Jamaican Queen

The Queen and her children went on vacation to Jamaica, courtesy of the King, who arrived later. How the Queen loves to travel, get outside her realm, experience something new and different, even though the KFCs and Pizza Huts have spread their tentacles even to the Caribbean. How courageous was the Queen so many said, to manage alone her children through airport security checks, immigration and feeding times all throughout. She loved escaping the harsh, dry climate of the mountain top and revel in the moisture abundant and tropical green scenery everywhere. How she loved having fun with her children and how she loved spending time with the King……

Although she wasn’t very happy about the speeding ticket she got when she returned to the castle.



Jamaica is a beautiful place. I like the people and culture. People are happy here, and Bob Marley’s image, music and presence seems to float over the place like a loving, happy father. I’d love to see and learn more and return. Even do give a yoga and storytelling/writing retreat!

I love the Caribbean, this being my second time here. Like the U.S. Virgin Islands, the breeze in Jamaica is sweet and the turquoise waters softened by salt that supports you as you float oblivious to the world and just stare at the blue sky and white clouds above. I love the humidity and the oxygen and the pressure here -- huge shift from the harsh vata-aggravating climate of Colorado. This is good for my health and my energy. I realize that is probably why I like Bikram yoga so much, the humidity; it holds your body; it cleanses it.

The all-inclusive resort we are at is just that. The Lady Hamilton Grand Palladium, Spanish-owned and rushed to finish. This new place is cracking at the plaster, tiles coming up, but the people are super nice, the food sumptuous. They hand you alcoholic drinks at check-in, and from the boisterous voices of Eastern-European sounding men at the swim up bar that opens at 10 a.m., the drinks don’t seem to stop. I haven’t drank alcohol in a long while, so I thought, it’s vacation! But I imbibed modestly, except for one night. I remember too well the affects of this particular poisoning. I feel so much better without it. Same thing with the food. This incredible abundance of decadence, but one has to remember one’s own power of choice. I choose not to be a pig, gorge on everything. And ultimately feel horrible afterwards! I marveled instead at the fresh fruit and steamed fish. But I have to admit there was so much to try - i loved Jamaican bammy bread and Italian gnocchi - I did start in on the heavier carb stuff and you just couldn’t resist the little desserts!

The kids sure loved it and I was happy to see them happy. Even though when my friend who treated us to all this fun was there for a few days, and I relished in talking to an adult about interesting array of subjects, he left and I was back to the empty fourth chair at meal times. That loneliness of being a single mother. I have to catch myself always with my son, not making him like a parent, talking to him about history and economics, and he tells me how Opa is always telling him about space people coming. That too! I said.

As my daughter stood up from the table at lunch one day I imagined Frank here with us at the table. How would his presence affect us? Are suicides really condemned to stay nearby invisible and assist the loved ones they abandoned and wounded so much? Are their silent presences to be felt to steady you in times of great overwhelm, loneliness and grief? What would it be like to have him here? On a family trip? What would my daugher be like to have her father in her life? Something she has never known? What would it be like for her to have a male presence in her life? A father? For my son? A man like him.

There is a Roman theme about this place, large Doric columns everywhere, if not completed beyond any further aesthetic quality rather than to keep costs low. The decadence is there, yet it seems this resort, opened not to long ago, was built at the tail end of the last gasps of capitalism. As if the credit ran out and they had to cut corners just to get the place open. But my kids love it. Just to swim, eat, do nothing, and watch a lot of TV in the room. (since we don’t have TV at home.) They’d be just as happy in a Comfort Inn in Westminster, Colorado. But we are in Jamaica, and it’s good for them to see places outside the U.S. And if anything they have had geography and history lessons hammered into them and even my daughter knows Jamaica is in the Caribbean now.

I re-read Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place on the plane and by the poolside. Such an amazing author. Such an amazing voice. Her brazen scolding of colonialism, and how she admits not much changed after emancipation. Sure, here the blacks serve the whites in a gluttonous stream. I love how Kincaid implored the rebuilding of Antigua’s library, which was destroyed in an earthquake and never rebuilt. How important education is - literary and artistic exploration and encouragement. How that is society, culture, humanity. Rather than decline or the reclining class lounging in artificial pools when the real prize of nature is but a few feet away at the beach. But then I stopped being so critical and enjoyed myself. I started thinking that this place could be converted into and make a great commune and education center and have a yoga storytelling retreat.

I went to the resort’s morning stretch class and ended up teaching it with yoga. There was a couple from Philadelphia I helped with their back pain, and even the bow-legged employee Smiley I gave exercises to help his condition. I miss teaching adult yoga. Perhaps I will return one day. Grow Medical Marijuana in the basement of my father’s house and offer other herbs and yoga therapy. It might make the right combination.

