy when I overwhelmed myself with a dysfunctional husband, two small boys and a job living in a residential treatment home for emotionally challenged teenagers. Looking back I seemed to need to fill a void when I was not experiencing uncommon amounts of stress. My mom had died suddenly in a car wreck, so I no longer had a wise person around me willing to help guide my life. 

By then I knew I needed that “no mind time.” I took on a serious daily meditation practice called the Path of Light and Sound, or Surat Shabd Yoga. I would tune into the high-pitched eeeeeeee sound while plugging my ears and hold my attention on the rhythmic beating of my heart. My mind melts. My body relaxes. My soul feels soothed.

Eddy had a knack for getting head injuries. He also had five loud bossy sisters and a brother who lost their mom at an early age. Chaos was his friend. A perfect recipe for the ongoing generation of stress. A match made in heaven. We would help heal as many damaged children as we could. So of course it made sense to move into an off-the-grid community that took in abandoned and abused children. A true no-brainer.

Celebrations was a community run by two idealistic people who could not have children of their own. Sunow was a Vietnam vet with PTSD devoted to his fragile wife who spent most of her youth bedridden. She developed a theory about unconditional love as a cure for anything behaviorally challenging. They worked with the local children's services to take kids no one else would tolerate. Perfect. Another genuine stress manufacturing overwhelm made in heaven.

Spirit was unflappable. She held “healing circles” to help kids process emotions. Ed and I had taken in a girl named Barbie who was kept in a cardboard box on top of her parent's refrigerator until she was almost four. Skeleton-thin and completely non-verbal, Barbie would wisp through the house seeking butter to smear and lick off her fingers.

When we visited Sunow and Spirit’s community, Barbie would sit by the fireplace, sifting through the ashes. She would roll hot coals in her palm without getting burned. She would coo into the soft glow, fascinated for hours at a time.

Spirit referred to her bedridden childhood as a “Kundalini awakening.” She said the energy from this is what helped her heal from the disease that kept her bedridden as a child. I had no idea what she was referring to. What I did know is that she never lost her cool, and she was remarkably consistent about expressing love and support to anyone and everyone. 

By the time we moved onto the mountain and into their community, they had at least 10 to 15 kids at any given time. My son Dylan was eight, Lucas was 10 and a half, and Jesse was just two. We set up a small trailer on the land and built a lean-to living room onto it. We became volunteers. We went on welfare. Ed could not find work and eventually stopped looking.

Living on the mountain was both a dream come true and my worst nightmare. I reveled in the scents and sights of nature. I spent every morning I could on a stump in the sun above the pond, swaying. I got the idea from a pair of bears that would appear at the far end of the water when the sun came out in the early mornings. They spread their front paws wide, standing on their hind legs, rocking back and forth as though they were worshiping the sun. 

The mountain was rumored to be dense with minerals, perhaps even gold. It was laden with greenish serpentine shale and rocks laced with lines of white crystal. It had been home to the indigenous peoples of the Redwood and Fir forests.

Ed and I separated. He got his own little trailer and started wooing other community members. I began to have what I could only call “electrical issues.” It was as though my nervous system was malfunctioning. Energy would become activated and I would find myself spinning in circles until I hit a wall, or having violent spasms that jerked my body back and forth, causing me to fall.

At one point, the energy would literally move me into yoga positions I could never have accomplished on my own. Full back arches where my hands could touch the ground.

My sons were terrified. It got worse when we had lightning storms.

Spirit started calling these episodes my “Kundalini awakening.” I began to research the phenomenon. I read the accounts of Gopi Krisna. I read about the work of Osho. I read “Autobiography of a Yogi.” For an entire year my body jerked every minute or two, an electric current shooting up my spine. It was exhausting. People would stare.

I met Michael through an ad. He was a Kundalini teacher who had trained in the turban and white cotton wearing community founded by Yogi Bhajan and his group known as 3HO. “Healthy, Holy, Happy.” Sounded good to me.

I was still having “episodes.” I needed help cooling down my electrical system so I could function as a parent and a provider. Michael said his new teacher, Gurunath, could help me. I went with him to an event he sponsored in a Dojo in Menlo Park, California. 

I sat in a semicircle with the group, trying not to distract others with my jerking problem. Gurunath was a small man from Maharashtra, India. He had slicked back dark hair streaked with gray. He wore white cotton. He looked over at me with his piercing dark eyes. He waved his hand in my direction. The jerking stopped immediately. Guru literally means teacher.

Michael arranged for me to get an initiation from him called Kriya (breath action) Yoga (union). By practicing the exercises one would come to a realization of greater consciousness. According to Gurunath, pulling your breath up and down the length of your spine was akin to an internal shower. Piercing each energy center, or “chakra” as he called them, would give your mental and emotional body a regular “tune up.” What did I have to lose?

My daily routine completely stabilized my body and I was able to rejoin life as a normal person. Sitting within the bliss of “no mind” as he called it, I was able to access the energy I needed to attempt a meaningful career teaching earth-building techniques to environmental activists. The daily meditation practice became my identity. I would sit in empty-minded no thought as often as I could. I called it “going from now, to now.”

Wendy finally retired into a nursing home. She spent most of her life heavily medicated. Her hair has fallen out, and she has lost all of her teeth. She uses a wheelchair, and spends much of her time bragging about her son. 

I started reading up on how atoms behave. Not only are they always vibrating, but scientists say they are always in pairs, only the second one is in a different universe. They are also reporting that consciousness is a wave that permeates our known reality and that it is not something that is within an individual. All animals are also conscious and apparently, so are plants.  

Plants recalibrate their own chemical balance in order to repel diseases and other harms. They broadcast the chemical discovery to the neighborhood around them, so other plants can also protect themselves. Plants can call out to a specific variety of wasps whose larvae will develop into a predator-eating ally. So. Yeah. They must have consciousness.

The translucent soup of a developing larvae can give birth to miracles like butterflies. The silent recalibration of plants reminded me of my invisible friends in the bushes. Long hours in plant therapy saved my emotional childhood. Long hours in silent meditation where loud words do not have to fall out of my mouth, saved my adulthood. 

I made up a joke about the whole process. My way of explaining to myself what I learned over the years of searching, finding then living within the world I had found. It goes like this;

Why did the Yogi cross the road? 

Answer; to make you think there was another side.