Stand in the Path of Beauty

Sitting on the rooftop in the Mexican Riviera listening to the waves lap as the sun rises over jungle building and people stroll on the beach.

I think about my prayer that began as I left the Sierras, resurrect me. What did that even mean? The phrase came from a place deep within that began to ask me to remember it. What had I forgotten?

Seems I had been telling stories of remembrance for so long I couldn’t imagine who or what I was referring to but I kept the mantra in my heart and realized that was it’s place of origination.

Our place of origination. Where “it” all begins.

People ask me often to tell them my story, and I think about the many journals of my healing work yoga sequences recorded post class and little snippets of journeys from the Russian senile princess in London to my dear friend with Lou Gerrigs disease in Maui and the little sanctuary to which visitors come where jungle meets the sea.

In this moment, it is quiet.

What happens in between is breath. It’s yoga. It’s a lot of...wonder. I wonder what will happen today? I wonder what the hell I was thinking when...?

My eyes open in the morning...ooo Iwonder what today will bring and my dreams? Are they still the same? Does my heart still remember where it came from?

My mother and her country of origination is my heart. My father and his straight arrows into the future is my mind. My blood is a band of gypsies from the Mediterranean who crossed seas and imprenanted Indians from both north and south. My spirit is an aloha flower behind my ear and she came to life in 12 hour walks and spirit guided regressions back to the place of yoga where prayer births a flower princess naked under water falls out of volcanos and swims with whales and sea turtles.

Every trip to Mexico is a resurrection. The cyclic ebb and flow of ocean waves brings tides of eternity and stories circle with cricket chirping night time lullabies and dreams...they come to me lucid dreaming in the jungle.

And what is it that is resurrecting in me?

Its full moon, semana santa, and I can’t sleep.

La Luna esta llamando me.

I awaken and pass the dining hall several times while I try to figure out what I wanna do to pass the midnight hours.

A small couch, my Mar de Jade family all crowded head to head staring at a little phone screen. I smile and laugh, locos.

I go up to the yoga hall. Yoga? Nah. I light incense get bored. Leave. Walk down the stairs. They are still there.

​I go to the temple hall....tap tap my feet breathe swing my arms a bit...no inner song tonight. She is awake but quiet. I light incense and stand in front of Quan Yin where I place my phone.

Suddenly I know what I wanna do...leave it behind and run in my sarong wrapped in a blanket towards the ocean glowing white wave fingers curling towards the long pull wave leaving a huge canvas of sand. My little heart giggles and I walk two steps up two step down two steps up two steps down I see a zig zag snake and my little feet keep going to the spiral tail end and then circle it a giant heart with a fish hook and...

Hey! There they are! At the steps! I wave at my friends in the dining hall where they stand watching.

Hey! Come play with me!

They scatter...boo...but I see a heart hanging at the end of the fish hooks and I jump image to image so as not to destroy the pattern and with glee begin the mermaid tail that leads to the torso of woman holding out heart and a male merman hand out stretched receiving as opening as giving. It is mutual and I finish to return to the spiral and watch the moon begin it’s set over ocean mother.

I begin my return and out of the shadows a figure appears and a male voice approaches I contract and scatter, realizing I am receiving an answer to the question I have had since I overcame my midlife crisis and went opposite direction to believing my true desire now to live free.

I realize I could have moments like this one with partnership and not fear the male in the dark. I run up to my room and hear the mantra..”Love is a protection.”

I sit to meditate and the meaning of it flows through my open heart. The meaning of which, love can save us from ourselves. It can save us from our endless consumptions lists selfish paths. Love can protect us. It can be the angelic wings that support us. It can be the courage in our hearts to begin again...to end.

Love can protect us from ourselves and from those who would enslave us for their own purposes. Love is freedom.

I will bring this realization to breakfast where I will sit with my friend, tell her my story and end it with the drunk man under the hammocks. She will return to the reception desk where they will be telling a story about a ghost in a cape that was walking back and forth on the beach and tried to talk to them so they ran back to their room and Alicia will laugh and say Hah ha that was Zonia and she will tell them about the drunk man who will end up being our friend Krispy who the group sent and who was scared hiding by the hammocks...

Bah ha ha ha❣️

​Todos locos! Including me!

”In my defense it was full moon and I was left unattended”

Las phantasmas de la mente.

We are all running from them and running towards something we believe will keep us safe.

Safe.

I have many friends who are new moms and they are ragged with worry. They worry they won’t love right. That somehow they will get mothering wrong.

Their greatest fear is that their child will cry, even worse that they will have caused it or be unable to comfort it.

I’ll smile. I have heard this many times which now leads me to realize something all mothers are afraid to share that it’s normal. It’s normal to feel guilty inadequate afraid. It’s normal to want to keep loved ones safe but it is also impossible.

I will think about this with my fairy client who is on sebatical in the jungle. I’ll tell her you’ll never know if you are doing it right. I tell her all you can do is love and trust Love. Leave the blessings to God.

They will come. So will the tears and disappointments and heartbreak and firsts. Some of which you will not be there for. That’s another hard one. The witnessing.