In Jamaica I could just rest and let go. Floating around in the Caribbean waters, I found that staying focused on the present and letting go of thoughts, and by gaining awareness of old patterns, stories, that no longer serve me I get some distance from the thoughts and patterns, which allows a certain energy to be released, a certain spell to be broken. The traumas and grief of the past are finally gone, a story, a house, let go. Like the house the old man hauled around in the movie UP, which we watched on the plane.

How that old attachment really makes things difficult, hold you down. They really are grooves in the koshas, your layers of being. You have to lift them out of the layers, smooth out the surface again, float around in the Caribbean water and feel your body supported, free, safe. There is a turning point, a new story all together. Like the sun gaining length again after the winter solstice. The shift. Re-patterning really takes hold. The old yearbooks of military history and authority and sorrow have faded. There is peace. You are rooted in being. Grounded in a feeling of peace and safety. You don’t have to be or feel unhappy anymore. You don’t have to be confused or upset. You don’t have to act out the rage that your mother had inside her, the frustration, the powerlessness, the grief and fear. You get to feel at rest, at peace, in balance and aware and it feels great. And happy. I was happy, floating around in the Caribbean sea in Jamaica. And although I knew the moment would pass and I'd be back home eventually facing difficulties and fears, I felt a shift in attitude. Something good and beautiful and loving is going to happen in life, regardless of everything else. Regardless of any old tragedy.

What do you do with the memory of the tragedy? You create art out of it.

I think of my grandmother, whose husband starved to death in a forced Mitzubishi tin mine outside of Tokyo during World War II. How my grandmother survived concentration camps and the soul-destroying hells of war with children. How those scars on the children and mother and family run deep. Generations deep. For I am her all over again, a widow with children.

I see this abundance of food at the resort, the people at my service. I think of my father, as a little boy separated from his mother. My Oma, not knowing whether he is dead or alive for two years. My father, eating snails from the river that was also the latrine to survive. Eating snakes and burying dead old men.

The grief is in the body. It is in the heart. Little by little you can coax them out, just like the mold in the basement, and get a good look. And then we see that it was not really anything, a story, a passage of time, in life. A book on the shelf, a memory, and we return to the present and it’s radiance and it is that radiance that makes us safe and happy.

The End of Food book I read was amazing. We really are headed for disaster. How I am returning to my healthy self again, no drinking, a regular routine. Because it really reprograms you.

Little Heart Openings

It was a good thing that the Queen was in the middle of a Shambhala meditation class when she foolishly checked her email on her I-phone during the break and saw a message from her lawyer. The ex-King’s lawyer now wants to collect his fees at her expense. Good thing the Queen has been practicing a lot because this kind of thing can send her into a powerful spell of funk.

It was almost miraculous that as the burning upset started to arise, the meditation teacher was talking about just such a thing. How these thoughts interrupt our peaceful abiding if we let them. The breath and the present are very powerful tools, if you are willing to use them. I know how painful it is to have to indulge in the demon forces. The present really is my Knight in Shining Armor. It takes care of me. The demons of the past are held at bay. I have a lot of space between the upset, the trauma and my body is slowly releasing it.

The evil Judge Klein rejected my lawyer’s request for his fees to be paid since I had to take Justin Chipman to court because he let my house go into foreclosure. The other judge was in agreement that the divorce agreement included my ability to protect myself with a lawyer, but it rotated away from her. Now Justin’s lawyer wants to collect on the same provision! There is no justice. It’s insane. I will just have to collect by complaining to the realtor board and collecting through his Errors and Omissions insurance. I think Justin is terrified about it, hence his kindness and “nice guy” act on full on for me. Something I’m a softy for. I thought I could get him to trade what he owes me to help me with the rental properties and my father’s house. But how soon I forget, my lawyer, another knight in shining armor, reminds me. Why would I put myself through the same torture of his incompetency, undependability, endless screw-ups and lies? I guess I’m like the old man in the fairy tale of the Old Man Who Could Make Withered Trees Bloom Again. Always kind, even to the evil do-ers. However, I think it’s a boundary issue. And I tend to attract the types of people who know they can cross my boundaries and I let them. No MORE!

I went to Anusara yoga class today with Jeanie Manchester. She’s so wonderful. Her little story about the monk who keeps falling in the same puddle day after day reminded me of my predicament. I don’t learn from experience very well. To become aware of this is the important thing. My son made me aware that I am always invalidating what he says. It was in a flash at the dinner table yesterday that I was made aware of this. He says something, and I say, no that’s not true. As if I think he is a child and doesn’t know the truth. But he’s almost 12 and very smart. I was shocked at myself. My daughter said, “It’s true mom. You do.” And she chimed in that I’m always disbelieving her. I said I was sorry and would do better. Awareness is key, and the ability to really surrender all of yourself.

