Purging Memories

Intimacy...It's such a deep and interesting topic to me. For the past few years, my teacher has been gently demonstrating for me and nurturing in me the qualities of emotional, mental, and spiritual intimacy, teaching me that trust is about me and God, not about another's lack of ability to hurt me, and always offering me the opportunity to go a step beyond my comfort zone in our communications with one another to create a deeper bond.

So many times I have pushed my teacher away emotionally, terrified of his power to hurt me, afraid of the love and joy I experience in our relationship, paralyzed by the fear that the rug could be pulled out from under me, that he could crush me, obliterate me beyond repair. In the form of true mastery, whenever I closed my heart in fear, he opened his heart even further, standing steadfast in a state of love, showing me the very vulnerability in himself that terrified me to know in myself. I learned that it is that very vulnerability that is the secret of his strength.

I used to cry and ask him, "Joey, how can you live in the world with that vulnerability? I don't understand..."

"What is the alternative?" he would always respond, and suddenly, at least for a moment, it would all make sense to me. The choice is to live as love, open, expanded, vulnerable, or live not as love, but rather in fear, closed, contracted, afraid of being hurt, so never being all the way in or all the way out, but riding in that safe zone of ordinariness, of comfort, of stagnation, of mediocrity. Oh yes, for a moment, I could see very clearly that the choice to stand in the world with one's heart exposed was the only choice I wanted to make.

And yet I didn't know how to make that choice for myself. I didn't know how to move past fear and the harsh lessons that life has brought me that taught me the opposite - that safety lies behind locked doors, a closed heart, and a very small life. Maybe that life was not fun or engaging or passionate, but it seemed safe.

Only not really, because locks get forced, closed hearts are brittle and break easily, and a small life offers no room for expansion. But never mind all that! Details, details!

I remember the moment when I first experienced great strength in vulnerability, the first time I truly stood in love. I was so amazed!

The week before this experience, I had sent my teacher an email that was harsher than I meant for it to be. I meant to get his attention, but I truly did not mean to hurt him. Looking back I can see clearly that it was another attempt to push him away, to make him abandon me so I could be right about my view of the world.

I sent him an unkind letter, and in return he apologized to me. There was also a lot of yelling and tears and discussion, but in the end he only wanted to know what he had done to hurt me that I would lash out at him in that way so he could make sure it did not happen again. He had done nothing wrong, but in the midst of his own pain, he stepped out further into vulnerability with me, even though I had just cut him open.

We were together in person a week or so later when he came to KC to give an advanced workshop. It was in that workshop that I finally experienced true vulnerability. I couldn't hold it for long at first, but I got a taste of it. He had asked me to look within and contemplate why I was so afraid of love. When I looked straight on at those reasons, they didn't stand up. They were shadows. From there I was able to experience a taste of what love really is, the strength and power of love. I found out that love is not a wilting flower, but a mountain of rock, or a great fire.

Fast forward a year and some change. There is another level to intimacy that my fear of has been holding me back from where I want, need, desire, wish to go spiritually. Although I have made great strides in many ways, I am still just beginning to make peace with myself as a physical being, a spirit with a body.

When I met my teacher, one of the first things he said was, "Get back in your body! I will not work with you if you leave the body. Make of your body a temple, a glorious place for the light to come here. Do not go out there looking for the light. Make this body a wonderful place to be. Be light here."

That changed my life, and also was not an easy request for me to comply with. My habit of leaving the body was as old as I am in this incarnation. Joey and Sai Maa have both worked tirelessly to serve me in repairing my connection to the body, strengthening my root and sacral chakras, burning off karmas held there. They have done soooo much for me, and Joey has been there to guide me through the jungles of fear more times than I can count.

And now I have come to the place where I must deal with and heal the most delicate aspects of my humanity, the time when action is required. I have forgiven, but the body still remembers abuse and violation, and action brings that to the surface.

This is nothing new, of course. This is really not different than my freak outs about weight and body image when I was told to report my measurements in Kung Fu. It is all related. Or when I was 27 and first began to deal consciously with memories of sexual abuse. In physical activities, I would have physical memories that would drop me wherever I was, the pain of violation shooting through the body. Sometimes I would vomit as the memories purged themselves and coursed through me.

When I was 27, I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't know how to handle the memories, so I wrote in my journals and I stuffed back down whatever didn't fit or wasn't fully released there. In a matter of months I was sitting across the desk from my gynecologist who was telling me I had cancer...a huge mass on my right ovary, which he compared to a citrus fruit, a whole band of masses in my right breast...he cried as he spoke. He had just lost a 27 year old patient to breast cancer, and felt he had failed her somehow, and now here I was, whose babies he delivered so recently.

Orphans, I could hear bouncing in my head, mother died of cancer...such a shame...so young...don't know why these things happen...three babies...so much to live for...why???

I sat smiling at him, as if I didn't understand his words, even though I understood perfectly.

He suggested further testing. "Is it going to change what you told me?" I asked, smiling.
"No," he responded, "unfortunately it's not."
"Then why bother?" I asked, smiling. "Now what?"
"Surgery. Tomorrow. As soon as possible. We have to get that out of there."
"No, not tomorrow. Not until after my birthday in 3 months. I have to turn 28 first. Before that, I die. Don't ask me how I know. I just know." I suddenly dropped the smile. He believed me without question, and scheduled surgery for the day after my birthday.

I had joked to my girlfriend when she turned 28, and was again older than me for a few months, that I would just not turn 28 to avoid being as old as she. Normally tough as nails and as sassy as they come, she surprised me when big crocodile tears began to pop out of her blue eyes. "Don't say that," she said. My stomach moved to my throat, because on some level we both felt the truth in what I said. Then I went to the doctor a few months later and- well, now my head was spinning with the joke I had made so flippantly.  

Clearly I lived, as it has been just over a decade. I think I lived. Sometimes I wonder if I might be imagining this life...I don't know if I could imagine for myself such an amazing life though, so I think it must be real, such as human life is, anyway.

But my point is that as I move more fully into this integration of myself as human, undeniably with a body, there is still some fear and reservation, though much smaller than I ever dared to hope or imagine it could be. I don't know what Pandora may still have in her box for me. Have I done my work? Can I finish healing? Do I deserve to be whole, shameless, fearless?

Can I begin to see this body as holy, divine, as an expression of God itself?
Can I feel beautiful? Safe? Nurtured? Ecstatically vulnerable?
Am I strong enough to befriend this body fully, to trust it?
Am I willing to let go of what I think I know?

I hope so. The stakes are high.