Of course there will be many shared moments but if your child is lucky they will also have moments during which they can self realize...become self aware. Hear their guidance have space to follow where it leads and understand how to move their right hand and then their left.

In reality, the greatest experiences that youth leads up to will not be with you and can you allow that love?

Will that guidance system teach them to follow their energy to source connection and trust where it will lead them. Perhaps to backback Nepali Coasts, definitely to fall in love. First kiss. First sex. First making love. And will you have taugh them to be free in those things? Will they love their bodies. Will they love their mind? Will they love their impulses? Their spirit? Their choices? Will they learn to trust? Will they learn what we are all learning?

To love? To protect? To be courageous? To walk in the moon? To rise in the dark?

A thing like this takes time. A thing like this takes patience. A thing like this takes faith.

Zonia? How do you know where my pain?

A client will ask me this and I will look at her inquisitively and she will feel silly so that later In the night after Ive thought about this question she will find me reenacting the beach scene ghosts and drunk men for Amber at the bar and my two new friends hummingbird and glitter bug.

I’ll see her and tell her it’s a good question and that I don’t have an intellectual reply for an intuitive experience.

​I’ll reenact sessions and show them me dancing the body and smelling oils going to find them mixing them for each client special amounts special circumstances, their ligaments, joints, the empathetic touch that is my own relief so I know together we breathe sigh I feel better so I know they do and the tomes I can feel a client trying to make something happens their expectation for healing so high their belief that grace should hurt or tears must come instead there’s laugher or better peace in receptivity. The times I’ll stop touching people because they are so confused and overwhelmed so in their head about what should happen that they track my hands and try to beat me to the move when in fact I’m moving with spirit and they haven’t told me yet so I start over at the foot.

Start over with flowers.

Start over.

If you came to me with a spiritual emotional intention what would it be? If you believed Love really wants to give you what you want but you had to ask, what would it be?

Is it relief from the shoulder or the grief in the lung point I can feel pulsing under my hands? Is it the place in your neck with words you can not utter but long to hear that radiates heat and calls me to it like a magnet?

Communion. Union. Harmony. How can we work together for the results we all long for? How can we make it easier this letting pain go which holds us to past?

How can we instead fall in love with future?

I’ll ask this as I wander home in the sunlight
and my phone will stay with Quan Yin four days
so that I am untethered to WiFi. I will go where it does not reach to find my coworker needing a hug and the ocean where the water holds me.

Phones don’t reach but in all these moments I will feel the hands I hold holding me. I will think of people their smiles especially the ones hoping the way I feel is real. Do you really love me? Yes. I will remember you, I say.

I’ll remember where we left off which hopefully will be like the day we met. Open armed. Big smiles. Before the session. After the session. Magic. It happens because we are so open. Stay that way. Know you need not be careful with me. My real friends know I will laugh when I tumble from the paddleboard doing cartwheels in the wave, that I’ll lose my purse and everything in it many times, that they should keep one of the keys, that I’ll be running and laughing, dance under stars leave conversations return forget myself remember myself stay up all night sleep early jump in the ocean in my clothes to swim with dolphins and always touch them if they stand close enough.

I will remember as I read an early book by Wayne Dyer about the sacred self a thought I had weeks before I arrived.

When the jungle and sea take me, I don’t want the phone I’ve left with Quan Yin. I never do. I’ve lost relationships over this as I stand in my heart request for presence breath dream days unfolding forever day by day as I change in relation to people whose life touches me.

How did it used to be? When I could hold people in my heart and not text every minute day week. How did those friendships last? How was it when we just knew the thinking was the knowing and we were held in mutuality? How was when we just lived? And I will read a passage by Dyer warning us twenty years ago that if we continued to rely on technology for connection we would lose that which separated our ancestors from many today. A warning that what would be lost is telepathy. Conscious connection through the ethers. And I think about the necks of clients who come in. Collapsing occipital ridges, steel cable sternocledos shortened neck muscles from technology slump. I’ll think about telepathy the indigenous connection communication and evolutionary leaps...backslides. If we collapse the back of our skulls in 20 years and pass on the habits to children from birth am I witnessing the change of a species? Will we collapse the doorway in the notch at the base of the head exposed during prayer chin down that yogananda referred to the doorway to god? Information Age.

Its not a physical problem, it’s a spiritual one.

Too much thought, not enough knowing.

What do we need to know?

That we are loved. That the source of it is God. That there is a creative force greater than ourselves. That it’s way is beauty, that it’s gift is grace and that we can just breathe it. Believe it into the depths of our cells that remember we are made of stars and constellation sunbeams and earth she is our mother blooming flowers and kissing us in butterfly wings and that the only thing that separates us from her are the things we put in front of her, as in think is more important than but in truth our lives depend on her and her ways are beauty.

Put yourself in the path of beauty. Let the gratitude rise to meet her and the spirit that descends let it be soft like starlight and accept being touched by compassion and feel into your heart the truth that connection it is here and it is close as breath.