To Love and Let Go

by Rachel Brathen

  Dennis dried himself off and sat down next to me on the beach.

  “Want to go for something to eat?” he asked.

  We ended up at a Thai place and sat for hours, eating vegetable rolls and yellow curry, drinking Singhas, and talking. Neither of us wanted the night to end.

  When finally the restaurant started closing up, we reluctantly got up to pay the bill. We stood outside the restaurant, neither of us wanting to leave. “Want to go for a drive?” he asked. Silly question. We drove with the windows down, his hand on the clutch, my feet on the dashboard. We got to a lookout and stepped out of the car. What looked like a thousand lights glittered in the distance. Suddenly we were out of words. He stepped closer and for the longest time we stood like that, close, but not touching. I felt like I was on the cusp of something momentous. Part of me knew: If I kiss this man there’s no turning back.

  “Maybe we’ll see some shooting stars,” Dennis said as we stood and looked up at the sparkling canvas. “I’ve never seen one,” I said.

  It was true. In all my nights spent traveling, I’d never once caught a shooting star. Andrea used to call me bad luck. “We never see them when Macha is around!” she’d say whenever we gathered on the beach for bonfires at night. Well. Standing there on that lookout, on a small Caribbean island that I’d probably never set foot on ever again, I decided to make one final wager with the universe. If we see a shooting star, I’ll kiss him. A second later a star shot across the sky, leaving a long trail of bright orange glitter behind. In an instant, our lips met. I don’t know who kissed whom, but he tasted like salt water and sunshine.

  After five beautiful days together, it was time for me to return to Costa Rica. By then I had been gone for a while and Andrea had taken Quila from the beach in Dominical to San José. I was embarrassed. I’d literally just taken off on a whim and left my whole life behind. I felt so irresponsible. Andrea didn’t seem to mind. She was stoked to see me.

  We decided to spend a week back in Dominical. I’d assumed that while I was there, I’d try to get a new house to rent and start working at the bar again.

  Our time at the beach was epic. I was back in my element, with the person I loved most in the world. We meditated every morning, went to the waterfalls, swam naked, sang, chanted, and played with the dogs—Andrea’s two and my Quila. Our evenings were spent hanging out with our old friends, dancing, sitting around fires. Life was good.

  Still, every day I thought about Dennis, but I couldn’t imagine what we had working out. We hadn’t spoken since I’d left Aruba two weeks earlier—who knew if he was even thinking about me? One morning I woke up from a dream about him—again—and told Andrea about it.

  “Call him!!!” she said. “See what happens. Part of me feels like you just need to chill and be alone. But this guy! What is it about this guy? You are dreaming about him every night. Just call him. Let the universe decide what’s next.”

  I didn’t have a phone, so I took a few hundred colones and walked to a pay phone across the street. I dialed Dennis’s number. My hands turned sweaty when the phone started ringing. He picked up right away. Just hearing his voice made my heart race.

  “Hey, it’s Rachel!” I said. “I’ve been thinking about you.”

  “I’ve been thinking about you, too,” he said. “A lot.”

  My face flushed. He had been thinking about me!

  “So, I was thinking, maybe I’ll come back to see you?” I said, holding my breath.

  “Yeah, that would be good,” he replied.

  “Tomorrow?” I asked, half joking.

  “Yes, tomorrow is good! I’ll pick you up at the airport?”

  “See you soon,” I said, hanging up.

  From where I stood, I could see Andrea waiting on our balcony.

  “I’m going to Aruba!” I shouted.

  She ran down the stairs and jumped me in the street. “Aruba! Aruba! Aruba!” we shouted, bouncing up and down.

  I booked a flight for the next morning, before I got the chance to change my mind. Andrea and I drove back from the beach to San José that same night, arriving very late. We shared her bed and I woke up in the morning with her arm in my face. When she dropped me off at the airport I got strangely emotional. I was on my way to Aruba to be with some guy I barely knew, when I could have stayed there and continued my life with her, my best friend.