So I was aware that little by little, my heart is opening, my chest is expanding. I contribute it to hot yoga deepening my muscle work, and the Anursara for the awareness of alignment. How the inner spiral of getting thighs back is so important to opening the heart, opening the chest. That the tension in my arms, even though I have a herniated disk at C3 from a hit-and-run car accident from there, is from the collapsed chest, the powerlessness. But little by little I am claiming my power. The Queen’s power that she can do anything once the demon groove of energetic patterning are removed from her body and she is left with the present to create and believe in anything she wants and make it come true. After a lot of back bends, I cried in shavasana again. That little by little releasing of all the old stuff, the realization that I am valuable. I am powerful and worthy of respect. Even remembering the hit-and-run car accident, how powerless I felt when I failed to identify the man from the license photos. The failure I felt. The abandonment when not only the man who hit me but the man that I hit with my car in front of me who also fled when I said I was hurt. How the body holds all that in, in the shoulders, the neck. The yoga, the meditation and breath and the present slowly unsnares everything like Drano unclogging everything from the deep.

After class I went to my father’s house again. We had lunch and later we worked on some piles of boxes of papers, magazines, junk mail and bills that were in the living room. I did find a few old Mother Earth News magazines to mull through, and a diary of my mother’s cross-country trip with her sister in 1953. But mostly it was tedious, as we went through every piece of paper in several boxes. I got hasty when it came to junk mail catalogs from 2000. He said, “Slow down!” And it irritated me. I began thinking of the futility of all this. Can I really live with my father? He doesn’t want to move out completely so we could clear it all out, gut it and redo it, we’d just work around him. I should just move to Puerto Rico. But then I want to take care of my father. I want to clean this house out. I want to have another adult around to help me raise my children. I want to have a beautiful garden in the backyard and go back to being a mother and homemaker again. Just without all the loneliness and isolation. We shall see.

Bottom

The Queen was overwhelmed by the demon Black Mold. It all seemed so hopeless to go up against it. It was down there in the basement. The darkness now has eyes, and the creature has now been awakened. She wasn’t quite sure what to do with it, just sitting down there underneath the stairs. It’s eyes open and glowing. But at least its presence was made known. Now she can get to the bottom of things. She just might be able to deal with it.

But the demon Black Mold is very powerful. It tells the Queen to go back to sleep. Ignore it. It’s too powerful for her to deal with at this time. The Queen feels sleepy, she fights to stay with the demon, even though she feels overwhelmed.


I was driving down the road this morning when I realized that I had forgotten my yoga mat for Bikram class. I came back to the house, and accidentally left the door open and Sargeant Pepe ran out. “Oh, drat! Now I’ll be late,” I thought, because it's hard to lure him back in. The kids joke that the only thing I trained Pepe to do is to run outside in order to get a treat. So that’s what I had to do. Go all the way back in, get to the fridge and get a treat, lure him in, and dash myself back out again.

I observed the frustration brewing. I had to fight to focus on the out-breaths and get present and not fall into the old trapping of negative emotions. Those old feelings are too painful to indulge in anymore. A gift of about to turn 43. I’m like the rat who finally realized that those shocks hurt, and you need to give some things up if you’re going to survive or evolve and if your children are going to survive and evolve. Wisdom is the gift of age and the gift to the world.

I think it’s old trauma, old patterns related to stress that start to wear on you. It's post traumatic stress. I think about Frank's death. I think about my father. I feel so sorry for all the soldiers returning from Iraq. I’ve witnessed it in my father all my childhood, all my adulthood. How we children of concentration camp and war survivors are affected. How all children are horribly, horribly affected.

Finally back in my car, I was backing out and I had a flash of insight. It was the same kind of insight I had, incidentally, when I was backing out of a driveway when I was on the way to be with my mother dying in the hospital. I had just dropped my infant daughter off with a friend, and backing out I saw an image before me of her as a young woman. I got a call from my younger sister not long after that with the news that mom had passed.

Backing out on the way to yoga, I had the impression of powerlessness. The brutal stamping out of hope. My father as a 9 to 12-year-old imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp for Dutch colonialists on Java during World War II. That experience of horrible atrocities during the formative years, it scars so deep one gives up on affecting the outer world and there is only anger turned inward, its oppression total.

