The Optimist Queen and her Transvere Abdominus

The Queen hiked up the mountain today, but alone, for Sergeant Pepe was getting groomed for the ball and to go as Prince Pepe instead. She hiked up, footing skillfully the ice and snow. She remembered her mountain goat self, her steady, rocky ascent uphill. And she remembered her reptilian tail, her fishy, watery instincts in her hips on down. She felt the bird bones and she was quite comfortable there as they propelled her on.

She wore her crown, with the big sparkly blue jewel in it, and she sang her song the Shaman gave her and the feeling that was in her body swept over her. It was a lovely feeling. When she reached the top, she did her usual proclamation to the big, blue mountain, and she said, thinking there should be something to affirm or overcome or wrestle or struggle with and instead she said, “I am at peace.” There was just the moment, and the moment was perfect. Even though the King was still at the bottom of the earth, she knows and feels the shift. He turned the corner, he is headed north again. Her heart is so relaxed and full at that moment it touched eternity looking at the mountain. The Queen’s court called just then. The King’s heart was at her Castle Door! “I’ll be right there!” And the Queen hiked back down the mountain, mindfully but very excited and with a quicker skip to her step.


The past few days have been nothing short of remarkable. It’s amazing how the more you surrender and the more you love the more things fall into place. I think it's because the mind is in harmony with the body and the body is in harmony with the environment, and that's when the boons come. That's what purpose myth serves. Then synchronicities show up. Because you live the mythic life. Things have their own meaning, their own story. You start with today and now and shape it the way you want with the ritual of images and words and intention. No wonder witches were burned at the stake. They were powerful!

I spoke at the Boulder Optimist Club today. It was good for me to go, even though I had a little bit of an upset stomach for some reason and felt a little sluggish in the morning and less than optimistic. I was invited by the 80-year-old widower, Carl, across the street. I had gotten him and my Dad together for lunch at my house to talk war stories no long ago. I like hanging out with old people. They have such great stories and history. So when he asked me I said yes, even though I don’t get paid.

I had a dream a few nights ago exactly standing and talking to the group exactly as I did today. In the dream I was giving a presentation, but said I didn’t have anything prepared. The dream was initially anxiety over the upcoming speech. I needed to think about it and pull it together. Finally I decided to just tell them about the dream! And not TELL them about yoga and story, but just ALLOW them to EXPERIENCE it. So I told them the Buddhist story of the Spirit Who Lived in a Tree, although I didn’t tell them it was Buddhist, and we talked about what images they saw. The Tree. The movie Avatar’s Tree is so powerful too. As if this basic life force and mythic image is erupting full speed ahead! The mother! Most people were senior, and one man was in a wheel chair from a stroke. I taught them how to breathe deeply and rhythmically and watch their thoughts. Then we just stood there in mountain pose, getting into our bodies. Just standing there in our bodies and noticing them and feeling them. I got the feeling that this was the first time for most of them they ever paid so much attention to the sensations of their body. Then they did tree pose, very simple, using the chair if required. I sat them down and then had them close their eyes for meditation and relaxation and told them the Christian story of Jesus on the water, although I didn’t’ tell them it was Jesus, just a master in a boat on the water with his 12 students.

It was nice to just be with people. Hear their stories. Old people like to tell stories. It’s nice to have somebody to listen to them too! Especially those old war stories. He made a point to tell my Dad's concentration camp story as an introduction. A woman bought my DVD. I thought, this was nice. I taught people to breathe, to notice the present moment. It was quite a joyous experience. It goes beyond any measurement our culture can come up with. For it’s measured in the depths of being, of the heart, and that’s where the alchemical story is taking place. As things transform, awaken, emerge. Truly a renaissance is happening to me, and to my heart and the person I love. And as much chaos erupts in the world, the reconsiliation of paradox takes place and there is just that much love, awe and wonder taking place. It’s all taking place in the heart and it’s fascinating. The joyous and loving feeling I had at the ceremony takes over, it lightens the heart, opens the throat. My bird sings, it’s joyous and flowering and so very, very new. Like the birth dream I had not long ago. The baby was coming out fast.

I’ve been having wonderful synchronicities with the King. As he has voyaged to South America and to Antarctica, to the bottom of the earth, to the fierce storms and winds and water, whales and iceburgs. While he was having his epiphany and turning point, I was having mine that same day. Yesterday, I knew it because our symbol, twin birds, showed up.

For in that day’s Shambhala meditation class, Contentment in Everyday Life, this woman I was paired with wore these gorgeous, Mexican twin bird earrings! I shared that last class was profound, as I felt the effects of meditation assisting in my mythic and heroic journey of getting over myself and the mire of struggle and relishing the freedom revealed.

It reafirms the natural goodness, the gentleness and openness of the human nature, not that there is some mistake, something must be fixed. That's how I felt my whole life. No longer. There are tools to assist us in life’s trials, but they are nothing to be of conttradition to each other to the joys of life, but to live in the paradox, and balance those out. Lessen the tension between the two opposites. Undo the complexes and patterning we are born into and are in this organism infused with energy and life force. How we undo the patterns and complexes to purely and simply bask in eternity.