  Andrea grabbed my shoulders and looked me in the eyes. “This is all going to be amazing,” she said. “Trust it.”

  I relaxed, but only a little. “But what if he’s some kind of psychopath?” I asked.

  “Well. If he is a psychopath, he’s a really cute one.”

  Leave it to Andrea. We hugged, and I was off.

  let go

  7

  * * *

  LISTEN

  Dennis was waiting for me at arrivals, wearing a bright green T-shirt. We hugged and headed to his place, a little house he rented with his best friend, Cado. Things between us got intense quickly, but it was an entirely different feeling from the infatuations I’d experienced before. For the first time, I didn’t feel the need to run, or go looking for the next thing. Lying in Dennis’s arms at night, I could feel my body relax in a way it never had. I felt at home. At peace. Dennis felt like an anchor in my messy life.

  I’d only been living on the island for about a month when I saw a tiny puppy in a trash can on the side of the road. I figured him to be two or three weeks old. His legs looked like toothpicks, his belly was swollen, and his fur was dirty and matted. I fell instantly in love. I brought the puppy home, fed and bathed him, and left him in an open moving box with a note for Dennis: “Don’t get angry—we’ll discuss it later.”

  I didn’t know how he would react—we’d only been dating for a month—but when I got back home I found Dennis sitting with the puppy on his lap, tears in his eyes. It had been love at first sight for him, too. We tried to decide on a name for our new little family member. Dennis wanted to name him Dynamite; I liked Yogi. We settled on Sgt. Pepper (Pepper for short) after our favorite Beatles album. Dennis’s dog, Laika, loved the puppy, too. Poor Cado. Living with two dogs and a couple who were newly in love was not what he had bargained for and soon he found a place of his own.

  While I figured out what I wanted to do with my life, I took two part-time jobs, as a server and a bartender. After a few weeks of my working nights while Dennis worked days, we decided it wasn’t working—we barely saw each other. I went to the beach to meditate on what I really wanted to do or “be.” What did I truly love? I asked myself. If I was going to settle on this island and spend several hours a day working, it had to be something that brought me joy. The answer that came to me was undeniable. Yoga. I wanted to teach yoga. My yoga practice had become a huge part of my life and every morning I would roll my mat out on our little patio to stretch and move with my breath. I’d already taught some classes in Costa Rica and could feel a dream forming. What if I could teach yoga for a living?

  I got a job working in reception at a small studio on the island and slowly began teaching some classes, using books and senior teachers to guide me. Eventually I got a job teaching at a resort, and with time, my classes got so popular I was promoted to yoga director of the hotel. I completely immersed myself in the yoga world. I didn’t have any official training, but the sum of my book learning, personal practice, classes, and workshops had paid off. Teaching came easy to me; it felt like something I was supposed to have been doing all along. The next step was training to get certified.

  By then, I had been in Aruba for nine whole months. The course I chose was in Costa Rica. With the blessing of my employer, I signed up to go and flew on the return ticket I’d never used when I left Costa Rica to see Dennis, thinking I would soon return. My plan was to stay with Andrea before my three-week teacher training in the jungle, after which Dennis would meet me for vacation, and then we had planned to pack up my things and return to Aruba with Quila.

  I got to San José and Andrea
picked me up at the airport. I was so happy to see her. We spoke on Skype all the time and texted almost every day, but I’d missed spending quality time with my best friend. We spent the next few days together, hashing out the details of her latest relationship and mine with Dennis. “Remember when you worried that maybe he was a psychopath?” she reminded me. We both laughed. I thought about how quickly my life had shifted. And something within me had shifted, too; something Andrea noticed. I was calmer, steadier, she said. Having Dennis in my life had helped to ground me.