My father told me a story once about the war. That he was at camp Ambarawa 7, which had a monastery and nuns. One of my father’s few possessions was a towel his mother, my Oma, monogrammed for him. One day it was missing from his bed in the barracks. He climbed up high in the rafters one day and watched the nun come in and he witnessed her removing the threads from his towel.

He climbed down and confronted the nun. “That’s my towel,” he said. She just glared at him and said, “No it’s not,” and went back to work. He mustered up the courage to complain again, “It’s mine!” “You’re going to hell when you die and you’re not going to need it,” she said of his protestant soul.
My father wanted to hit her, he told me. “What could I do? Me, a little boy, up against the nun? That’s when I started to get angry.”


That’s what I carry of my father's onto my experience of reality. I react to it with his unconscious pain. That powerlessness I felt against my mother and her illness. It’s my mother, yet she’s raging at me, terrifying me and hurting me and my brother and sisters and my father. You try to take care of them, you feel guilty for their suffering. Because you love her too. She's still in my body. She's in my shoulders and psoas. She’s the blackness.

My father’s migraines, the rock-hard muscles in his shoulders and neck. I’d massage them, give him a head massage just like the nurse Babu did for him on Java. After yoga I can see still where my tension is in my arms, the collapsed chest, the shallow breath. How trauma and powerlessness shut you down. Unable to escape my mother’s prison as a child. Now able to finally be aware and get present rather than dwell in the past. Snake is a good friend.

The Black Mold is just a reminder, an opportunity to wake up. To look here and check this out. My mother's healing too, just like the dream, she's helping cleaning. We're searching every corner of our energy bodies for leftover stories. What powerlessness and discouragement do we feel when stress arrives? What hopelessness? That depression that renders us without courage to face life. We find the courage again and this time its grounded in being.

Shall I move forward on my desire to clean out and fix up my father’s house? Now that I’ve hit the basement and found the snake and the mold and the rot, discovered the rat that gnaws at the tree and the toad that blocks the well. Now that I know the facts and what needs to be dealt with, I can summon the community to help me deal with it. Now the castle can be rebuilt again. The samskaras have been removed from the layers of being and now I am free to create anew with the power of the present. And the community makes all the difference. Something I didn't have as a child, isolated here on Kilkenny Street East of Boulder out in the country with the cows and the corn.

I wrote Dad a letter. I said I could not live there. And that he should consider living with my brother for his health. Today he said he was down there with some bleach working with the mold. Gads! Julia was supposed to be over there today. I hope she convinces him that a Haz Mat unit needs to be consulted!

The Queen and the Black Mold

I brought a friend who rebuilds houses professionally over to access my father's house. He basically said the house was a health hazard because of two things: black mold in the basement and the mouse feces. He asked my father if he were willing to move out for a month or two to get the whole place gutted and cleaned out, and he said no.

SO! The reality is that the black mold is winning. I wrote my father a letter saying that I can't continue cleaning or coming over with the kids and that he should really consider moving in with me temporarily to clean the place properly or just permanently moving in with my brother as my father gets older and needs help and really for his own health. Having him spend more time among the black mold is not healthy! it gets into the ventilation!

I was aghast, horrified, a bit depressed. But it seems I've been dealing with the unexpected and the disappointing all my life. So I will just stay present and see what else arises. But I really want my father to be well and rescue him from the Black Mold! I even wrote Julia an email asking her to talk to him. He seems to trust her.

So symbolic that it comes from the basement. Something still very unconscious and insidious that does not want to rear its head but is starting to. Perhaps my father does not want to deal with it because of that reason. That it would bring up war memories and horrors that are still too painful for his fragile self to deal with.

But at least now the Queen knows her enemy the Black Mold, and she will figure out how to deal with it next.

The Queen Sheds her skin

The Queen's oldest sister, Narada, who lives in India, sent an email asking about their father, Saint Albert the Wise. She read the Queen's interpretation of the myth Vishnu's dream and replied that their cult leader said that the demons coming out of Vishnu's ears were the first homosexuals because of their voracious sexual appetite. The Queen was offended by this interpretation, and said so. She thought that personal choice of sexuality should not be demonized and judged wrong.

Her sister immediately got upset and withdrew. "People are always offending me. Now I must retreat from such negative associations," she said. Forgive me, but I don't know why you despise Krishna so much."
"But how can you judge me?" the Queen asked her sister. "How the Queen loves the divine, but experiences it in a completely different reality than you, dear sister." Because all the Queen could feel for her sister was love, because their mother, the Witch of Kilkenny Street, hit her sister the hardest when they were growing up in the ruined castle. That's because she was the eldest, and got the most blows from the witch, who shut her down completely, and a strict cult was the only thing that would salvage her fragile psyche.

