—Paulo Coelho
I’d been thinking a lot about omens at this point. I never talked to Dana about this—I knew she would snort derisively about it if I did—but I checked our astrological charts every day and compared them. She’s a Taurus, but her moon is in Cancer, which means that she is both highly sensitive and excessively stubborn. I’m a Libra, and my moon is in Leo. I’m sensitive, too, but more malleable. I tried to look at our horoscopes to figure out which events in our marriage had been fated, and which ones we could control.
One of my coworkers had been instrumental in encouraging me to look more deeply into our lives and figure out how I could make positive changes. I worked the third shift at an ad agency doing copyediting. The agency was so big and there were so many pages of copy touting the benefits of the latest miracle weight-loss supplements and deliciously chemical energy drinks that they needed copy editors working around the clock to keep up with the volume.
I started this job in early 2006. I had been a bartender when Dana and I first moved to New York after college so Dana could go to a fancy law school. I was supposed to be making money at night so I could work on my playwriting during the day. I wrote a couple of short, semi-autobiographical plays that were produced in small theaters downtown. All my plays took place in Montana and involved a dead mother and a distant dad.
After three years I’d hit a wall, both with the writing and the tending bar. I realized I was just spewing the same small, sad story over and over again. And serving endless Jack Daniel’s shots to depressed old guys who were avoiding their wives was sucking my soul. Dana was just finishing law school and since she would be making enough money to support both of us, she encouraged me to take a break from the bar and focus on my writing full-time.
At the time I didn’t know it, but Dana’s unyielding support had a time limit. When we turned twenty-seven, I’d been writing full-time for a year and hadn’t produced a single play. The pressure to write was paralyzing. Then Dana started dropping hints.
“Both partners in a relationship should pull their own weight,” she’d say.
Or, more pointedly, “Why don’t you take a graphic design class? You’ve always been so artistically oriented and it’s something you could do for work to supplement your playwriting.”
And finally, after she came home one too many nights to find me sitting in my plaid easy chair, drinking a beer and reading Howard Zinn or Robert Pirsig, Dana said, “You need to get a real job.”
I can’t remember what I said to her in response. Probably just “Okay.” I have never been into big blowups; I’m nonviolent to the core. But I was deeply wounded by her pressuring me about work. I do remember that I slept on the couch that night, totting up all the stray comments Dana had made over the past couple of months. They weren’t addressed to me, but the subtext was glaring. Comments like, “Everyone in a household needs to make his own money.” Or “I can’t imagine sponging off someone else.”
That was the first time I realized there was a fundamental misunderstanding between us. When we were in college, I thought Dana understood me, that she respected my art as an extension of myself. But it seemed like she couldn’t comprehend that all of my studying was part of my process. Everything I read tilled the ground of my brain so that I could have a fallow space for deeper thought.
After that first entreaty for me to get a job, Dana didn’t let up. She left the house before I was awake most days, and when I got out of bed I would find job listings already queued up on my computer. I didn’t say anything, though I wish I’d had the inner courage to tell her to back off and let me do it in my own time. I just started setting up interviews.
I would trudge into various Midtown offices in the suit that Dana bought me and pretend to be eager about travel guides, or business websites, or pharmaceutical copy. After years as an unsuccessful playwright with an English degree from a liberal arts school, proofreading and copyediting were the only marginally lucrative jobs that I was remotely qualified for. I chose the job at the ad agency because it offered graveyard-shift work, and I thought that working at night gave me the best chance of playwriting during the day. It was also the only place that offered me any kind of job at all, but I tried to look at the positives of the situation and not the negatives.
Sometimes I want to go back to that moment and tell 2006 Ethan that he should fight back against complacency. That he should not take that job, because proofreading sentences like “Side effects may include clay-colored stools, decrease in urine output or decrease in urine-concentrating ability, and unpleasant breath odor” is soul-deadening work. But part of my current practice is about radical acceptance of circumstances beyond my control, so I have tried not to let myself wallow in regret.