  When it was time for me to leave for my training, Andrea dropped me off at the bus station and I set off to my next adventure. I was super excited, and nervous to start teacher training. It took place at a retreat center in Puerto Viejo, on the Caribbean side of the country. I walked to the first session, giddy with anticipation. The deck was in the middle of the jungle and we were a group of thirty women, sitting mat to mat in a circle. When the teacher walked in, the atmosphere felt almost holy.

  Lori was in her fifties, with hair that was pulled back in a tight knot. She greeted us, then sat on her mat and placed her hands together at her heart in anjali mudra, the heart before the heart. The room was silent. Right as she was about to speak, she noticed a bug on her mat and smashed it. Whack! I gasped. The teacher killed a bug!? On her yoga mat? I’d always felt an innate reverence for animals and insects and never even killed a mosquito. The first of the five yamas, the moral, ethical, and societal guidelines for yogis, is ahimsa—the practice of non-harm. Surely that included bugs! I knew right then that I had the wrong teacher. It was downhill from there.

  I always advise people who are looking for a new teacher to find one with whom they can imagine meeting for a cup of tea. For me, that was not Lori. One day she was talking about the challenges of being a yoga instructor and used me as an example. “Some of you are going to have to learn some hard lessons,” she said. “Rachel, for instance, is going to have to learn that there is more to yoga than just looking pretty.” All eyes turned to me. My face was burning. Yoga was more than looking pretty? What? Why did she think that of me? I owned all of two pairs of yoga pants, never wore any makeup, and kept my long hair tied back for practice. I didn’t understand why she would talk about me in that way, but I was deeply wounded by her comment and spent the rest of the training trying to divert attention from myself while sticking to the program.

  Every day of the two-hundred-hour course had a theme so we could immerse ourselves in different styles of yoga. I was most curious about Kundalini. I remembered what Kim, the Kundalini teacher from the farm who’d attended the ayahuasca ceremony with me, said about it. The practice consisted of a repetition of simple poses and intense breath work that released powerful energy from the spine up through the crown of the head, merging with the divine and, if we’re lucky, resulting in enlightenment. “It can be overwhelming, and there are too many people teaching who shouldn’t be,” Kim had said.

  I’d learned that Lori taught Kundalini infrequently and I was nervous when we stepped on our mats. The group dynamic was off—I didn’t feel safe. We started moving, doing simple poses in repetition. I immersed myself in my body and breath and before I knew it, I’d lost track of time. At the end of the practice we were seated in meditation, and I felt as if my hands and feet were on fire—similar to the feeling I’d had during the cacao ceremony. An intense sadness came over me and I started having visions. Suddenly I saw people I’d lost throughout my life descending from above, landing on the yoga deck in front of me: my stepfather, Stefan, who died in the plane crash; my grandfather on my mother’s side, who’d passed away before I was born; Marianne, my mom’s stepmother, who’d lost her battle with cancer when I was a teenager. When I tried to reach for them, they moved farther away. Overcome with deep feelings of grief and despair, I began to cry so hard I couldn’t breathe. I lost connection with the earth below me and felt myself being swallowed up by a dark, gray cloud.

  When I opened my eyes again, three hours had passed. It was almost dark and the deck was empty. I gathered my things and walked toward the retreat center. I was almost back when I heard a voice call to me.

  “Hey! You!”

  I lifted my gaze and saw a woman standing on the steps of a neighboring cabin. I recognized her as the resident healer. She worked at the center giving massages and doing energy work.

  “Do you want to come in for a second?” she asked.

  I nodded, almost in a daze, and slowly walked up the steps. She ushered me inside and to the back of the cabin.

  “Lie down,” she said, pointing to a soft table.

  I laid on my back and she started chanting and working on me with crystals and essential oils. Little by little, I started feeling normal again. When it was over, she invited me to stay for tea.

  “What happened to you?” she asked. “I saw you walk by . . . I felt you walk by. I’ve never felt such low, heavy energy surrounding a person. I’m not sure what happened to you, but you were not in your body at all. And not in a good way.”

