The Birth of the Bohemian Bombshell

The Queen is born from the waters. Her bottom matsya self. Reptilian, earthy and watery. Her body is remade from the fires of the earth, the sweat of the rhythms and pulsation of life. Her heart opens, and her wings spread and her breath releases a beautiful new poem. A song, a mantra and it mixes with the air and sky until it waters down and fertilizes the earth she walks on.

I am the Bohemian Bombshell. I’m re-sculpting my body. I’m re-storying my Self. No longer do I carry the stories from childhood that were stuck in my body. I am re-patterning that groove in the record. I’m a hot yoga junkie now that I’ve tried out the Yoga Pod. I don’t get the headaches; it’s a shorter class and we do a downward dog!

Slowly the heat and the alignment and movement along with a new guiding myth in my life are re-shaping me. A rebirth. Just like after shavasana, there is something new out of that death period of rest. I have forgotten the terrible worthlessness, the shame. The shame of my house, myself, my body. This terrified little girl, so afraid and ashamed of her house that she could not call the police when she came home one day her senior year in high school and found that her little sister had attempted suicide. So ashamed that she had only herself to comfort her and she did it with bulimia, building more shame, more self-hatred. More hatred of her body, her self.

I will be 43 in 20 days. I have a new guiding myth. The Queen. I love my body. I love myself and I have value. I’m cleaning my house out swell. My body is full, 145 pounds typically. Up 15 pounds from three years ago. It's OK. It's right. Because I feel so good in my body. It’s strong and healthy. It's sensuous, sexy and beautiful. All my flesh, all my wrinkles and peeping gray hair. What a difference. My little girl of the past is OK with it too. She’s healed too. She doesn’t have to be 115 pounds like in her youth. She just gets to be healthy. She gets to be happy, trusting and safe. She gets to be herself. So everybody gets healed. Even my mother and father, sisters and brothers. It’s heaven on earth. And it’s in the body. It’s in the Bohemian Bombshell.

I am the Queen, the feather-plumed serpent, or the mermaid, half goat, half fish. The alchemical toad and bird chained together. I’m finally rooted, my energy balanced and back down toward the lower half of the body instead of rising in fear upward. I have a stable pelvis, that lizardly area, grounded and solid, and flowing freely with the energies of life. The hot yoga gets more deeply into my chest. For now my upper body lifts toward heaven. My heart, no longer a heavy stone, collapsing, pulling me forward and protected by rock-tight shoulders paralyzed by fear, but a bird, light, open and liberated. Free in the breath, present and powerful. And everything ceases. This is where Durga comes in. It’s that presence, unmistakable mother in her death and life. She’s in the heart, that amazing organ that has arteries running from it and to it, giving and receiving. It’s a Shiva consciousness. I can see more clearly my ego self because of the distance that mediation has gotten between me and my ego story. I like to reside in the Shiva spot more. It's an addiction. It’s protection, safety. It’s a silence that is yet so loud with the roar of the cosmos.

In hot yoga, I slow down to the heat and real rhythm of my body, notice every toxin in it. With my deep breathes I can feel every nook and cranny, any mis-alignment. It’s a slow melt, a smeltering, a crafting, as the new mythology kicks in. That I am of value and worthy. For I am the Queen of royal, cosmic blood. And my value does not fit in with the passing economic age of imaginary money, or even precious metals, but my value goes beyond, into something that cannot be measured by any earthly means. The value of my self and my work is not able to be assigned a measurable value, but it is rather unspoken, and connects to every living being on the planet. It connects and communicates with the herbs and the plants and the seas and water and the moon and the stars and the sun. It connects in faith, as it is confirmed and knows that an upheaval is necessary. To rebalance things. The classic Star Wars myth goes agrarian with kings and their peasants revolting. Politicians and proletariat. Corporations and taxyapers. So I’m not too worried any more. I’m excited. It’s time for some good action. We are all assigned our roles and so now it’s show time.

So is Birthed the Bohemian Bombshell.

In The Cave of the Heart - Anahata

The Queen suffered a terrible sickness when the King left. It was a terrible wave of grief and loss. It is a very odd hollow echo of pain that came from much deeper within her heart. But this morning the Queen picked herself back up again, went to yoga class downtown on her pink moped (free parking!) and felt much better. She breathes and recognizes that Durga's name, hard to approach, is just that.

