yoga

The Empath


Did you ever watch Star Trek Next Generation?

We did.

Well, Rob did on his own in his previous life here and there, and I did on my own in my former existence in Iowa. Another instance of the eerie way our data banks contain common touch points that supersede the need for us to have “grown up” together.

On the show, one of the characters is an empath. Deanna Troi was half-human and half Betazed. Betazeds were telepaths and empaths. In effect they read the minds and emotions of those around them. Deanna was just an empath. She sensed only feelings. I never envied the ability to perceive feelings as much as the ability to read minds. Being bombarded by the emotional stew of the middle school I worked in wasn’t high on my list of need-to-do’s. Little teens project loudly enough without a teacher needing an added psychic enhancement in her arsenal of weapons.

One of the women in my yoga teacher training is an empath.

Yes, empaths exist outside the world of make-believe.

She woke up with the ability after being hit by a car. Quite a remarkable story without the extra sensory perception angle. The accident nearly cost her an arm and doctors told her she would never regain its use, but she re-habbed herself essentially using yoga and has close to full mobility today.

She told us all this during the introductions on the first weekend and though I was curious about her empath ability, I made it a point not to get too near her, especially after the first practice when she announced,

“I can feel the pain radiating all around me.”

Not clear on what kind of pain or whether she was one of those who can sense illness as well (some empaths can tell if you are sick. I’ve learned about a gentlemen down in Redwater that some folk around The Fort see who has diagnosed cancers and other equal nasty illnesses), I decided that the whole thing was too creepy for me. And I live in a haunted house remember, so the shiver factor has to be high to repel me.

Yesterday at Anatomy however, I ended up sitting not too far from her and during a break was drawn into a conversation where her ability came up.

A younger lady, maybe Mick’s age, has back issues and I observed the Empath run her hand side to side along the girl’s affected areas, drawing out pain. She doesn’t touch the skin at all. Her hand is about two inches away from any sort of contact. The girl’s eyes widened and she flinched away a bit.

“Wow,” was all she could say.

Mentally I noted to increase my distance in future and then the conversation turned to me,

“I was practicing next to you on the last weekend,” she said.

I hadn’t noticed. Really need to be more aware, I thought. The practices in February were brutal. Two plus hours and lots of hanging in asanas.

“Your ankles were just screaming.”

I acknowledged my ankle weaknesses though truthfully, it’s just the right that is painful – and most of the time – though I have been accustomed to it and don’t notice unless I have really been working it.

She nodded and her look was a mix of pity, sorrow and sympathy.

Run away, my mind said. This person is way too sensitive and I have a sneaking suspicion it is not just physical ailments that she can intuit.

I can be, when I am  paying attention, a fairly astute judge of people’s interiors. Probably related to my psychic “sight” but maybe not. The ability to sense spirit activity might be some different awareness all together. But I find the empath thing a bit scary in the same way I find palm readers and psychic readings a bit off-putting. I am not certain that we should have “heads up” on things. The future may be limited in actual directions and choices due to much of what we have already chosen and paths we have taken, but there is still some play that could be compromised by foreknowledge.

It’s like Greek mythology. Over and over in the myths there are gods and humans with peeks into their destiny who try to change or stop them but they never do. In fact they make things worse for themselves than if they’d simply prepared and faced the prophecies head on.

I will not be getting cozy with the Empath,  I think*.

* Updated to add: I did find myself working with her in small groups and sitting right next to her at the weekend in March. I am going to admit to have been a bit too quick to queasy and, in fact, overly dramatic when I wrote this post originally. Living, as I do, in house where spirits turn lights on, sometimes stomp and bang and occasionally jump on my bed – while I am in it – and have even spoken to me, I am completely in line with the idea of  everything is essentially one and that we are all tied together whether we know it or not. So I am careful in places that I sense are “alive” and with people who are even more attune to the flow of energy than I am.

I am such a contradiction. I can write nearly anything personal about myself, but in real life, I miss my barriers. I miss them because I have found that I can’t step out and away from interaction and keep to myself as was my wont in years gone by.

