The Second Layer

After a rather intoxicating Thanksgiving break, I am back to doing hot yoga. I went to a new studio in Boulder to try it out. Not the straight Bikram stuff, but hot with a variety of poses. The toxins I ingested over the break, not to mention food, really got the best of me. I dripped sweat, but was incredibly tired and stiff. And this was only an hour class! Out of practice. How I crave stability. I felt fantastic, as usual, after class. I’d love to come every day for thirty days, or at least 3-4 times a week. It really does reshape your body, mind and soul. I can fee the muscles in my shoulders begging to let my heart free, my hips and back yearning to really open.

Nonetheless, I realized that you really do have to find the discipline to stay focused on not intoxicating yourself nor getting out of practice. I’ve always been the take two steps forward, one step back, or sometimes two back. Not quite getting anywhere, but nonetheless getting somewhere. So I am back there. I call this my second layer of cleaning house.

The first layer was just getting beneath the surface of things to see clearly. This layer we really see it and how it’s been going on as a major story in my life. As the cleaning in my father’s house has come to a halt. I knew it would happen. I had a dream about it while in Jamaica. That I went to my father’s house and things had been rearranged, headed by this one person who runs a magazine but never acknowledges me. I was very upset in the dream. I’ve had many portending dreams, yet never the courage, nor the desire to heed them much. It seems I can’t resist my desires, even though they head down the wrong direction.

So it was cleaning my father’s house. As I knew that despite my troubles and upset I shouldn’t go there. Shouldn’t change directions. Because my pattern is that when fear and upset arise, I change gears. The trick is to keep going. Work through the fear, stay stable. But I thought I must go home. I can’t afford my debts, I can’t make a living as an artist, blah, blah, doom doom blah.

As a child, I always cared for my father, tried to heal him, protect him from my raging mother. We intellectualized and spiritualized together, but there was no complete intimacy. As he was my father. And our relationship was buffered by the narcotic haze of his painkillers. So I was still very lonely as a child, only books to comfort me, a few siblings to play with for a while. But no visitors to the house, no dinners or get togethers. No extended family or neighbors. Just me. I was intimate with myself. I became a community of one.

That’s how it’s been most of my life. Relationships with men who used me and let me down, and although I wanted intimacy, I was not able to give it. I was loyal to my father.

And so it’s natural the cycle repeats itself. That my dad over Thanksgiving talked with my siblings, and doesn’t think it’s a good idea for me to move home. So that is that. I pull myself up by my bootstraps, rework my business plan, stay the course, stay put, and look for stability in myself.

Which brings me to the person I am in love with. He is married. I knew that. We both had our needs. We could help each other. I don’t have much time for a relationship, besides, my kids don’t like somebody else competing for attention with me. I am in love with him, but I can’t tell him that. For what is there to do beyond that claim? He is married, he has his wife to return to, and I have no one. Each time he leaves, the hole in my heart is more painful, more devastated, awash in sorrow. The loneliness and the loss. And I wait for a period of time, sometimes months, to see him again.

How I do crave intimacy, just when we are getting going on talking about interesting subjects and making love, he is gone. I can’t call him, text him, mail him. He is like a father, older than me, it provides wonderful togetherness and tenderness, but our relationship is limited. I cannot get what I need on my heart’s level. I am empty and sad. I can have my dreams, but I must stay rooted in reality. I will stay the course. I will practice my yoga, meditate, work, be a mother. Take up the time with the daily life. until I see him again.

I love him. But I am sad because I need reassurance for the future. I do want somebody in my life. I do crave deep intimacy. Somebody there for me at all times. And he lives out of state. Somebody who is not there for me all the time. And I am into taking very good care of myself. Not my father, not my ex and his kids and other needy people. I just take care of me and my children. My son’s grief and rage, my daughter’s learning disability. Learning to do home cooking again, gardening more, living simply and beautifully. That makes all the difference in the confidence in myself to succeed and not have to return to my father’s house, to it’s destruction and fear. That is no longer an option. And I feel so much better.

This is what the second layer is all about.