In the cave of the heart is that which swallows up all thought. It the event horizon of a black hole that swallows everything up, it's the anahata heart chakra- unstruck, it enters eternity as just being exists and is the only focus. It cuts out everything, like death comes through with a scythe to cut your life down at death. Isn't armageddon our own death? The death of the ego and the world it has spun out of its conditioning and storytelling? To cut everything, surrender, die. È più.

I've noticed that because of yoga practice and really working the inner thighs back, my lower lumbar spine I really released and I sit regularly on my sit bones now, right over the mula banda point. I'm just starting to figure out just what it means to get the thighs back and why, and it changes your whole relationship to your core and your alignment. It keeps you connected to the earth all time and this is a very safe feeling. To be so rooted in your own being, that radix ipsius. It's quite an awakening. It's as if I have finally learned how to release and remove those old grooves and patterns from a dysfunctional childhood by relaxing into it. Something else has woven deep patterns instead on the heart and body. The goodness and vibrations are ritualized through yoga and story. Awakening emerges from the heart as images and dreams, and we put it together with meaning and out pours a poem of the body.

I realize that my mother reacted to pattens of fear deeply engrained in her body. Overwhelmed by grief and loss and traumatized by her father and electro-shock treatments, my mother resorted to withdrawal from us children to cope with the overwhelming demands of a mother of four children. My father sick from post-traumatic stress, how does one raise children all alone with few resources, especially money, which plagued my mother terribly. I remember clearly my mother screaming at us that we "didn't even move a plate," or "turn off the lights!" Those are the exact things that my children don't do. I can feel myself mirroring her patterning, the fear, the overwhelm. How those patterns and feelings in our body compel us to repeat it unconsciously, no matter how hard we try not to. It takes effort not to give in to the pattern. To really end it in its tracks, end of story, and create a new reality, a new energy pattern in the body. Yoga reconditions the body's energy to reset patterns. Creative imagination, words and stories reinforce it on a symbolic level to our mythic aspect of our existence, the psyche.

So Durga myth resides in me now. Her energy to shut it all down, stop the thoughts, the pain, the sorrow and just remain in being and bliss. She is the mother that devours all that and let's you rest in her bosom. She lends me her weapons to keep battling the demons, and keep living as the Queen.

The World Tree

There is a voice inside that sometimes speaks only in images, and those images and feelings come up as doves and roses. Once in a while this little glimpse of paradise is available, and often times it also comes up as an image and a feeling of a tree. This flowing, flowering, blooming energy that really does crown within you. When you are really connected and not afraid but linked to the source, it is a lot like a tree. And the tree has roots. Deep roots, that come out of the vagina and reach into the ground and reality. They hold on to the outer realm and make you feel safe. There is nothing to fear.

Anyone who has experienced trauma knows the fear inside. It pulls you up, nothing is safe, not even the ground you walk on. You are waiting for the other shoe to drop. This tree image pulls us down, down, into our bodies and into the earth, Mother earth, and paradise. It takes us to a place before the trauma, before the wounding, to the prima materia, and on this journey we find another mother taking care of us. We find it through the body; the body is like a tree, especially the nervous system. I have often gazed at the mangle of cottonwood trees in winter, and how their delicate branches seem like nerves all bundled up. Our legs are firm and strong, and the feet grip the earth. Our bodies are the trunks, and our heart the heart beat of the earth. So many world mythologies have the world tree. Mayan, Norse, HIndu, Hungarian and more.

The tree is us. It is our body, our container that the spirit visits the material world. Our consciousness arises from the biochemical action of the body and prana. It is the Shakti, pulsing through it. We are going from unity to duality, and bringing creation forth. This is our cosmic dream, and we are participating in it. We don't have to make it a nightmare. The dream can be beautiful. Just imagine it so! Imagination is your power and creation! You really do get what you think about. So think great thoughts. They are coming true!

Once you are grounded again in your own being and can feel the depths and the flow, once you identify with that rather than all the stuff going on up above, once you are rooted in spirit, then you can create effortlessly up top. Things change. Trauma heals. But it was the darkness and the suffering that guided you to the light, it is what makes the tree grow.