And besides, if I hadn’t taken the job at Green Wave, I would never have met Amaya, who has introduced me to Lama Yoni and a new way of living.
I met Amaya on 6/6/06, which in the Judeo-Christian universe has dark connotations. But in numerology, six is the most harmonious of all single-digit numbers. It can symbolize perfect balance, which now makes complete sense both physically and psychically. I believe that my meeting Amaya was in some sense preordained. She started work at Green Wave about a month after I did, and she told me later she was drawn to me immediately. She sensed that I would be open to Lama Yoni’s instruction, and she was so right. Lama Yoni’s yogic teachings have given me better balance in soul and body.
That’s the only change Dana noticed in me when I started studying with Lama Yoni during the day—my body. She was working so hard she didn’t get home until eight, at which point I was at Green Wave. She knew I’d started going to the occasional yoga class during the day when she was at work, but she didn’t know how much of my life was consumed with my practice. Dana was happier assuming that I was plugging away on my latest play. She was also happier when my beer gut had been replaced with a burgeoning six-pack, and she was happiest about our athletic weekend sex. She wasn’t able to see that our physical connection was fast becoming the only thing we had in common.
DAILY AFFIRMATION: The universe is built on numbers. If I listen to those numbers, I can come to a deeper understanding of my life.
Last year it was sixes that held significance for my fate. This year it’s sevens: a number of creation, of generation. It was the twenty-seventh day of the seventh month of my practice when Lama Yoni took me into his inner sanctum for the first time.
I had been dutifully attending classes—usually Amaya’s—at Yoni’s Urban Ashram. I went to early-morning meditations, midday yoga, and afternoon indigenous culture study. But I’d never been allowed to see what went on in the back of the ashram, behind a wooden accordion door that stretched from one end of the front studio to the other.
But on the twenty-seventh day, after the meditations, I was sitting with Amaya, drinking cashew-apple-mint juice to recharge, when Lama Yoni approached us. He had never spoken to me directly before, but on that day he knelt down in front of my chair and looked me right in the eyes. There’s no other way to describe my reaction in that silent moment: I melted.
The only other time I’ve had such a reaction to another man was when my mother took me to a town hall meeting in Bozeman that Bill Clinton held when he was president. He talked about protecting federal employees, like my dad, and about health care. Afterwards, I went up to shake his hand, and he gave me the same look Yoni did—one that said, I understand, and I want to help.
Without saying anything, Lama Yoni got up from his knees and walked toward the accordion door. Amaya gestured for me to follow Lama Yoni, and I did.
We stood in silence in the center of the inner sanctum on a small, circular purple rug. The room was all white—the exposed brick walls were even painted white. The only other color besides purple came from a small shrine with a golden goddess perched near a window. Lama Yoni stood five feet away from me and met my gaze. We stared at each other so long without speaking that I kept ascribing different motivations to Lama Y
oni’s actions. My thought process was something like: Does he want to slap me? Kiss me? Is he trying to telepathically transfer some knowledge? Is this a test? What if I have to go to the bathroom? Oh god, I think I have to go to the bathroom.
All this is to say: don’t quickly dismiss a spiritual opportunity. After what must have been twenty minutes of this staring contest, my brain went to another plane. I felt like I was accessing some unused space that I could only find through true connection with a spiritual leader. I don’t know how long we ultimately stood there, but I remained in prayer pose until Lama Yoni broke eye contact. He bowed toward me so slightly he may just have been nodding his head. Then he walked slowly away, in large, deliberate steps, and sat down in front of his altar. Once his back was toward me I assumed it was my cue to leave.
Amaya was still outside the door when I emerged. She was drinking her juice and looking contemplative. It was a silent period at the ashram and so I didn’t say anything to her, but, like Yoni, she gave me a subtle nod.
