The Closing Chapter.

This is the last of the "Texas times" blog.

Texas, thank you for making me stronger through testing every fiber of my being.
People of Texas, thank you for being kind, warm, open minded, accepting and deeply unpretentious.
San Antonio: thank you for Yoga Yoga teacher training. It has given me a purpose and a safe place when nothing else was certain and when darkness surrounded me, you have given me light. The people I met are forever became intertwined in the fabric of my life. The biggest gift that family given me is the joy of seeing those people grow, break down and light up and help each other know how HUMAN we all are. For allowing safety, love and sense of belonging to be present in our group every class. For breaking down fears and encouraging our spirits to grow. For giving me a glimpse of what is to come. For giving me faith.

Texas, thank you for the road trip my dad and I took on the way back to California. It is the single most important life event between my father and I, where we have had a chance to connect, to fight, to reconnect again and experience the joy of spending time together and getting to know each other closer then ever before. With my car literally filled up to the roof, we both were crammed into a small space for about 7 days. I am eternally grateful for that experience of forced physical and emotional closeness that helped us both realize just how important we are to each other, how bad we want to know one another and what a gift that is to have an opportunity to share experiences, thoughts, feelings, excitement and concerns and not to be afraid of judgement.

I am back in San Diego now. Things to face ahead are challenging to put it mildly. Upon return i have already managed to sabotage something so incredibly dear to me. I will once again try to rebuild what i have destroyed. I am not sure it will work this time. I am not giving up though. Love is strong. I have to hope. I have to...

I feel that this is a critical time. For everything. Today is the first day of my entire life.

I love deeply. I made mistakes. I am guilty. I love deeply, one love.

September 30, 2012

A few words today.

Today at my Yoga training all of us were going through a sequence of Suria Namaskara (sun salutations). Libby, the teacher opened a class with a collective “Ohm” that resonated through my chest at first and then as more people joined in, I could feel the waves of sound propagating through my entire core. Stretching all the way from my toes to the top of my being. The sequence was not hard, and repetitive with deepening of each posture, adjusting and listening to the body. I was going into Adho Mukha Svanasana (down ward facing dog) when my mind said that I was trying too hard…that I wasn’t doing yoga, that I was in fact trying to be perfect at my asana( pose). This was not the first conscious realization of me “trying for perfection”, but I was a heartfelt one. I stopped. I stopped trying and surrendered into my breath. And it took me further, I realized that it is what I do, even though not admitting. I strive for perfection and there is tremendous pressure that I put on myself and inevitably fail. Not because striving, because of trying NOT to be human. The essence of perfection is in NEVER making a mistake, well, that is something that is unachievable in a human world, in human form. Why? Why do I expect that of myself? Stop. I would like the relief of ALLOWING myself mistakes. Brene Brown “The Gift of Imperfection”. I better finish this book. It talks about exactly that. Achieving wholeheartedness, happiness and self-acceptance through knowledge and acceptance that NO ONE is perfect. Thank Gods. Thank you Libby for that back bend today, back bends are heart openers. It put into perspective what I knew about myself, but didn’t feel it through enough to act on it. Stop trying “Perfection” and try “great job for today” and try “happy”. That’s quite the challenge for me.

At the end of the practice when we went into savasana I imagined my grandfather kneeling behind me and closing my eyes with his hands, big, firm, kind, warm hands. Then I imagined him hugging me really close, and me hugging him back and leaning my head on his shoulder. I felt so home. When I came out of meditation, and Libby asked us to “Namaste” to each other, I suddenly felt a tear coming on. It was not like the flood that I felt before, just from mere helplessness. It was a tear from the very depth. It was the one from the cracks. Like when a tree leaks sap and it slowly runs down to the roots. I sat on my mat for quite a few minutes after. I didn’t want to let go of “the safe place” I created for myself. I soaked in the last of the meditation and my grandfathers’ presence. I rose off the floor and faced the day.

When they were alive

 November 4^th, 2012

I no longer wish to be faster than I am, to conform to the pace that is set by America’s inability to stand still and absorb and then digest things around.

I feel still…I feel myself going deeper inside my soul, introverting, like descending into a cave miles into the darkness.

Perhaps for me to become aware of the world surrounding me, there is a large need in becoming aware of myself, my internal world. From dark into the light. Takes time…I have time.

The only time now I smile from my heart is when I look at Pulya and Apis..

Yesterday at Yoga, I felt like it was my first class. During meditation I was squeezing my thighs so hard and grinding my teeth

A really bad day...a really negative moment...but it happened and i am not taking it back...its learning how to be true to yourself

 June 15^th 2013

I think that my mom with all the love and support she has given me when I was growing up, made a mistake in raising me. She made me believe that everyone around is like her. Kind, gentle, supportive. She also made me believe that she would always be there for me. Unchangeable, like an emotional memory foam mattress.  The truth is that none of it is valid. The truth is that she couldn’t be there for me. Mentally, physically, emotionally at the time. This separation of what I learned and what I felt lead me to a derailed conclusion that I should look for support in other relationships, no matter what the cost to me. I feel and felt incomplete because I couldn’t and can’t find support from my biological family. The only person that was there for me all the time was my grandmother, up until recently.

Alone feels alone. Up until this morning I had this dream that I was going to move back to San Diego, to my father’s house and even thought we have never had a solid relationship, I was hopeful that we will build it and start from scratch and my presence will help him and me. Him to know me better and communicate with me and see who I am. And me, to come to a “safe” place and just relax for a second. Something that has been unavailable to me constantly, except for when practice.

