Full Gestation

I have, as of today physically been without Max as long as I have been with him. He left his body exactly nine months ago. I am in good company. I am in God company. Come to find out, they are no different.  Grace moves through us. I can recognize her as the people who hold me accountable to the highest truth of my heart and ask me to continue living from that place. Look around. These are your people. These are your teachers. These are your warriors. These are your heart song. 


Some of my good people/god people live in Tucson. So here I am today at an advanced yoga intensive at Yoga Oasis. I am fully back in my body and bending it backwards, radical syllabus style. This is the place in the yoga practice where you trust that you have put in all of the hours (sweating, crying, building strength, ripping open, refining your alignment, and figuring out the formula) needed to support you for what is next.  This is the place in the practice where my teacher Darren Rhodes shares "you have to allow your intuition and memory to move you beyond the formula". In other words... when things get radical, there is no formula. 


Here is the one constant: everything is uncertain, everything is groundless and still we practice to create the stability we need.  We do not practice to create more stable ground. We practice to create a more stable container. Practice is a reference point. It gives us a place to work from, but it is not the work itself.  Life will move through us.  We are it's vessel.


There is no formula. 
There is no formula.


When radical things happen all we have to rely on is the hours we have put in getting to know the depths of our heart so that we can, and we will rise up when we are called. 




The only real work is the opening of the heart. 


Not all heart opening needs to be radical. This is where time has become my ally. The perspective time has shown is this... be gentle with yourself. Rest when you can. Trust me. Your time for night watch will come.  Life will move through you.  Living a good life is not about getting through it, it's about getting it all over you.  But we too need seasons... so in the rest times, in the times in between the really big storms enjoy the ocean for what it is. Take really good care of yourself. Bask in the sun. Ask your heart questions. Be curious. Get to know its longing.  Make loving yourself the priority of your practice. Because at some point the formula will not cut it and this path (if we are lucky) will eventually reveal exactly what and how we have been practicing. 


Thank you for walking this path with me. 


as we let love in.


Heather 

accessorize your scars

I have a wall of teachers in my new room. I also have the letter M A X.   A friend questioned why I do not have a picture of Max up there with the other open-hearted heretics. My teachers do all share a certain quality of revolutionary .  And Max certainly rubs elbows with these masters.  I have, however very intentionally never printed a picture of him. Pictures of him decorate the desktops of my electronic devices and yet to frame him on a wall in his perfect form that he didn't stay long in seems futile.

He is changeless, yet changing forms all of the time.  A frame seems too little for his great bigness.   For the first few weeks after he left his little body the two of us once again shared skin suits. He came from my cells and I felt him return into me. He moved from my uterus to my heart-erus. The veil became so thin between birth, life, birth, death we wanted to stay very close to each other so not to just disappear. As soon as we figured out how to communicate he quickly found an additional form, and another form, and another form.... he is always recognizable and always beyond the scope of my imagination. He both evolves alongside of me and shows me the way on a path that demands all of me.

Sometimes he wears roller skates and feathers, while sometimes he wears war paint and armor. Sometimes he is as gentle as a chinook wind,  while sometimes as fierce as flooding water. Sometimes he has very furry large feet and a little clumsy while sometimes he has perfectly coordinated bird wings.   Sometimes he is an absolute planetary marble playing mastermind while sometimes he is two good friends having a salad.

He is omnipresent, omniscient,  ineffable, and loves girls singing Kirtan.

He is also happy to just be my son. 

We long for each other. 

This is the beauty of the beloved. The beloved is a perpetual state of longing for the other. When I talk about the awakening that Max shared with us, it is the awakening that essentially we are all in a state of longing that doesn't come from incompleteness. It comes from our heart's longing to be in our baseline state of absolute unconditional love. We loose it somewhere along the line. We forget. We let strange things block us from feeling it. Then we will find it.  Then we loose it again. This cycle continues.  Then one day we get lucky (when I say lucky I am talking about the lila kind of lucky, not the winning the lottery kind of lucky) and something radical happens.  And when radical strikes it is insane. But If we rise up and really meet it... inevitably we will be ripped open and the raw space of revelation gives us another taste of the sweet perpetual deep longing of the heart. This is beloved. 

Evoking a broken heart doesn't take much when we loose are children... and still the work is to stay both broken hearted and ripped wide open. We are actually designed to be in this state. Our cells know what to do. Our hearts know how to connect. 

 The choice between tragic and triumphant is a very thin sharp sharp razor.  Both edges will cut you open.  Our work is not so much to heal these kind of wounds as it is so much to accessorize our scars. I wrote a few blogs back that "our beauty is our broken". Dare to stay triumphantly broken hearted.   Dare to stay triumphantly broken hearted.  It will look amazingly good on you.

Let Love In

H.