Forgive. Move Forward

Again I stay away too long from blogging, when it does my heart so good to know that whats inside will be expressed. I cannot explain the levels of procrastination and resistance, BUT, all I can do is begin again. Forgive. And move forward. Forgive. And move forward. This seems to be the theme in my life right now. To forgive and move forward. Mostly....forgive myself, entirely. I don't tend to be as forgiving as I would like, I tend to latch on to things and repeat them in my head, rehashing different angles and trying to get them to be other than they are. I have wasted alot of time like this. This too must be forgiven.

My mother is ill. After these past 7 months dealing with my own illness, now my mother pops up with this intense thing. Lymphoma. Stage 4. Aggressive, rare large cell lymphoma. It isn't pretty. Its all over her body and she is having trouble eating and so has lost alot of weight. My mother was skinny to begin with, so now, even more so. I haven't seen her yet as she is in California, but on Monday I will fly out there and be with her for a 10 days. Then I will need to come back and deal with my own healthcare here.

My mother and I have not seen each other in 3 years, its been like that. Estranged. And yet still close. I have avoided her. My last visit was so painful and dramatic, I simply didn't go back. I didn't want to, although I kept meaning to, thinking it would be good for me to go but at the same time, avoiding it. Now it seems I really have to go back and clean up the uncomfortable stuff that was left between us. Really look her in the eyes and forgive her and ask her for her forgiveness so that we can both move forward.

The thing is, she wants to go. She isn't interested in staying so much. Chemo doesn't even interest her to give her perhaps a chance. She is at peace with leaving.  She keeps saying she can't figure out why she is so peaceful,  why she feels so connected to God as she does, why she isn't more freaked out. I wonder how she doesn't want to stay around for her grand children, or learning music or her dogs or the sunset. But thats not for me to say to a dying person, to convince them of why they should want to live. Its their life. Not mine. I personally want to LIVE, and celebrate and create and explore and expose and transform. I want that. I do I do I do. To dance on many dance floors and share that dance with the people in my life, to give that back to them on all the levels. So I must forgive her and forgive myself.

For what? For not living fully, For taking things for granted, for not letting my talents shine, for not offering myself more to others and to the community. And yet, what is this "more"? Who says? I do. I havent given all I have wanted to give, I have held back, post poned, put off and resisted doing the things I really want to be doing. I didn't go to see my own mother, to say I forgive you and I love you, out of pride, fear, pushing away the feelings that would come with that kind of honesty, whatever it was I didn't do it. Kind of. If the now is right on time, like it says it is, then all of that was perfect. Except now what? Where do I begin now? At the beginning. It is so simple.

Forgive. Move forward. Repeat. I love you, I forgive you, I am sorry. Over and over again. Until your heart is so open every single perfect thing that will make your life shine, will come thru and play you a fool. YOU? Like a reed, played by God. Let God play thru you. How can she if you are so filled with all the ways it should look, should have happened, and should have gone. She cant, She trips over your shoulds.  Let that perfection come in and there will be less questions of how and what etc. It will be spontaneously hard work to keep plodding away at something that gives you joy. Showing up for that joy, day after day. And you will know. What to say to your old and ill mother, how to be there for her and how to let her die as she wants. To help her to cross with love and acceptance. And then from this space, something new will be bloomed in your soul. A new life. A new way of accepting and forgiving yourself....each day.

Forgive. Move forward. It is the only way.

MUSIC-The Healing of the Soul

How do we heal? Not just on a physical level but on a level that goes deeper than just bone and blood and flesh? Since its not about just healing Cancer to stay alive, but also healing a soul that was needing to express itself thru this body in the form of dis-ease. Suddenly everything that wasn't working in my life or not working enough, is suddenly up in my face and ready to be transformed.  The cancer microscope has suddenly put a view on all things outdated or unused or simply not working at all.

The truth is, I have struggled with a profound sense of loss that I can never quite put my finger on to know where it comes from. It is a haunting from something I have never found to have happened in this life or consciously. It has always baffled me as I have always felt a great passion for life and a great desire to experience and enjoy and sometimes, out of nowhere, this haunting comes and causes such a profound shrinking back from life, and a sabotage of everything I have built or created. It causes me not to trust myself, to not trust that I will be able to show up for the people or things in my life that matter the most to me. There has always been a sense of one foot out the door, a sense that no matter how much I do or give this unsettled feeling will always find me.

Perhaps it will. I think they call this the shadow, I think they call this ego. I think they call this low self-esteem. I think they call this isolation. I think they call this.....darkness. Whatever they call it, and whoever "they" is, I am ready to let it go. I am ready to look it in the eye and say, yes, I see you, you think I can't do alot of things and there are a whole host of reasons I am not good enough for the things that truly mean something to me, and you like to run thru my mind and create separation, and you may go ahead and have your time doing your little jig, but I got news for you. I am going to enjoy my life anyway.