I left the building in a daze. I can’t even remember how I got back to our apartment. But the same phrase kept appearing in my mind, like a mantra: God-shaped hole, God-shaped hole, God-shaped hole. It’s a phrase I hadn’t thought of since Methodist youth group. We weren’t really religious, but I attended sporadically after my mom died because my aunt Mary was worried that I wasn’t getting enough support at home. Our group leader, an earnest guy with a goatee and a guitar, would always tell us that going to church made us complete. It filled a vacuum inside us that would otherwise be empty.
At the time, I thought he was a moron, with his stupid facial hair and his Amy Grant songs. Jesus wasn’t going to fix what was wrong in my life; he wasn’t going to bring my mom back. But after locking eyes with Yoni, I finally understood what he meant. A void that I hadn’t even realized existed felt brimming. I was whole.
Dana
I was still thinking about what I had read in Ethan’s book while I waited for Lo to arrive at the mind/body workshop she was supposed to be teaching. I had been able to read only a small chunk before it got too painful. Was that really how he remembered our last New Year’s together? Yes, I’d had a little too much to drink, but I’d thought we had fun. I didn’t remember the tiff about Nikolai, or the discussion of how much I was imbibing. I remembered getting dressed that night in a silver sequined skirt and applying red lipstick. I remembered Ethan telling me how beautiful I looked. I remembered giving him that kiss before he left.
He didn’t even mention the part of New Year’s Day that we spent in bed together. We cuddled, and giggled, and ordered takeout from the Thai place down the block, and watched A Few Good Men—Ethan’s favorite movie. He thought Aaron Sorkin was a genius. Ethan said Sorkin had been a struggling playwright doing odd jobs—he even delivered singing telegrams—before he hit it big. So Sorkin was also an inspiration. I remembered finishing that day much as I started it, asleep in Ethan’s arms.
And yes, I had encouraged him to get a job. Aaron Sorkin might have had odd jobs, but they were still jobs! Ethan’s account painted me like a bossy philistine who didn’t care about his important intellectual work. When I started pushing him to get a paid position, it was not because I was coming home to find his ass sitting in that chair reading Howard Zinn or any other labor historians. I came home to him watching Law & Order reruns, playing Call of Duty, and once, memorably, hunched over his laptop with his fly open watching old episodes of Saved by the Bell.
He probably thought it served me right that he met Amaya at work. Wasn’t I the one who forced him into it? I knew about Amaya before he left me, but I thought she was just his work buddy. I guess I had known that she introduced him to the yoga classes, but it didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time. I was just glad Ethan had made a friend at work, and I was glad he was getting some exercise—and not only because it made his body fitter. Sure, I noticed the new muscles, but I wanted him to exercise so he’d live a long, healthy life with me. And what was all that zodiac nonsense? I had hardly heard him say anything like that when we were together.
To keep from seething I tried to take deep—cleansing?—breaths. Just because Ethan had misrepresented some facts, that didn’t make him the kind of person who would kill his lover.
I was taking these deep breaths when Lo entered the room quietly, almost on tiptoe. She had warm amber eyes that crinkled when she smiled, and long, wavy gray hair that she wore loose and flowing. She was really petite—I’d be surprised if she cleared five feet, and her hair grazed the top of her hips. She looked like a very old child. The title of the class she was teaching was Reviving the Feminine Spirit: Empowering Women’s Self-Renewal. I had no idea what that jumble of words meant, but I decided to take the class because Sylvia spoke so highly of Lo.
Lo sat down on a pile of pillows near the center of the room. She had perfect posture. “Namaste,” she said.
There were only three other women in the class with me, all in their fifties and sixties. “Namaste,” they parroted back. I mouthed the word along with them.
“I’m so glad to see you all here to do this important work,” Lo said. “I see we have a new face among us old-timers here today.” She smiled at me. “Please tell us your name, and what your intentions are for our work together.”
“I’m Dana,” I said. “My intentions . . .” are to find out about my dead husband from you. “Are . . . to become more centered and make sure that I leave here in better emotional shape than when I arrived.” That wasn’t even a lie, exactly.
