Antarayas (obstacles)

  

Klesas (afflictions) and antarayas (obstacles) issue from cluttered vritts, which form the basic material for spiritual evolution rejecting these means rejecting the path as well.  All these impediments are blessing in disguise on the journey of realization of purusa (soul).

BKS Iyengar, Core of the Yoga Sutras

 

The experience of helping my mother move into assisted living has given me a deeper experience of faith and courage and the deep interior presence which support this.   

 

I had been worried about my mother for several years now as her cognitive abilities have declined.  I did not know how I was going to find and afford care for her when she lost her ability to care for herself.  She did not want to talk to me about it preferring to focus on the funeral after she died rather than the help she might need in getting there.  But when things began to unravel for her this fall and then more rapidly this winter, I had to step in to figure out what to do. There were so many obstacles from finances to family members trying thwart things and my own grief over what was happening. I did not feel up to this challenge and in my despair wished that someone else could take over.

 

But there was no one else who could do this for my mother.  And deep inside I knew that it was a burden that I was called to carry as her only child, for the life she had given me, and the lifetime of love.  It has been painful and frustrating these last several years to see the changes in my mother, her resistance to my helping her, and the psychic distance opening up between us as she withdrew into confusion.  But in her vulnerability, made so much more acute in her recent decline, something tender opened up between us.  It felt to me like the flow of love we had with each other when I was a child and she was a soft and beautiful presence surrounding my growing. This flow more than anything pulled me forward these last months when the obstacles kept coming and felt insurmountable.

To move forward against the obstacles, I had to give up needing things to go a certain way.  This would be like fighting the rock like obstacle with another rock.  In surrendering the outcome, I found a fluidity which allowed me to flow around obstacles, find alternatives, move forward into the unknown.

 I allowed feelings of grief and despair to expand so I might feel them fully.  Allowing them space and presence gave me the courage to take the next steps with flexibility and possibility. As I allowed the grief to make me tender, I felt welling up inside of me an inner presencing which held and buoyed me even as I felt incapable and afraid. 

As I continued to take the next step, I found in me a gratitude for this chance to help my mother, to carry this burden as a testament and honor for her life. The poetic image that comes to me is of my mother and I walking side by side towards the shore of the ocean at sunset.  I will not be able to follow her to the horizon. This is as far as I will go for now.  It is enough to be by her side at this edge.