Somehow everything looks different

It’s a warm rainy Monday for January. My last one in Nashville for a while. The car is in the shop getting herself all dolled up for the trip West. I am sipping a 2nd cup of coffee, turning lukewarm quicker than I'm ready for.

Friday I begin my journey West, or perhaps it is a resuming of one. One could argue it began in September when we moved Northwest of the city. Or from Brooklyn several years ago.  But I am being farsighted, there is my 19th century ancestor Karen Heier Braäten immigrating from Norway. And the Huguenot ancestors escaping the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Who’s arguing. It’s begun.

The last five years of my life have been primarily about recovering from the trauma of spiritual and sexual abuse within the yoga community, my Me Too story. Many of the choices I have made in that time, or been unable to make, have been at least influenced, if not governed, by that story. The story that reminds us of our shame, unworthiness, and powerlessness and undermines our ability to trust, feel safe, to make decisions with faith. It is also perhaps a crack that allows the light to get in (Leonard Cohen “Anthem”). I have been tying and untying the strings of that story with the support of others, communities. I have relearned what safety feels like and relearned trust. I have met incredible courageous beings in all corners of my life and had the opportunity to cultivate caring and soulful relationships with them. And I am constantly discovering faith, or being knocked over the head with it.

This is not the first time I have sought a new way of life and hoped for transformation, fingers crossed. There was New York in Aug 2001. There was New York the 2nd time newly attached to my life partner. There was an epic biking journey across country. There was a tunnel vision leap into a yogic spiritual tradition. There was Nashville, land of Honky Tonks and the Trail of Tears. What promises that this threshold is different from all the other beginnings?

Because I am awake. That has been the biggest transformation. I am farther from the business of trying to fix myself, of stamping out parts of myself, so that I could be worthy to love and be loved. I am stepping out from the “trance of unworthiness” (Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance). Somehow through the grace of Mystery/Higher Power/Beloved (God as you understand God please) and the way she shows up through all the beings in my life, I have learned to be nurtured and receive love through that crack, in spite or because of. Learned that I am loved, lovable, and loving. I don’t really know how it happened, but I have walked through some door that I could only intellectually imagine. And so this journey is beginning from a different place. Where the strings attached are the threads of an incredible web of nurturing persons who have, sometimes at great personal sacrifice, spoken directly into my heart and whispered, sung, or hollered in their own way “I love you. I believe in you. I accept you. Now fly.”

Somehow everything looks different from this place.