One of the ways I enjoy my life is by surrounding myself in music. Since highschool, I always had music on and always had a walk man under the covers when I went to sleep at night. Finally we progressed to the CD man and I found running and Runners high to music, mostly Led Zeppelin and The Doors...running around my northern california suburban neighborhood filled with the power of spirit, when the mind rested and suddenly the endorphins kicked in and there was a sense of flight. Wow. I would find God on the sidewalk in Nike's, that Californian sunshine burning thru my brain like God's gold.

From there we entered College and the life in the NYU dorms. Moving in with a group of girlfriends was one of the most fun years of my life. We had a strobe light we would hang from the ceiling and then blast music into our little dorm room. I lived in a suite at the dorms on 3rd avenue and 11thst, despite our adequate living room and the presence of two other rooms, the dancing always ended up in my room. We would invite the boys over, a group of guys we spent alot of time with and drink 40's of malt liqour and beer. Eventually the Dee Lite would kick in and we would be madly dancing all mushed in together in our little room, drunk and sometimes stoned, 19 free and happy. I can remember the feeling when the music would take me and I began to taste those first moments of dance ecstasy. Eventually we started going to clubs as young people in NYC eager to be sexy and hip and wild and dancing into all hours of the morning. Later I found the 5 Rhythms and Gabrielle Roth and felt like I had come home to a dance floor I had never left. The dance had always been in me, it now finally had a practice to form around it. And music was the main point of the practice, it was the music I had come for, the feeling when the body melted into the music and the music was dancing the body alive. It was always about the rhythm and the beat of the music that called me, that created those moments of ecstasy.  Later when I found Pachamama and we had listening meditations during the silence, where we would sit and just let the music fill our souls, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I think I did.

Yet I never felt music was something I could do or be a part of, it was only something I could dance to, to participate with, not as. I sang in college, and I remember I was decent, I could carry a tune, but I never thought it was something that was really mine. My mother had been a singer, that was hers. I was different. I didn't really know what was mine to claim, even acting which felt like it should be my talent to claim failed me and once I started dancing, I felt like I had come home to my own special place. It just made sense...the love of moving the body to music had been there since the beginning of it all. And she didnt dance, in fact she was a poor dancer, so I could shine where she couldn't. In Pachamama when that first long trance happened down by the river, I am certain the heavens opened up and took me in their arms that day, whispered thru that wind that this space was forever more home. It was just like that.  I would rise at 5 am sometimes 4 am to crawl thru the dark forest to the meditation hall and practice yoga for 2 hours to my ipod and once I learned how to work the sound system I would listen to it on the big speakers. The first thing I wanted in the morning was the pulse of music througout my whole body, breath and mind.

But in the last two years before the diagnosis, I got a bit detoured from my path and found I wasn't alwys putting my music on or getting up early to do yoga or taking those walks thru central park with just my music and my thoughts. Something died in me n the last two years that I am still trying to peice together, triggered by some event or something I am still trying to figure out. But something definitely gave up inside of me. Too many heart breaks over and over, too many ways I was putting myself out to lovers that really couldn't offer me what I deserved. Too many ways I was hurting myself on another, an easy way to blame someone on the outside for my own self rejection. Letting myself be used, thinking sex was love, not understanding the fumblings of my own imagination about romance. The expectations, the lies, the ways in which I was hiding from having to deal with my own relationship to myself.  One after another and I can count about 6 different lovers, that I didnt investigate thoroughly before jumping into intimacy, and then blamed them for my own error, when I realized it was nothing more than hormones and romantic fantasy based in girlhood dreams of what love should or could look like. I didn' respect myself enough to spend the time to get to know them and let them get to know me.  A subtle form of self sabotage or I just didnt really want to get to know them?
Anyway the point is, over and over I let my heart take some real bumps and finally I think I just closed in and stopped trying...I decided there must be something wrong with me. Always a wounded child talking there, when we decide that. Is it ever REALLY about us? Its about a flow of universe that no one has control over

So now the healing must come from opening back up to all that is good and real. There is so much goodness all around me, so much happening in ways we cannot predict that is good for the earth, that is good for our souls. I want to be a part of that, to be a part of bringing that goodness here to this person, to this tribe, to this city, to this country, to this earth. So I gotta put the music on, its gotta go on and loud and I must wrap myself in it, cozy like a newborn baby.
As Susheela Raman sings "Woman, he doesn't know your worth, dont be tortured by a Mad Man, you've got to get out! The prison door is open".  A beautiful song off her album Salt Rain called Woman. We build our own prisons and then complain someone else put us there. We turn the music off and then complain the DJ sucks. The DJ never really sucks we just have to learn how to dance better. :)