                The truth for me right now is that there is no one who will complete my loneliness, relieve my struggle. No one I can share the difficulties of my life with and help them with theirs. That is a fact that I feel. I also feel like a fake. I am a yoga teacher and a yoga student. What the philosophy teaches you is that all is one and one is all, and that we are all connected. I feel the opposite right now. I feel so disconnected from everyone and everything I know that my chest hurts, physically. I must still be in tune thought with my body, as the physical manifestation of my emotional state is clear.

I don’t want to go back to my father’s house. My understanding of the world and the way people help each other is so different from his. It may be wrong, and he may be right in his approach where everything must and is planned and there is no depth to the constant chatter around him. But I have no energy, nor enough conviction to help him realize anything, nor be a burden on his home life. It feels like that. Like I am an inconvenience, creating problem for him and his manicured life. There are boulders of unresolved pain, fear, anger, frustration all around, but he chooses to ignore them and like a blind horse…charge forward to corporate victories.

My mom is wrong. She believed and believes that people are good. I believed that until this morning. I lost faith. I no longer believe that. I no longer want to believe that. Because the heartbreak is endless and the scars are no longer healing. They just get opened up again and rubbed with some salt.

I don’t want to love today.

I don’t want to love anyone or anything human. Animals are excluded, because they have no malicious intent in them.

I take full responsibility for my pain and the pain I caused others. I probably deserve this. I don’t believe in better, I don’t want to eat, I don’t want to sustain myself. I don’t want anything. I don’t care if the pain stops either. I don’t care about music, about art, about yoga, about love, about drive, about neuroscience, about family. I wanted all of this before. I am a devoted unbeliever now. Not liberating at all. Not happy. Just a fist squeezing my heart inside my ribcage.

 I know people have it worse, I know I am weak, I am ashamed of being weak and maybe I just don’t deserve anything, any life, Including my own. I am weak now. I now I am not supposed to say that. Because Mahatma Gandhi said “be positive in your thoughts, because they become your words, be positive in your words because they become your actions, be positive in your actions because they become your habits, and be positive in your habits because they become your destiny…”

I need to erase this passage, and move up…that is the only way. I am a fighter if I am nothing else. Just get in a habit of fighting alone as there is no one alongside with you now.

Graduation

May 2^nd 2013

I thought nothing has changed. I stepped out of my spiritual graduation with a sense that I was an imposter. In a room full of freshly graduated Yogi’s I was the one who has not moved a centimeter from the time I started 8 month ago to now… A beautiful, breezy San Antonio day, where spring just began unraveling all the wonders of a fresh season with aromas of youth, energy and vitality.

I felt saddened. I was back in a same spot emotionally, intellectually even as when I began. I was fighting off disappointment with a realization that I did in fact finish something great, but there was no feeling  of any feasible depth associated with it…well, no feeling at all….Huh, I thought. Maybe this was my journey, to come full circle, not advance in an expanding spiral…I continued sharing the joy of my friends who have come to such a blossom, each and every one of them. I gave a speech on power within me, that I have discovered, and when I did, it was like a divine intervention, I felt like I was floating. I felt strong, free, and liberated, but when the ceremony was over I felt lost. Alone, confused by the same trail of thoughts, same patterns.

And I decided to wait.

And then. I transformed.

Sometime in the dark of Texas.

         So you make a grand mistake…the one that you can’t erase no matter how hard you may try, nor can you forget, nor can you redeem yourself. You come to a crossroad, again, and it is starring you in the face, In a form of a flash of memory, or a smell or a scene In a daily life. You realize that your choices are to forgive yourself, but that is also not coming easy and you may never, or you just burry the guilt deep inside and try to do as much yoga as you can to mask the self-mutilating stream of shame driven thoughts. That’s how life is for me. Some days are great and I am miss “Zen” spreading the word of wisdom about how “thy shall love thyself” and “internalize peace”, “breathe”, read lots of wisdom quotes to find the one that will get me through the next 24 hours.

I went through yoga teacher training and it was a therapy group. I needed so badly to catch up. To have this craft under my belt (it sound ridiculous when I write it, because Yoga is life and the way of life, so my “possession” of this “craft” is quite improbable in this lifetime), to one up someone who hurt me. I came out of the teacher training better equipped to numb up my OWN pain. I was looking for help when I entered the doors of the studio. It sounds so weak to me. Looking for help. I remember begging my boyfriend at the time to “Help me”, to “feel sorry for me”. How shameful, how weak, how “everything I don’t want to be”, how “everything I am not”.

I don’t know my lesson in this “grand mistake”. I don’t see the light right now. I only see a monstrous shadow following me around and reminding me of how I FAILED to be brave, how I FAILED to live up to the expectations I had for this event. How I Failed me. And the one I didn’t have.

I was looking in the mirror yesterday in my bathroom and remembered the doctor saying, “ you will never regret it if you have it”. He was right . There is NOTHING to be done any more about this. NOTHING…so I will just keep stepping into the dark and pulling myself out with my practice, books, daring things and a hope that I will have a chance for another chance.

The truth is I hollowed myself out when I had the life inside. It was My choice. My Pro choice. And it kills my soul every single day. It has been almost two years and the pain has not gotten any less. I think the only way I can be whole again is to have a baby. I wish I could blame someone else, like him. He didn’t want it, he didn’t tell me to stop, he didn’t go to the hospital with me. He..he…he….But it was me…me …ME who went and had an a…….