I cleaned out my father's house again today. It is as if I have peeled down a layer of stuff. The first level is about what you can deal with, what you can throw away or how to make a semblage of how to organize things. Sometimes I would take a box from the other back bedrooms and start looking through it. I'm looking for the boxes, the obvious trash. That was the first month and what filled the first dumpster run. In one box from the basement, I found an amazing thing. Two petrified garter snakes. One curled perfectly and it's head curling up, its eye hollowed out. Then there was a much smaller one. I saved the big one and gave the other to my artist friend Wendy. I remember when I lived in the basement as a 22-year-old and found dead snakes on my underwear I picked up off the floor. So I thought it was symbolic. I am shedding my skin. A layer of something very deep - energy stuck in my lawyers of body and being bubbling up and getting cleaned out. I feel it's a stage toward rebirth, as you begin to see in meditation that there really is something greater than your ego mind when you finally get some distance between it and can see things more clearly. And you get hungry for it.

This time cleaning I started tackling piles of stuff on tables and tackle its details. Like the kitchen. A particular doozy. Dad and I started in the small cabinet that has 29 years of grease stains all over it from the stove below. Julia had cleaned the stove and it remarkably looks so much better. We pulled out dozens of old herbs and spices, and Indonesian cooking ingredients. duplicate bottles of garlic powder, onion onion powder, basil that was from 1992. There were even some bottles so ld they still had on the paper my mother had covered them up with to reuse the item.
The rest of the kitchen was just filled with scattered items in complete disorder. Outdated food cans my father kept for survival but never cooked. He typically ate out or warmed up some soup from the fridge or ate something frozen. On the table and counters there were bathroom products, bug killer, car oil. I sorted them out and consolidated them into cabinets.

I realized that my father is of the depression era, born in 1931. When it comes to cleaning, I have to have him right there with me because you can't throw anything away. Weeks earlier we had gone through every piece of paper in zillions of boxes. We even had found Liberace's autograph. Now we are going through every screw, button, lock, stamp, zillions of little things and you sort through it but encourage him to just throw it away and mostly he does. It was hard to get him to part with some of the old food. When Julia was here she helped me convince him. You have to go down to every nut and screw and receipt, and pen cap and a pair of scissors parts that lost its central screw and he was going to have it repaired. There were dozens of Nescafe jars in other cabinets that were empty. I know he was thinking he could find some use for them, like fill them with lentils or rice. He held onto it and you could tell it brought some kind of sentimentality. So he couldn't part with it and I said no problem. There is a movable kitchen cart in the middle of the kitchen and I sorted through the layers of food cans that where years out of date, every kind of herb, natural supplement and health liquid you could think of. They were scattered all over the place. So I sorted cans to go into the pantry Julia and i cleaned out (of zillions of cobwebs and dust) last time. And the natural stuff to another area.

My brother, Albert, came over too. I hadn't seen him in so long. He's the workaholic senior software engineer for a big company. He helped Dad sort, which was good. To have other people help him sift it all out too. I was able to work quietly in other areas, taking sneaky liberties of throwing out obvious junk at my discretion.


Earlier I had talked to my father about my older sister Nancy. How she offended me in an email recently and made me angry, and that it seems she has a personality disorder. It brought up a lot of grief around my sister, who was a mother to me. The memory of playing with dolls and making up stories, cooking in the kitchen and growing plants. It made my childhood so happy against my mother's insanity. I remember the sorrow and the helplessness I felt that strangled my heart when my mother was screaming and cursing at Nancy, destroying her sense of self. Shredding any sense of worthiness after being so startled and confused by the violence. Because the violence was jarring. It took you out of your body. You knew your body was not a safe place to be.

Nancy was my buffer to my mother, to all of us kids. And she fought back the best she could, as my father was much of the time incapacitated with migraines and pain killers and unable to help. It's like the Japanese guards' brutal action that rendered my father helpless to act against during his childhood in the concentration camp. Dad to this day feels guilty for asking my sister to leave the house, after she and my mother's fighting was too much and my mother ordered her out. She fled to Alaska and worked for the forest service, only to leave behind the drug scene there and have the Krishnas meet her at the airport in Honolulu. That was the end of having my sister around the house and the beginning of my mother wailing about her and her "shitty religion." I was six years younger than my sister. I was in the 8th grade. That sense of loss has carried with me so long now. Now my sister is coming back from India in July and will be living in Denver again after 30 years away where her daughter and grandchildren live. I wonder if coming home brings some powerful stuff up and that's the cause of the upset. This tension between us is to be resolved and for that she would be healed as well.