We had been working with emotions last week. Seeing how they arise and working with them in meditation. I shared how this week I didn’t flip out and get my body worked up into a hot, angry fit filled with victimhood, self-righteousness and the need for justice when all in this just one week Speer tenant’s going to skip paying rent and use their deposit instead without my permission issues, repressed landlady who won’t let you paint your daughter’s bedroom something other than stark white issues, slimy ex-husband who isn’t paying you back the judgment you received because he allowed your house to go into foreclosure and not pay you $30k issues and other emotional issues reared their head.

The woman I was paired with wore lovely artsy clothes of red, and the twin bird earings. She’s a painter and a teacher. We had to share the feelings of trust and confidence we had in the past and now and how we may have had mistrusted or feelings of deceiving someone.
I told how the world wasn’t safe for me, didn’t trust many people, didn’t have much intimacy with people because of an isolated childhood with a violent schizophrenic mother and a concentration camp father. The present moment wasn’t safe. But to have the trust, love and confidence in myself that I have gained from showing up in the present and not identifying with my mind allowed a stability and a grounding to take place that my trust and confidence was found experientially through my body and awareness. And I found that the more you surrender, the more you align. And it’s very hard to do, that surrendering, but surely somehow it seems that the universe all along was doing all that icky devil stuff to you just to get you to give up on your ego ideas and point you to the light. And that ever since my ayayuasca ceremony it gave me the shift and incredible vision that I can never forget. The past is past and all that story gone. All I have left of it is a work of art in honor of all the love I have for it and the people in my life of past, present and future. Her story was interesting because she had the opposite, provided everything from her parents and had everything done for her so it created a terrible insecurity about herself, but that she is at peace with her artist self that even if she never sells a painting at a show that's not what it's about. it's about he making art. I really connected on that. We artists just need to create art. We do it for art's sake and because we have to! Hence my showing up at the Optimist Club or creating anything at all! And there is no clinging to an old story, no digging in the past anymore, but rather a starting from where you are.

The rest of the class was an Oniki traditional monk eating lunch. We brought each three bowls, each smaller than the other. We ate in meditative silence, and two women served simple food from bowls, tempeh, sesamea seeds to sprinkle on, mixed vegetables of asparagus, carrot and squash, brown rice. The second third pass was for condiments of tamari, salt or pepper and the sesame seeds. The third pass was for tea in the third cup. I had put food in it not knowing! And had to clean it out of the soy sauce!

We ate in silence, enjoying each texture, the sound of your neighbor crunching, of the different tastes and sensations. It was magical, so present and glowing reality.

Then a woman gave a demonstration on Japanese Ikibani, flower arranging. The two main stems, heaven and man, then the flower, earth. The stillness and arrangmenet meant to stop you in your tracks and point you toward eternity. It’s a doorway, a symbol that juts you beyond time and space and wakes you up to the now. Somehow I find lately everything is doing that - mountains, trees, chairs, flowers and art. Children's faces and even war and terror.

Later I drove to have lunch at Chipotle and conversed with the women in Spanish for my lunch. I stopped off at Guiry’s for art supplies before heading to my body work session.

I was blown away by this session and the depth of knowledge this guy, Jeff, knew. I had met him the weekend after my ayahuasca ceremony. Feeling self love gushing, I went to get a hair cut. I was early to the salon so I ducked in next door for a 10-minute massage for the pain in my neck I had from doing all the hot yoga classes and stretching the muscles so deeply only for me to stop taking the classes due to getting busy with kids and life again and for the muscles to cramp up severely and cause agony in the spot in my choulder from my car accident was 17 years ago and was nagging me all through the movie Avatar. So I had decided to do something about it and that's how I met Jeff.

I learned about my transverse abdominus muscle and how pregnancy separated it and was causing the destabilization in my pelvis and my organs and issue in my ascending colon because of undigested food! The work he did was hard to pin down, he had such an interesting style but I was so impressed with his deep knowledge of anatomy, the nervous system and how the body functions. I did decompression breathing, deep breathing all the way to the nerves in my head and slow exhalations, five per minute. He held the area of my udyaya banda and wehre the abdominal muscles separated and it was an incredible feeling. Like a psychic hole that was leaking out energy had been closed. And as he said, “You will be like before you were a mother.” Like a virgin again! So there is something to that process! It is an energetic feeling at the uterine, abdominal level. I also felt in one position as I looked down my body from the position on the table as if I were back in the hospital giving birth at one point. So powerful is the body’s memory. It was very real and huge. I felt so calm and peaceful and aligned after leaving there. And I naturally Googled everything on the muscle and what to do about it and look forward to more sessions because it’s so healing! I swear, all my health problems related to that issue! And I had no idea! And my son will be 12 this month!!!

And the Bohemian Bombshell never has felt more comfortable in her body, even thought she is plump, by Goddess she is full, FULL! Full I say! Full of life and it courses through her body, her breasts, belly, thighs, hips and arms. It just radiates life and all the good food of the earth moving through her in grace.

The Queen returned to her castle and found the King’s heart there. She knew that it was only a matter of time before the King’s body, mind and soul caught up and were here completely at the castle. And she’s so exited about that. But the Queen is at Peace. She’s at peace with everything right now. And she’s ticking down the days until the King finally arrives.

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.