grief

Over and Over: Thinking About My Reincarnate Self


During the Friday opening of our yoga training weekends, Cat always asks us if anything is new.

The reason for this is twofold. First to discover who might not be physically up to the long daily practices. This last weekend our longest practice on the Sunday ran a bit past 3 hours and the shortest on Saturday was just two.

The second reason is to discover if anything is new in other areas of our lives as yoga is about the spirit and mind as well as the body.

I’d been in a small amount of agony all week. My back muscles were in a literal twist due to smoke intermittmently choking the air in our hamlet. An atv had set off a forest fire about 30 minutes north of us and the wind carried the char as far as the city to our southwest. Bad asthma days have the potential to bind me physically as well as clog my airways.

I kept that to myself though. I was determined to practice. I have practiced every day now for a bit over a month. Even on my worst days last week, I crawled onto my mat and did something.

As Cat surveyed the room, yoga face greeted her but no one volunteered until Rie spoke up.

Rie is different, as my daughter would say. I find her a bit tiring. She talks almost non-stop when not engaged in the actual asana practice  and she is someone who has done that, been there and likes to share.

A former body-builder and self-made business woman of considerable means, she’s trained in India and I think I could appreciate her knowledge base more if she wasn’t prone to talking over people or interrupting. Not that I think she does this maliciously or dismissively. She’s just really excited and enthusiastic. All the time.

“I’ve got something to share,” she piped up. “I’ve been remembering my past lives. It’s so cool. I’m realizing that I know or have been meeting people I’ve known before in other existences.”

Silence.

Cat’s face freezes in a half-smile and wide eyes that seem to be begging anyone to respond so she doesn’t have to.

Fortunately, Rie doesn’t seem to need or expect a response and the class continues as Cat quickly leads us into opening meditation.

Past lives. I have covered this a bit here and there. I don’t believe in soul mates. That, in my opinion, is a modern invention that has led us to the current level of dissatisfied dysfunction in relationship terms in our society. The idea that a world that has billions of souls on it at every given time can mathematically produce only one match person is ludicrous.

For a while, I preferred “kindred spirits” because even though I think soul mates is a very junior high/Romeo and Juliet thing, I can’t quite dismiss the idea that sometimes you meet someone and you simply click – without preamble or any discernible cause for doing so.

I read a few books that Rob has that talked about the idea that we travel through our earthly existences in groups that reconfigure with each pass and it felt “right” to me. The book called these compatriots a “soul group” and discussed how each of us comes into life with an outline of who we should strive to connect with and what tasks we have to do and what personal issues we need to improve upon.

As I thought about Rie’s revelation, it occurred to me why I have felt so isolated for most of my life – I am going it pretty much alone in this existence. I rarely meet people and feel a connection. Mostly I feel cut off and out-of-place as though I am not normally “here” but should be somewhere else on the globe and hanging with a different crowd.

Canada is one of the few places I have been that didn’t feel foreign. New York City was another place to which I didn’t get that “brand new” feel. I feel comfy in the mountains and at home in/on the water – any kind of water. Victoria felt familiar, which isn’t odd because like NYC, it is coastal.

Not many people feel comfy. I have to learn people and often I am not driven to do so because – and this is just a guess – most of the people I’ve met over the course of my life aren’t part of my outline.

Will was someone I’ve known – though I don’t think we’d ever been married before or even romantic partners. His illness and death were part of my outline – tasks for me and somehow I owed him this.

My mother is/was a task. I was meant to be around for her and I think for one of my nieces and nephews too.

I was supposed to teach in Des Moines. 1987 was a horrid year for new teachers. Jobs were scarce, but I’d turned down two just to wait on a the promise of a job I’d gotten from Jerry Wadden, the English Supervisor of the Des Moines Public Schools. It was a crazy thing to do and yet, I felt it was the right thing. What I was supposed to do.

There were a lot of children who passed in and out of my classroom in the first ten years for sure whose lives I know I changed. Kids who’d never had a good school experience and thought they were stupid or bad, and I made the difference for them.

It was a wearying and lonely time for me though. Draining and I didn’t have the understanding of my purpose then that I do now, so I wasn’t as sanguine as I could have been about it.

Sis, BFF and probably Leslie are among the handful of “souls” I felt instant connection with but they are not part of my inner circle or path but perhaps orbited me a bit to shore my spirit up. I don’t think I am quite evolved enough to go it completely alone.

On Sunday, as I entered a discussion on past lives with a few others from the class, I had the revelation. In some lives we are one of the main characters and in others we are supporting cast.