I didn't allow my upset to be indulged. That typical rage that I felt when my ex-husband's ex-wife would offend me. I learned that the price you pay for that emotional burning is too steep. I have no bad feelings against my sister. I do not want to engage in an energy drain. It really messes you up. I know from experience that you get what you think about when you're in a negative state a lot. So now I can only send love. I allow her to be who she is, and I minimize the rest. Avoid it completely if needed. But always love her, and heal the pain through forgiveness so that only freedom remains.

Things have definitely cleared out on a noticeable level. I've been really happy. I broke my health kick this weekend, but it was like a ritual. I really notice the differences in my life with the shedding of the old stuff. That those negative thinking grooves are finally but ghosts in the distant sky. This regular groove is very present, and relaxed, and content. Things in our household are going so well. Like my daughter's schoolwork -she's grooving math - and the overall functioning of the household. Thank you maid! And more friends in my life! There is harmony it seems, and all because I've slowed down. I practice yoga and meditation daily and they ground me in their ritual. I think the future is going to be even more amazing, because I have no desire to know what it is at all because I am really just so in love with the present.

I will be back on track come Monday, because the magic of the yoga drives you on. Snake is pretty powerful. In mythic yoga practice, the heart is opening, chest is expanding, my wings are stretching out, and I'm firmly anchored in my snake, fish tail bottom, my reptilian hull.

Maybe it really is the return of Quetzalcoatl.

Meditation is a wonderful thing

The Queen loves to meditate. Somehow driving to downtown Boulder and sitting in Shambhala meditation with others is just the ticket she needed to calm the demons that overtake her mind with busy thoughts of doomsday, loneliness, children's doctors and orthodontics appointment and ten thousand other things.

But amazingly, meditation puts some space and distance between those thoughts. And also the Queen is tired of thinking them and feeling bad with them. It's so easy to indulge! the thoughts cry, but every time she practices in the morning or with the group, those anxieties and fears tend to slip away faster. They don't have much power. Demons begone! Amazingly they slip away, defeated. Meditation leaves such clarity, openness. But you do have to practice. So every day now, the Queen has gotten up early, gone down stairs, lit the fireplace and practiced. Amazingly, all she is left with is the present. And the present becomes delicious and powerful. As if those grooves of the past the demons carved are finally lifting, the demons are bored and are packing up and going home, because the Queen doesn't pay any attention to them anymore.

Even though my ex-husband let the house go into foreclosure and it's looking pretty dismal that I will ever see my $30k i was owed, I'm not feeling that bad any more. I refuse to be pulled into the past or worry about the present. Meditation is pretty powerful, and I'm convinced that something will come out of this by being so present. Like I'm pulling out of my long depression since all this happened (and since the King left on a long trip.) And thinking that, well, I can maybe pull through. Gloom and doom and bankruptcy are not the only possibility. I might just be able to be inspired and sit down and write something creative again and get the creative juices flowing and reapply myself to my work. Because I have been doing not much more than lots of yoga, meditation, tending to the children's myriad needs and pumping myself full of wonderful ayurvedic herbs and vitamins. Sabbaticals are sometimes a good thing. The creative well springs up. Especially when you slow down, take good care of yourself and children. Not much can get done if you are not well! So healing does happen. All the deep grief, unfortunate events, you can finally pull ahead of them and look back and say, "ha!" What an experience! Sure glad that is done!" and you can revel in the present moment. The creative present moment and look ahead, as if one chapter is really, finally closed, and there is new life ahead. And the possibilities are endless.

I went to regular Anusara class today. My psoas is still killing me, and it seems like I am more tight from all the Bikram yoga, that did get deeper into my muscles, but because they use the same poses over and over again, I am weaker in the regular asana routines! So much mother came up during practice. The "Waterfall" of thoughts as the Buddhists call it. But it's the practice that helps. All of her negativity and rage. It has been helpful also to practice agnosticism. There is no "god" or "karma" to gloss over the pain of life. You just accept it. I don't have to go boo hoo, why did I have a violent schizophrenic for a mother? Because you wonder about those Ft. Hood soldiers. What did they do to deserve a massacre? Or the women murder victims of the crazy man in the Ohio house. Life is ferocious. The idea of God puts such a buffer on things. But it also gives you a crutch to stay protected from your pain. Because really when you accept it, you are happier. There was an article in the paper about a psychology study of people who had this procedure in which their bowels had to be on the outside of their bodies. Half of the patients were told that there was the possibility that their bowels one day could be put back inside of them and they would be normal. The other half were told that this is what their situation is and there is no other possibility. The people with "Hope" suffered more, putting their life off in the future. The people with no hope, were actually happier. They accepted their situation. So we don't put any hope for God to save us. We just accept life. And somehow it actually becomes more beautiful, more amazing. You just love your story, your past, your demonic mother who is actually helping you amazingly to clean yourself out. Clean all the last drops of whatever is holding you back.