The Empath is a very kind person and it’s easy to see that her awareness is a burden though she manages it with far more grace than I think most people would. I think, in addition to the fact that I would rather not be “known” but “reveal” on my own terms, I don’t want to be a source of pain to her. I have a creaky old body. Worse for the wear of the last decade. Universe forbid that anyone have to deal with it than I.

Opportunity


In Sondheim’s Into the Woods a line comes up again and again,

opportunity is not a lengthy visitor.

In my opinion, it’s not a frequent visitor either though it does often seem to follow the old saying – when it rains, it pours.

On Tuesday I was offered a presenter’s spot at the upcoming Strathcona Writer’s Workshop in April, and on Wednesday, my yoga teacher asked if I felt ready to teach as she’d been offered a couple of after school jobs at local elementaries that she didn’t have time for herself.

Solid opportunities that I am taking, but it feels a bit odd coming from my background of conventional nine to five work. Free-lancing is such an artsy thing though in truth, I have become a rather artsy person in many ways. Manner, dress and mild distaste for the scrambling that goes on in the pursuit of lifestyle.*

It’s a fortunate space I occupy at the moment to be able to do what I want to do. Not a place I would have envisioned a decade ago. The Des Moines school district, where I taught, is very likely to savagely cut its teaching staff in the next 8 weeks. Even with twenty-three years of seniority, I might not have been safe from that and my mother and BFF tell me that the lay of the land is grim. I wonder at the twists and turns that spirited me away from all that and why.

My writer friend, Abby, once commented that it appeared I was meant to be here in Canada. Some higher purpose? Giving talks on blogging and teaching kids yoga? A dubious purpose, but it could be that humans have the idea of destiny and purpose confused with World of Warcraft questing.

Getting back out into some hippy mom version of the world of employment feels okay though.

*And I mean the choice of lifestyle that many of those around me engage in. I know from experience that for a lot of people work isn’t, and has never been, a matter of anything other than survival.

It’s Probably Just Me


I don’t like being a “dance mom”. Two nights a week I haul the girl into town and pass time sitting on a cement floor while people I pay pretend to teach her to dance. Dance is just another version of those horrifying child beauty pageants. It’s all about outfits, costumes, hair and make up. Dance is incidental.

The ancillary stuff dominates. At the beginning of the year, the moms anguished over the ballet uniform: hair up in bun, black leotard, pink ballet shoes and ballet pink tights (yeah, it’s its own colour). Some of the girls weren’t dressed out properly and moms who’d been lectured on their own daughter’s dress code violations were stewing none too silently over what they saw as preferential treatment.

I’ll cop to being one of the privileged moms. Dee’s dance instructor doesn’t approach me with complaints on the odd day that I don’t get Dee’s hair into a bun, but that has more to do with my “who fucking cares” demeanor and the fact that I am 46 and  the teacher is just 18 than anything else.

“Why do you care what a teenager thinks about whether or not your child arrives properly dressed every time?” I asked. “Sometimes life gets in the way. The laundry didn’t get done or we didn’t have time to put hair up. It happens. No high schooler is going to lecture me on parenting.”

Unsurprisingly, none of the other moms had a response to that.

The current crisis concerns the costumes for the girls’ ballet festival performance. Festivals are weekend time sucks where dance schools gather and compete for bragging rights. I will miss both festivals this spring due to conflicts – yoga training weekends – thus saddling Rob with “dance mom” duty. He has been quite Dalai Lama about it.

Harry Potter inspired the choreography and it’s cute really. After 4 years of ballet, it finally appears as though Dee is actually dancing, but the costume is a mish-mash and two of the mothers aren’t pleased with the full effect. Every dance night there is a discussion about what can be done about the unacceptable costume. The poor little dance teacher keeps to the fringes because she’s afraid of simply scrapping and starting over – money has been spent and clothing purchased so far is non-returnable. She’s only 18, as I mentioned earlier, so I understand her reticence, but I am tired of the angst.

