Parinama

I keep a beloved picture of my grandmother Philly on the wall of my yoga room.  In this picture, she is holding my newborn daughter for the first time.  Philly is dressed in a white floral patterned house dress and wears a wristwatch on each hand even though she can no longer keep track of time.  Her hair, white as snow now and wiry, is combed back from her still smooth olive-skinned face.  My daughter also dressed in a pink floral dress onesie is entwined in my grandmother’s arms, her chubby arms and legs flowing out from the tender embrace of her great grandmother.  Their eyes lock onto each other’s, in wonder and newness and also reunion. Not as much strangers but prodigal intimates. When this picture was taken, Philly had been living in a nursing home for seven years.  It wasn’t an easy place to visit let alone live in, sharing a room with another ill, frail, or confused resident with only a thin curtain separating the beds and the shared bathroom. Duri...

“These long months and years were leading me where I could not have predicted.” Henri Nouwen Life unfolds in so many strange and unexpected ways.   When we are in the first stages of life, it can seem as if all is under our own control. If we work hard at this or that, surely life will turn out as we hope, want, and plan.  And when things eventually turned out as planned, happiness and contentment will surely follow.  But even while I needed this kind of hope when I was younger, to make my way in the world, not all of me felt this way.  Deeper down uneasiness, anxiety, and shame had always broken through into the hope, making me feel like I was failing, that things were about to fall apart.  It has taken such a long time, a lifetime of work, to find some freedom from this illusion of self-control, the self-imprisonment of shame, the fear of failure. But necessary work without which I/we surely would become more brittle, closed, and imprisoned as we age. The...

It is amazing how estranged we can feel from the bodies in which we have lived our entire lives. How often and completely we can forget the miracle of how our bodies hold our aliveness in the perfect balance of breath, blood, bone, and cell, moving us through the world with grace and purpose. Surely, it is the spirit itself that gives me my next breath.  These are the bodies through which we hold one another with care, skin to skin, offering food, shelter, and companionship. All that we will ever feel in this life will flow through this body, every tender kiss and tear, each heartbreaking loss, all our strength, shame, pride, and frailty. But I forget this on a daily and moment to moment basis living too much of my life on the outskirts of my own embodiment.  I am afraid of feeling so much, of not feeling enough. My body sometime cathedral, sometime prison, friend, enemy, and stranger.  When dissociation takes hold, I can sometimes feel as if I am not in my body but walki...

  A recent discussion with a spiritual director gave me the chance to explore how my irritation and impatience with people covers a tender longing for deeper connection.  I have a picture of how I want to be connected with another or with a group.  There is a longing to be seen, accepted, and even cherished.  I want to be a celebrated guest! And there is also a longing to reciprocate this love and cherishing, to celebrate the gifts, wonder, and life of another.  I long for there to be no friction between me and my beloveds. When the experience of relationships falls short of my longings, as they necessarily will given how unrealistic my expectations are, I can feel letdown, marginalized, ignored.  I can feel angry at the person or group who has ‘let me down’ and ashamed of myself for wanting too much, for being selfish and ungrateful. Suffering from a feeling ‘not enoughness’ in these relationships, there is an urge to withdraw from engaging and participati...