Deeper Cleaning

Two nights ago I had a dream about cleaning out my father's house. He wasn't there, but other people were there to help. It was great having the help, and even my mother was there. But then in the dream I realized, my mother's dead, and asked other's if they had seen her there and they said yes.

The next day I went to my father's house and began cleaning again. I removed the junk I had taken out of the back bedroom that my mother used to occupy and threw it in the dumpster. Most of it I threw away: an old rusty trunk, old newspapers, ripped up clothing covered with cat hair, ripped up old suitcases. You could hear a music box chime go off. It's as if it were here from the dream, helping, approving, chiming in. My mother was always collecting music boxes from garage sales.

Her bedroom was finally cleared out of mounds of junk for the first time in 35 years. You could see the floor finally - old yellow shag carpet. This was my mother's bedroom and it reminded me of before she died she would just urinate over the side of the bed. Or throw her used leenex over the side and they would pile up. Social services finally stepped in, because my father could not deal with her, guilty as he felt. But my mother was so beligerant that no public geriatric, psychiatric nursing home would take her, except one far down in Englewood. I had other memory flashes as I threw stuff out. I threw out old pictures, a broken glass, travel books that where 20 years old. Crash it went into the dumpster. I remembered the time we sat on the edge of her bed after a particularly big screaming fest when I was a child. She said she was sorry, and told me about her electric shock treatments as a 19-year-old in 1949 when she had a nervous breakdown because of her violent father. She said it was like a piano falling on top of her head.

I started pulling up the filthy carpet. It could tear like tissue paper it was so old and dusty. I stopped, sneazing. I figured to take one step at a time. I needed to empty out first.

Later, I went to a Bikram yoga class. The layers of emotions can be peeled away by doing this yoga, as most yogas. A big memory of Frank's suicide note came to me. "Now she's going to have to work." I remember being so traumatized from being penniless that yes, I have to work. How stupid of me to be dependent, to trust anybody. To be abandoned so terribly. I started working and never stopped. And now in Shavasana after the yoga, I cried. No, I don't have to work. I can relax now. I can just take care of my children. I can heal myself. I can go back to the prima materia, before the wounding, and be a mother. I am cleaning out my father's house, cleaning out my emotions. I will go back to being a mom, cooking, gardening, and taking care of my children and my father now. There is a huge relief.

So yesterday my father's friend Julia, the maid, showed up. What relief! Just like my dream. To have others helping me. Because every time the dust and dirt and memories over whelm me. The bathroom mirror, dirty and stained with toothpaste from our childhood. The mirror I looked into as a teenager, getting ready for a date. And any boy who came over never came over again.

And later, more friends showed up at my own house. Dreams do come true. Because old stuff does get cleaned out. Ever so slightly, it really does. Even in meditation, you get further and further away from those disturbing thoughts. I had a meditation class today. Even though it was irritating to sit there. My psoas had frozen up in the left leg. It's been terribly painful for about a month. It's letting go a lot of stuff. A lot of trauma. Things do get healed. You just have to let go, let go of all the resistance, and most of all let go that there was ever anything wrong with your life. It's just one great beautiful story. And it's healing. I believe my mother gets healed by the cleaning of the house. That's why I dreamed her.

The dumpster was filled up. I called to have them haul it away, and my father said it was all taken away. I feels so much lighter now. All those emotions are gone. Because they dissolve in meditation, dissolve and leave the body, and they have gone physically as well.

The Queen of Bohemia Cleans Her Father's House

It has been a while since I have written. Not out of lack of substance, but out of lack of capacity to express what has occurred in the past month.

I started cleaning my father's house. The house I grew up in. I also started taking Bikram Hot Yoga classes. Somehow I think the two are related. The house and my body.

I was at the Cordillera Spa and Lodge a few weeks ago in Edwards, Colorado giving a workshop, and I had a wonderful massage, swim, whirlpool, and I decided to sit in the sauna. I usually am reluctant to be in saunas or hot rooms or anything because it makes me irritable and claustrophobic. Somehow this time I loved the heat, loved the sweating. I felt like something deep was melting away. The detox. And the spa place was so beautiful. Ultra luxurious, but a not conspicuous. Just nice, remote, even though I could not help but wonder what the heating bills were on these monstrous houses dotting the landscape that remained unoccupied!

