Day 91: Stepping Through the Portal
“A disorienting dilemma is an event that so turns your life upside down that all you can do for a while is sit and stare at the wall…The world is a different place than you had thought. You are stunned into inaction. You sit in shattered amazement: I had no idea that this could happen to me.”
…
“But here is the fascinating part: it is precisely in confronting the most disastrous disorienting dilemma that our classic spiritual hero finds God... Really? These spiritual heroes, not in spite of, but as a result of the successful negotiation of their plight, reach the highest possibility of the human condition.” — Stephen Cope
Tomorrow will mark 100 days of Vedic Meditation for me.
And this week - I’ve been calling it Portal Week.
Why Portal Week?
Because somehow, the stars aligned and this week held a cluster of milestones that cracked me open:
6 years sober
My 33rd birthday
60 days since the assault
90 days off Instagram
100 days of daily meditation
It’s like the Universe gathered up all my initiations and handed me a key. I didn’t walk through the portal. I was pulled through.
One of my dear friends - Lindsay, someone I got sober with in the early days - messaged me today after a few months. She said, “I was so moved and sad and angry to hear about your assault. It feels impossible to write a text message about it. What an awful and life-changing experience.”
Those words landed.
Awful and life-changing.
I couldn’t have put it better.
It was awful. And it was life-changing.
But now?
The awful is mostly over. I’m just living in the life-changing.
I was chatting with Mr. Mimpi Indah tonight. (His new favourite Balinese phrase is “Mimpi Indah” - Sweet Dreams. He watched me on video call as I walked through the village streets saying it to everyone with a huge grin. He was impressed by how much Balinese I could speak. From his point of view it seemed like I could have a whole conversation. I was like, “Honestly? I know just enough to make people laugh and impress you.”)
Here are his other names in case you’re confused and don’t know who I am referencing:
Habibi (My Love in Arabic), The Approaching-Boyfriend (Boyfriend in Waiting), Mr. Vritti, Mr. Jack Pot, Mr. Meditation, Rocket Man, Mr. Mantra, The Meow-ditator, The Rational Mystic, the-guy-i-like-that-i-feel-safe-with, him (the crush).
I told him I finally told the yoga studio in Uluwatu that I won’t be teaching yoga there anymore. I just couldn’t bring myself to go back there. That’s the “awful.” The last time I went was the night I had the scariest nightmares. The ones where I woke up in the bathroom, over and over again. I had run in my sleep out of the bed and into the bathroom. As if I was trying to escape. It terrified me.
The next morning after that, I led a Kirtan for their Yoga Teacher Training.
And that was the last time I went down to Uluwatu.
We’re planning to go to Uluwatu together in June. And it will be different then with Mr. Mimpi Indah. Safer.
My friend Lindsay was right.
“Awful and life-changing.”
But now, I’m mostly in the “life-changing.” Jenn reflected something beautiful to me recently - that I’ve changed since November, when she last saw me. She said I feel more present. She feels safer around me (and that she always did, but now, even more so).
She said, “You hug harder now.”
And I do.
This experience cracked me open in a way I didn't expect. For at least two weeks or three weeks straight, I lived in fear. Not fleeting fear, not a jolt of adrenaline from a bad situation. But a prolonged, sustained fear.
It rewired me.
There were moments I genuinely believed he might kill me.
I drafted texts to my parents with his photo.
“If anything happens to me... if I get killed… this is who did it.”
I’m not afraid of him anymore. I think he could kill someone - but I don’t think it will be me. I feel safe in my house, even when Jenn’s not around.
But even though the fear is gone - experiencing that kind of fear changes you.
This morning I picked up The Dharma in Difficult Times by Stephen Cope again. I started reading it in January, sitting in cafes down in Uluwatu. Then I got side-tracked when Cope referenced another one of his books - The Great Work of Your Life. Both books explore spiritual heroes who lived out the Bhagavad Gita in real life. Real dharma, real choices. I wanted to read The Great Work of Your Life first, and I just finished it. Today, I went back to The Dharma in Difficult Times.
The first quote I read hit me:
“Sometimes crisis alone, without any preparatory training, is sufficient to make a man forget to be his customary self and become, for the time being, something quite different... Very often, too, the proximity of death produces similar results.” — Aldous Huxley
That’s what it’s felt like.
I’ve forgotten how to be my old self.
And in that forgetting...
I’ve become something else.
Another event in Portal Week that was unplanned was that I got back on Instagram. Just for marketing. I wanted to share with people that I’d built a yoga shala. Then, I wanted to share that I was teaching on a retreat, and share about my upcoming events. That’s what I told myself.
But we all know how that goes.
I got sucked back in. I wanted to be seen. Wanted the validation. Wanted the dopamine hit of likes and messages and comments.
The ego. I was thinking today, that’s probably why I held onto that yoga job in Uluwatu longer than I should’ve. I didn’t like driving down there, and barely made any money, but teaching yoga classes stroked my ego. I love teaching yoga in general, but it fulfilled me when I was feeling lonely, feeling disconnected, didn’t have a retreat group in town and was seeking love.
What would it be like if I weakened the ego - the sense of “I-ness” - as much as I could?
Today, I taught my Yoga Sutra Study class. We studied the Kleśas - the five root causes of suffering:
Avidyā (spiritual ignorance)
Asmitā (ego)
Rāga (attachment)
Dveṣa (aversion)
Abhiniveśaḥ (fear of death)
Rory (who I’ll be cohosting the retreat with in May, and will be teaching Vedic Meditation on my upcoming YTTS!) said something in class that struck me. He said, “Often, what annoys us in others is a mirror for what we haven’t yet accepted in ourselves.”
And I thought - oh wow. I’ve been really stuck on ego lately. The egos of the yoga teachers that annoy me. The self-importance in others that I criticize…
That’s me.
That’s my ego I’m seeing.
And so... I deleted my Instagram app again.
I did my meditation. (In Sutras 2.10 - 2.11, Patanjali tells us the solution to eliminating the kleshas is - you guessed it - to meditate!)
Tomorrow, I will wake up having meditated for 100 days straight.
And I will continue to step into and through the portal.
At Day 45 off Instagram, I wrote that I wanted to become nobody.
Not in a defeatist way.
But in the way of Patañjali, when he speaks of “disidentification from the vṛttis.” (Yogaḥ citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ, Sutra 1.2)
The practice of yoga is to still the mind - to no longer identify with the fluctuations of thought. With the story. With the somebody I’ve constructed for six years.
I no longer want to be somebody.
I want to become nobody.
And in becoming nobody, I might finally meet the Self.
The Ātman that was never harmed.
The Self that has always been free.
The light behind the wound.
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