This is my support life.

There are a few spirits who cross my path in order to pick me up a bit and there are time periods where I am allowed to shine, but mostly, I am behind the scenes.

Dee once told me – she was maybe three years old – that she chose me to be her mom again because she liked me so much the first time.

“This is the second time you’ve been my mom,” she said.

Dee is kinda to me what I was to my mother. Support. I strive though to not lean on her the way my mother did me. Despite it being my “job”, it was unnecessarily damaging and more than I should have been expected to do given how young I was when it began.

It’s one of the reasons that I was so open to the idea of remarriage. I really didn’t want Dee to ever feel responsible for me and she couldn’t avoid that if I were her only living parent.

Rob is a known. I have always felt as though we’ve known each other forever but that we’ve been separated for an inordinately long time of late.

“Maybe we only seek each other out now for respite and revitalization,” I told him the other night. “Perhaps we are workhorse souls for the time being and we only occasionally get to fulfill our hearts desires. We are like a holiday.”

Our maybe he is my holiday and I am his responsibility?

“Do you think though that we don’t pick up new soul partners as we travel?” Someone asked during that Sunday conversation.

I think we do. But I also think that some souls are part of our “natal” experiences and that anyone we pick up after will never be quite like that experience or have the same level of knowing for us.

Dee occasionally expresses her concern about my lack of companionship in terms of friendships. I sometimes wonder if this shouldn’t bother me more as well but it bothers me less and less really as time passes and I grow older. I am okay with the transient and proximal nature of my acquaintances and friends. People come and go and, probably, will again.

Patanjali Says it All


Yoga training typically culminates on a late Sunday afternoon with the Sutras. We’ve hit chapter two, which is the meat of the mental practice – because yoga is all about reaching the interior whether it be the muscles and organs or the thoughts and emotions.

We spent a great deal of time on teaching beginners, so Patanjali got shorted. Thirty-five minutes is inadequate to the task of fleshing tapas.

Tapas?

Tapas is all about the pain and the letting it go. Emphasis on “letting it go”.

Patanjali insists that we are only anchored to the physical world through the pesky inconvenience of having bodies. Bodies that are not us.  The true “me” of me is not my body at all. Therefore, all experience happens to the body and what “I” should be doing is experiencing, acknowledging and then letting it go.

Everything. Good, bad, meh and bloody awful. Feel it. Know it. Wave goodbye.

“Nothing is permanent,” Cat, our instructor, pointed out.

True. It’s our attachment to the idea that good things should have no end and bad things are unfair (I’m overly simplifying) that leads us into the mud and mires us there.

I just listened.

Not because I have no thoughts or concrete experiences to share, but because I know that this is one of those deceptively simple ideas that become nightmarishly difficult when reality envelopes a person.

“Our reactions are choices,” another woman chimed in.

Essentially, we can shape our lives through letting go or just acknowledging that all experiences are finite.

And here the conversation veered into the anecdotal experiences that, I think, aren’t helpful.

A fellow student was in a serious accident and was told by her doctors that she would never regain the use of her arm. She told us that had she listened to the doctors, she would indeed have no function, but she chose to ignore them and rehabbed herself to the point where she is now able to use her arm – not 100% – but no one could tell by simply looking at her that she has difficulties.

I hate these analogies. They are exceptions and they lead others to believe that we are all destined to be exceptions when we aren’t.

We are the rule. Sometimes reality is what it is. No exceptions.

This doesn’t preclude trying to be an exception but it does mean that more often than not, one will have to accept that they are the rule and then – let it go.

“We can change our reality,” Cat said.

But we can’t. Reality is. Sometimes all we can choose is our reactions and how to live within the reality. There are some realities that can’t be let go. They can only be managed.

Managed isn’t the best term, I’ll admit, but there are experiences that stick even though we have let them go.

Will is dead. I have a dead first husband. Not much I can do with that. Very little to work with. Certainly can’t change it.

But I can acknowledge it and let it go, knowing that its effect on me is permanent and that “letting go” might have to be revisited periodically throughout my life.

Same holds true for my classmate. If she had not been able to regain the use of her arm, she would still have had to let the experience go and live within the parameters of her altered reality.

I don’t know if Patanjali addresses this later on, but letting go is a process and it can take years or a lifetime. The choice – I believe – is the attempt to let go in the first place or to cling and not bother.

In Country


Of all the things I don’t especially care for when we venture Stateside, one of the top five is cemeteries.