Who the fuck cares? It’s a stupid costume in a dumb festival that even a year from now, let along a hundred, won’t matter one bit.

But okay, I am not a girly, dancey, overly invested in my daughter’s hobbies kind of parent. It’s fine if you are, we all find our parenting level and rise or sink. I’ve, obviously, chosen the lower levels to dwell in, but I don’t aspire to motherhood as some kind of personal nirvana.

Against my will, I volunteered a few suggestions last evening when the discussion began to veer off into territory that might involve more personal involvement on my part. Interestingly, they were not dismissed out of hand.

More interesting, to me, was the jealous twinge I had a bit later as I sat and listened to one of the moms discussing the purchase of their new home.

In the newer suburban tract of The Fort, there is an attempt at upscale, executive type, homes. They bottom at about $500,000-ish, but keep in mind that housing prices in this neck of Alberta are stupid. Case in point, my home in Iowa – 1400 sq ft with sizable yard on a cul-de-sac sold for $163,900 at the beginning of the housing bubble burst. That same house here? Probably $350,000. People here pay, without a second thought, for slapped together shite on postage stamp lots in neighbors so choked with trucks, SUV’s and holiday trailers that parking is a nightmare in the residential areas. I will give Canadians this one kudo – they are fanatics about green spaces, bike/walking paths and parks, but neighborhoods might as well be tenements given the lack of space between houses.

The new home owner’s daughters are friends with Dee and the mom waxed on about the new home’s spaciousness – the exec housing is on three-quarter acre lots and have stupid amounts of square footage in addition to all the other superficial things like the upgraded flooring, counters, bath accessories and three/four car garages.

I don’t have counter top envy. Granite? Whatever. I do have space envy.

I’ve mentioned previously, and on numerous occasions, that in my last house I had very little furniture. I fought against the accumulation of it. My mother and MIL couldn’t grasp not wanting a living room set. But I have always preferred sitting on the floor and in fact, sitting on the floor is anatomically better for a person in the long run. There was so much space. Sometimes I would sit on the top of the landing and just bask in the openness.

As she talked about space and de-cluttering, as she is in the midst of packing, I felt jealous.

My practical side, for which I can thank my Depression-era born father and my brush with bankruptcy during Will’s illness, can’t fathom buying a home in Fort Saskatchewan of all places for $630,000 when the house I live in is paid for. Especially at my age in these economically dangerous times and with my level of paranoia about “what ifs”.

Still – space – the temptation.

Must think more yogically – detach!

UB mentioned the Buddhist (and its yoga premise too) idea that attachment is at the root of what we term “unhappiness”. Our inability to accept the impermanence that is all things in life holds us fast. Attachment roots and not in a good way. I have struggled with the idea but not the practice ironically.

Occasionally I comment on widow blogs. It’s not smart because I am far removed from common grief-think. Someone wrote about how being in a new relationship does not make things better and I disagreed. Falling in love with Rob and marrying again did make things better. I shouldn’t have said so out-loud because it’s heresy wide-open for misinterpretation, but I weary of the doom and gloom about the future after loss. I was “attached”, if you want to put it that way, to Will but I never believed that our marriage was anything other than time and place. We were destined to have a time and a place together that at some point one of us would leave. Everyone dies eventually. The idea that we have more than just brief moments together here and there over the course of existence is not something I question.

Sadness can balance happiness over the course of a mortal existence or one can swamp the other. I think we know going in what the general outline will be and it’s when we stomp our feet against it that life is harder than it would have been if we’d merely viewed it as transitory.

Marrying again didn’t make the fact that Will died better, it made me better. It re-grounded me, gave me an outlet for love again and bolstered my faith (I won’t say “rewarded it” because I don’t really believe in the whole reward/punishment model of existence). I think if one denies the benefits of moving on – however it manifests – it ‘s just resistance to the reality that life is impermanent and that should be re-examined for one’s own sake.

But, it’s probably just me.