  I explained about the Kundalini session: the visions I’d had and the feeling of despair that overcame me. She was angry.

  “That is so irresponsible!” she cried. “These are sensitive energies to mess with. And they just left you like that? No one to support you? All alone?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  The woman looked deeply troubled. “Some people are very sensitive to this type of work and can easily drop into the Kundalini energy,” she said. “It’s clear that you are such a person. With time and practice you’ll learn how to harness it and turn it toward light, but for someone who is inexperienced, you can become overwhelmed and swallowed up by it.”

  I listened intently as she continued. “It seems to me that you have a very strong ability to connect with the other side—a good quality to have, but without direction, it can be outright dangerous. Promise me: Never move into this type of work without making sure you resonate with your teacher.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  I finished the teacher training a few days later with my certificate in hand, having learned a critical lesson. Trust what your body tells you when you encounter a new person. If your gut reaction tells you it isn’t right, follow that instinct. And most important: do your research before investing in anything that relates to your heart. Listening to your intuition takes practice and sometimes we have to move into a gray area to truly figure out where our boundaries are. I will never study under a teacher I don’t trust deeply ever again, but I’m grateful for the lessons it brought me.

  • • •

  Dennis met up with me in San José and finally got to meet Andrea for the first time when we picked him up at the airport. It was a big moment—my best friend meeting the man of my dreams—and I was anxious. What if they didn’t like each other? Dennis kissed me, then picked up Andrea in a big bear hug.

  “Finally we meet!” he said.

  In the car, we talked and laughed as if it had always been the three of us. In just a few hours, they had developed their own inside jokes—many at my expense.

  “What’s it like living with a person who chews with her mouth open all the time?” Andrea asked, elbowing Dennis.

  He rolled his eyes. “I thought I was the only one who noticed! It drives me crazy! She chews like she has nuts and bolts in her mouth! It’s so loud!”

  I pretended to be offended, but I was thrilled. They were acting like brother and sister.

  “He is so handsome,” Andrea said when we were alone. “I love him! He is the one for you! Do you feel it?”

  “I do,” I said, blushing.

  She rested her head on my shoulder. “Does this mean you’re never coming back?” she asked. “No more gemela time?”

  We both wiped away tears.

  “You’re my best friend,” I said. “I’ll never be far.”

  At the end of my stay, Dennis and I gathered up Quila and headed home to Aruba with a renewed sense of purpose: we really were a
couple now. I hadn’t just showed up to visit and stayed with him—I’d actually made the commitment. I even had my dog. We moved to the cutest little place surrounded by a huge garden with three mango trees, a large patio, and palm trees lining the house. We were a family. Dennis, me, and our dogs.

  love

  8

  * * *

  GROUND

  Dennis and I spent the next year in total bliss. Yet for all of the good that was happening in my life, bad things seemed to follow me. I hadn’t had much contact with my family after I left Sweden, except for occasional phone calls. My sisters, who were young kids when I left, were growing up quickly. Hedda was newly into her teenage years and, according to my mom, not doing well. She was drinking and suffered from bouts of depression. Mom called crying one day to tell me that Hedda had tried to kill herself. I was devastated. “I think she needs to come see you for a while,” my mother said. “She needs her big sister now, and some sunshine.” I loved my baby sister and said that of course she could come. My history, after all, was one of trying to rescue others, and I felt especially responsible for my siblings.

  When Hedda arrived I couldn’t believe my eyes. Her skin was so pale it was almost blue, and she had dark circles under her eyes. She wore heavy black makeup and her hair was dyed bright turquoise. I ran up to her in the arrivals hall at the airport and squeezed her tight. Choking back tears, I held on to her tiny body, but she barely hugged me back. I was stunned when we got into the car and she took off her sweater, revealing angry red scars on her arms. They looked like the lines in a notebook. Hedda was cutting herself. I looked away, trying to focus on the road.

  “Are you happy to be here?” I asked.