We haven’t been to Will’s grave since July of ’08. It wasn’t the highlight of that depressingly horrendous trip, but it will do as a touchstone.

Dad, from where I was standing, was clearly dying that summer. Death hangs about people, telegraphs its intentions and smothers soul and reason. The air was so thick with it that I should have known better, watched my words and actions with more care. Hindsight must be an invention of the Catholic church because it’s such an effective guilt inducing tool.

Burying Will is a regret. I knew that I wasn’t staying in Des Moines. Knew it from the moment I was told he was dying that the reason that brought me to Central Iowa in the first place would soon be gone.

There have been many moments in my life where something outside me has guided me on my path. In the spring of 1987, Jerry Wadden, the English Supervisor for the Des Moines Public Schools, interviewed me for a job that he knew didn’t exist – yet. He told me plainly that he had no job for me, but he thought he would by August. Could I wait that long? Not commit to another district before I talked with him again?

’87 was an abysmal year for new teachers. The only jobs were down south and only for those who were graduating in the upper reaches of their class. I turned down two offers waiting on Des Moines. Houston, where I most certainly would have met people my age and probably have been far less lonely than I was during the first ten years I was in Des Moines, and a border straddling town in Arizona.

I waited, not because Jerry was so persuasive or that I was moved by his conviction that I was the teacher he wanted to hire that summer – he actually ended up forcing the district to hire me without having a job for me. I waited because something was telling me I needed to be in Des Moines. There were tasks awaiting me. And this impulse? would not leave me alone.

I don’t pretend to be spiritual. I am uncertain anymore about what directs the universe, but I do know enough to listen – mostly. So I waited and ended up staying in Des Moines – teaching, marrying eventually, having a child, burying a husband – before unseen forces guided me to where I am now.

Burying Will was something I did because he wanted me to do it. There was so little I could do for him, I felt guilty not giving him this one final thing. Even though it cost money I barely had established an anchor to a place I felt in the deepest part of my gut I wasn’t meant to be much longer.

On our last trip down, there wasn’t time enough to make the trek to the little country cemetery where his urn rests. Do urns rest? Really?

This time, Dee needs to be made aware that we will be coming within about 45 minutes of it and given the option to visit. I really want to break her of the notion that Will’s grave is a symbol of him. It’s a big rock in front of a shallow hole that contains a metal box with ash and bone in it. He, according to her, is the guardian angel of a baby born last summer. Before that, again according to her, he dropped in on us often. Now he can only come in when he has time off. It’s an interesting concept for a seven-year old to have come up with on her own, but since we haven’t schooled her much in the afterlife, I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, she thinks everyone goes to heaven.

She and I watched a movie called Oliver and Company. Cheesy bad animations from forever ago that twists the Dickens tale into a bizarre cautionary quasi-friendship themed fare for wee ones. The bad guys die.

“That was a good movie,” she told Rob. “And the bad guys died and went to heaven.”

Of course they died. We haven’t mentioned hell to her. She has no idea it “exists” in the whole death mythology. Everyone goes to heaven. Punishment is death itself and then there is heaven.

I dread the cemetery. My earliest memories of cemeteries are pleasant. Strolling with Dad’s mother as she introduced me to relatives and told wonderful tales that I was too young to know I should have been memorizing.

When cemeteries became somber, I had forty years of wonderful memories to overcome and have found that difficult. Hence the other part of my conflict. I want Dee to think of cemeteries as place where history and family are and not as sad obligations.

I have already told her that she doesn’t have to visit her grandfather’s grave. She knew him so much better than she did Will that her sadness is often more profound over Dad’s death than it is for Will.

It’s not helping me gear up for the journey knowing that life is in flux in the States right now either. No one seems quite as grounded or sane as I remember. Crossing the border, never pleasant, menaces. I fear something awful is about to happen and I would rather be here, in Canada, when it does.

And I am allergic. Oh, I am always allergic, but this week has seen a resurgence of vicious, sudden attacks. Eyes swelling to almost shut. Sinuses burn as if I have inhaled acid. It’s something in industrial strength cleaning solvents that causes it. That’s what happened to me when we took our trip to Victoria last fall and I encountered something at Dee’s dance school the other night which has set me off for most of this week. It tires me and is a little bit scary.

My kindly old Chinese doctor didn’t help when I saw him either. I needed refills on allergy meds, and he cheerfully recounted how two of his patients died trying to inject themselves with their epi pens. Sigh. Socialized medicine does not improve bedside manner.

Must pack and begin girding my loins.