That seemed to please Lo. She and the women around me all nodded approvingly. Lo cleared her throat and began the lesson. “Today we’re going to focus on a mind problem that vexes many women of all ages: self-loathing.” She had a soothing, somewhat mysterious alto, reminding me of Nico in the Velvet Underground, sans German accent. “When we do not love ourselves enough, it manifests itself in all sorts of bodily problems. The healer Habib Sadeghi says, ‘Illness is what happens when women, the nurturers of humanity, forget how to nurture themselves.’”
My classmates were clearly enraptured. They all seemed to be tilted forward, as if leaning toward Lo would help them hear her every word better. “The antidote to self-loathing is self-care,” Lo explained. “While our ultimate goal is to make positive change in the world, it’s impossible to do so when our basic energies are depleted. As we are all individuals, we need different kinds of care to nurture our souls.”
“Amen,” said the woman next to me.
“As this is a sharing workshop, we will go around the room and release moments when we have denied ourselves care. Whether we recognized it or not at the time, self-loathing is the root of that denial. Sharing our stories will release the self-hatred, and allow us to make room for self-love.” A sharing workshop? I thought, panicking. Did that mean I was going to have to speak? Shit, shit, shit. I wished Sylvia had warned me.
Lo turned to the “Amen” woman, who had dark hair and a strong patrician nose. “Nancy, since you’ve taken my workshops before, why don’t you start?” I was relieved she hadn’t picked me first. Maybe listening to Nancy’s sharing would help me figure out what to say.
“Okay,” said Nancy, who had a slight Southern accent. “Well, when my kids left the house, I was all set to enjoy myself. I spent twenty-five years being a mom first, and a woman second. Well, y’all, Goddess, she had other plans.” She laughed ruefully. “Six months after my youngest left for school, my mom got sick. She passed a few months ago.”
The room was completely silent as Nancy spoke. “When I was going through all that caretaking, I told myself that when it was over I would have time to myself again. I would get back to my yoga practice, which I had abandoned when Mom got sick. I thought I’d go get a haircut and maybe a pedicure. And I never get pedicures!” Nancy stuck her foot out to show us all the sorry state of her toenails, which were dry and cracking. “But I didn’t do any of that. I just sat at home. I wasn’t eating much, and I wasn’t slee
ping much, either. I felt like I didn’t know what my purpose was anymore, without someone else to put first. I guess I hated myself a little for being so useless. My husband was the one who suggested I come back here, because he remembered how centered I was when I came here a few years ago, before Mom got sick. I guess this is my first act of self-care in a long time.” Tears welled up in Nancy’s eyes. She wasn’t audibly crying. In fact, she was still smiling. She just let the tears fall.
“We’re so glad you’re here, Nancy,” Lo said. “You need to be here.” Then, barely pausing, she turned to me and said, “This whippersnapper is a brand-new student! Welcome, Dana. Can you tell us about a time in your life when you denied yourself care?” Lo’s amber eyes fixed on mine with warmth and kindness.
What was I going to tell them? I hadn’t been prepared for Nancy’s legitimately moving monologue. I hesitated for a moment, but something about Lo’s stare made me feel safe. Before my brain could make something up, I blurted out, “I haven’t had an orgasm since my husband left me.” My cheeks felt hot. Where had that even come from? I had never said those words before, not even to myself. And they were true. I wanted to crawl under the pillow I was sitting on and not come out until everyone had left the room.
But I was still looking at Lo’s face. It wasn’t judgmental or pitying. It was just open. Despite my embarrassment, the words continued to tumble out. “He left several years ago. Sex was an important part of my life then. But he left me unexpectedly, and I was shattered. I haven’t dated anyone since then. Well, I went on one blind date because my sister made me, but it was such a disaster she never tried again.” I let out a bitter little giggle. No one else in the room laughed. “But I, um, used to masturbate, even before my husband left. We had opposite work schedules and sometimes the mood just struck when he wasn’t around. And I haven’t really thought about it until now, but I stopped doing that, too.” I stopped talking and held my mouth in a firm line.
Soulmates Page 5