Mythic Yoga: Vishnu's Dream

I spent three hours suspending time and space this afternoon at Samadhi Yoga where I taught teacher trainees about Hindu myths, psychology and yoga. I spoke in images and found what kinds of responses the trainees had from experiencing those images, carried through the symbol of sound and words. It's the conveyance of and the reconnection to the mythic image, the imago dei, or that God within, that are the powers of the spoken word. And we can see that the outer image of our world is also a reflection of the image inside ourselves, and that Tat Vam Asi, thou art that, is really true.

The soul speaks in an image, Aristotle said. God speaks in an image as our souls and we have all but lost that connection to the deep inner psyche and soul that keeps us in balance and harmony with our selves, with our world. We are Vishnu dreaming our daily world into existence, but where is our attention? Is it firmly rooted in the bulb and source of the transcendent, or is it the flower and the fruit on the surface, duality playing picture games and making poetry out of metaphors. Our society is presently very attached to the exterior world and has really lost its way in a labyrinth of economics and politics. Gone are the arts and letter, those links to the soul, and what we have is yet a wasteland and a disintegrating society. But we can blaze a path again into our darkest parts, and just like Persephone, create a ritual to regularly connect with this other half of ourselves and live in balance.

Listening to myths and creating images and symbols within our realm of the body makes us present to the imaginary, mythic and intuitive world. In favor of the intellect, we have rejected important functions of our psyches, intuiting and sensing. Myths, images and symbols connect us once again to this intuiting side that connects us to the unconscious, where the wild, undifferentiated soup of consciousness boils and from which forms arise.

Stories and myths allow us to self reflect in that we see everything as a reflection and examine it. We can view it externally, and then look at what remains - recognition of the Self and ineffable experience that is also bliss and joy of the moksha, release, when one is truly identified with the Self. We see that we are beyond the image, that our divine nature is eternal and untouchable, undifferentiated consciousness. We become rooted in that being and as in the Yoga Sutra 1.3 the mind's cessation allows the true being come forth, as if a light coming out from a cave, or as in the Maha Mritunjaya, like a gourd released from its vine. The true Self awakens because the symbols and forms pointed him to it.

I told the myth from the Vishnu Puranas about Vishnu's Dream. We are all like Vishnu, and we are creating our reality with our minds like Brahma each day, infused with the Shakti of Lakshmi and Saraswati, doing battle with the demons of fear and desire who threaten to make us identify with their false Self. But we remember Vishnu down there and we realize that nothing is happening. There is no Self. It's just everything as Vishnu. Contemplate this and the myth becomes a psychological guide to point you to your own experience of the truth. This knowing, jnana, is a body experience of feeling, which grounds and relaxes you, knowing that there is nothing to fear, as all things are of the Self.

Additionally I told Durga and Kali, examining the mother aspect of life and the reality of death and violence, which is what life is made up of. In Eastern mythology, demons are not to be cast out, like in Western mythology. They are just playing their part of duality, the negative energies in nature and the three gunas. Because we deny life and its reality of death and violence, its suppression is projected onto television screens and newspapers, instead, yet still unconscious in a never ending wheel. Unless a myth, story or symbol can reconnect you to eternal time, give you an experience and pitch you out of this profane realm and into the sacred.

We use Durga's weapons, such as yoga, mantra and devotion, to defeat the obstacles of the mind and the causes of suffering, or kleshas. By constantly examining ourselves we can overcome behaviors that cause suffering. When hearing a story we are able to also identify with the characters and when combined with hatha yoga, the insights or obstacles bubble up to the surface to be clearly made aware of and integrated or removed. Then the true self is unobstructed by the mind, allowed to come forth and moksha and bliss ensue.

Related to death, I told the story of how Ganesha got his head, and how Shiva, hanging out on the cremation grounds, reminds us that among death and destruction is also where life begins. Embracing the dark side of ourselves, making ourselves whole and loving our demons puts us in contact with the serpentine powers of the universe, of which we are identical. The mystical relationship and participation with the cosmos is complete as we create our own heaven on earth, the marriage of Shiva, consciousness, and Parvati, the Shakti and form. And we are so very conscious and aware of it, and that awareness is sheer joy and bliss, which is infused with love and gratitude, as all of life explodes in its reality.