Unfortunately, the drive back was so stressful because of snow, overturned trucks on I-70 and I feared they would close the tunnel and I'd be stranded. Worse, it was return traffic from the casino towns. Major bummer. It took me all day the next day to recover. But then I started cleaning my father's house.

He said it was time. That I would be able to come and live there if need be. He has a third acre in east Boulder. A nice bit to grow a lot of organic food, our favorite past time. But of course I would have to tackle the mess that is his house. When my mother died, I helped him clean it out. The piles and piles of old clothing, junk in every corner, the clogging of the entire house, buried in stuff. That on top of it that it had not been cleaned in 30 years.

He said it would probably make his migraine headaches go away, let everything go. That and maybe the big blockage at his navel area. A large weight held there, probably from emotions but also too much chocolate.

We started in the hallway, where he uses cardboard boxes to fill up each with old bills, magazines, junk mail, odds and ends. He was afraid to throw anything away. So we went piece by piece, paper by paper. I had ordered a big roll off for all the stuff. We just started dumping it, and recycling some, because he says he gets credit for the weight. But we filled up the recycling bin in a matter of hours, and it only comes once every two weeks. So piece by piece we went. I even found the Liberace autograph my mother said she had and had not found the first time I cleaned out the house when she died.

I had made a box of items that could be stored. My father's biggest problem is simple disorganization. Zillions of items just scattered around the house. I went in this storage area to put the box there. Mice had gotten into his end of the world food supply or wheat and what not that was there. It has been there since 2000. I saw two dead mice in traps, screamed, and dropped the box I was carrying, which upset another, untripped mouse trap. The box fell to the floor, which was covered in mice feces. I screamed again. I wondered, am I able to really clean this place out? It's so overwhelming the mess, the filth. The emotional layers there.

I went to my first Bikram class and made it through. I dripped with sweat. I felt dizzy at times, but did pretty well. Afterwards I was exhilarated, like the best high i've had in a long time. Natural, gorgeous. My skin was glowing. I had energy. I signed up for the two-week special for $25 bucks. Price is right. So I went again, felt better and wasn't dizzy. Again, dripped off sweat, like layers and layers of emotions and negativity and fear. Afterwards, felt great again. It was impossible to feel negative. I could deal with my father's house. I had to.

I came to my father's house again on Halloween. It was all abuzz with a friend of his who was a professional house cleaner. She was helping him go through tons of stuff. I was amazed they had cleaned out the back dining room area, which used to be the living room before the garage was made into the living room. But the back room was just tables piled high with tons of papers and stuff. She removed it. you could see the floor, which was previously covered. You can now see the original orange and yellow shag carpet from 1973. Although dust fills all the corners. Julia, the housekeeper, vacuumed up the dust, which I'm usually covered in when I help clean, sneezing the whole way through. Huge progress was made.

Trick-or-treaters came by and I dished out candy. I was amazed that kids come up to this house, since it's so run-down on the outside too. Maybe they think it's spooky, or dare each other to go up there, or maybe they are just greedy for candy. A Rotor Rooter truck was outside on the driveway too, blocking the way, because sadly the concrete in the back sank down so much because of a lot of rain and because the builder was cheap and didn't set the concrete correctly and it crushed the sewer pipe. So the toilets were unusable. Julia and I thought it was symbolic. THE SHIT CAN'T GET OUT.

So I went to a Third Bikram class. Sweated out some more. I haven't drank alcohol in many weeks either in a gung-ho attempt to cleanse. Went to a Shambhala meditation class. I can look at the shit clearly. I can see things arise in my mind. I know it's there. I can choose to get swept up in the shit, yes, I do sometimes and I pay dearly for it. And other times I can let it go. Is that what being human is about?

Somehow, though, seeing reality can be intense. It can also get a little boring. Or am I covering it all up again? Do you ever break through? Are you ever completely cleaned out? Or would you be dead? In reading Becker's The Denial of Death, it's about realizing how intense life is, that we are really half earth and half angel. Our bodies complicate things, even horrify us. We make up myths and religions to get around the death thing. But die we do. And to face death, and reality, is heroic. And that our society doesn't really offer us, especially youth, any opportunity to be heroic, as we barely face death anymore. We just watch it on TV and gawk at the body count piling up in the headline news. We cowardly wait in the shadows at some horror of life, hoping it won't happen to us. But it does happen to us. All the time. And somehow cleaning that out and really looking at it, to not deny anything of yourself, the filth in your father's house, the gunk in your body, that is good. You love it all. Every dark corner of it.

I wonder what the next hot yoga class has in store. And when I will find the courage to clean my father's house again.